An Alternative Writing Retreat
Set out on your government-approved once-daily walk. Go in the evening; fewer people present, less necessity for the awkward dance whereby you slip past one another on a narrow sidewalk, one of you spilling out into the road to keep that space, maintain that gap…
During its almost 30 years of operation the Camelot theme park in Lancashire had the slogan “The land of great knights, and amazing days.” Visitors could ride a selection of flat rides and rollercoasters, play games and buy snacks at battlemented stalls, and watch knights both great and not-so-great battle it out in the jousting arena…
Half an inch from the south shore, a line is cast from nowhere, black dots, black dashes, almost north, almost parallel to the line of the Humber Bridge, red on green, half an inch to the left. The bridge is cut off by the ordnance grid. The dots and dashes float in a pale blue square…
There are 24-hour gyms open around the clock in most cities and towns in the UK. Here we examine the daily rhythms of these strange, liminal spaces…
It’s so easy to gaze disparagingly, even mournfully, on the site of an LPG tank in a garden. Easy to consider it misplaced, miscreant, a boil on the face of a view. An objection at a local planning meeting to its placement was met with a wry smile…
You leave them dancing and sneak away. Everything has been said that can be said. You’re never going to forget each other. You’ll always be friends…
I’d spent too many hours at the wheel, racing the December dusk to get to our destination before darkness fell. Too many hours scrutinising every junction, traffic lane and sign, of passing through new places and barely seeing them…
“Crystal Palace Park still carries the name of something that is no longer there, a building of plate glass and iron from the high Victorian age…”
And then you realise that everyone around you – a crowd of thousands, all along the quays – are almost completely silent. There’s no wind, no rain, no massive heat from the fire, nothing, like everything else on earth has stopped…
Journalist Mackenzie Weinger travels in the footsteps of Thomas Hardy, through the partly real, partly dream-country that inspired his fiction…