An Alternative Writing Retreat
We’d arranged to meet in front of the Whitworth Art Gallery and head onto the baths from there. Being a time before mobiles, the plans had been made on landlines back at our respective houses – of course back then we didn’t call them landlines, we just called them phones…
When the bridge was built it was brilliant white, but now the cars have spat their soot and the rain has found the cracks in the paint to make it rusty and orange. They painted it 10 years after it was built, 20 years after, 30 and on and on until one year they painted it and the next day it looked grey and orange again and the council said they weren’t coming back for it…
On this particular occasion I was returning home from doing some temp work in Cheltenham. I was a catering chef and was often away for a couple of weeks at a time, going wherever people needed to pay an eye-watering amount of money for some finger sandwiches and dry scones. I’d just missed my connection and according to the board my next train was delayed, indefinitely it would seem…
Slushy. Books with poems. Parapets. There is a shadow cast from the trees. Wind. Summer. Talk in the distance both prosaic and profound. Denim. Denim for certain. Cars. It rained before. It’s all cleared up now, someone said. The barber shop sign is winding. White red blue, right? Someone is always chartering a boat, a vessel…
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…
SJ Bradley participated in the Alton Towers Residency in April 2019. We spoke to her about the theme park, the Northern Short Story Festival, and writing both short things and long.
Sometimes as he walked, taking long and meandering digressions down side streets and across squares, through underpasses and over raised walkways that spanned like triumphal arches the segments of silent motorway, the architect liked to think that the very formlessness of his wanderings was a kind of pattern in itself…
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…”