I heard him say his name was die, and seconds later that it was short for David, spelt D-A-I. We had just sat down when he walked up to me and Susie. He said he recognized her from the National Portrait Gallery. The one with the large forehead above the door. People miss it. The sad smile. Beer sloshed against the edges of his glass like a fish trying to escape its bowl, but in this case the fish was dead and only looked to be alive because of Dai’s swaying. There are people who relieve themselves […]

Marlowe empurpled, the state and stations of death / archive his cloven mind as it conjugates / the Latin of reality into past/present only. / the future is the faces of the triumvirate / † an English agent is not an English patient / crossing blood-brain-barrier into night’s syllogism / in time for Faustian bells to relay / news to the newscasters of the hourly schism

Hamilton Street, in the west end of Newcastle, was a classic strip of two-up two-down terraces: the visual shorthand of the northern working class, of the kind immortalised in the credits of Coronation Street. In 1973, Newcastle Council announced the Hamilton Street Compulsory Purchase Order after finding it ‘unfit for human habitation’; estate agents suggested a ‘piecemeal’ redevelopment in line with the recommendations of the Heath government’s White Paper […]

“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.” – Arundhati Roy. A festival of care in aid of the homeless has taken place in Britain each winter since the Seventies. Crisis at Christmas offers seven nights of accommodation, three cooked meals a day, medical care, dentistry, eye tests. Guests have access to showers, a cloakroom, computers, film screenings. Tailors are on hand for clothing repairs […]