Persistence of memory
Present views of combined pasts
Lost in music
A few years ago I did an album a day thing on social media, not entirely sure why on reflection, I guess it passed the time and time does passes. Music behaves as a bit of a catalogue or bookmark of favourite, or not so favourite, passages – it's part of our timeline,...
Jess Macdonald
For anyone who knew her - especially from the old Twitter mob, Jess Macdonald (@Jessikart) left us late in the evening of Tuesday the 2nd of January. She passed with her mum Meryl and her sister Abi by her side. She was one of my best friends, a funny, feisty, riot...
Nick Groves
Nick and I used to speculate a lot between us about the various assortments of stone we’d spot in buildings which probably didn’t originate there. Some of it came from demolished churches, you can find them dotted about like solidified memory in walls and buildings...
Mark Watson
As you get older it’s very easy to take someone’s existence for granted. It doesn’t mean you no longer care, because we as people are woven out of all we’ve said and done, those we’ve met, who we know and who we count as friends – those important people we’ve met and...
All the cars I’ve ever known
I wrote this in the early summer after reading a piece about ‘The Great British Car Journey’ – a heritage centre which has opened in Ambergate in Derbyshire. Then I stuck it to one side because it's not like my usual stuff, then the other days I thought I'd tidy it up...
Marking time
It’s been a spectacularly bad fortnight. So here’s a story about some records and what they mean. Because music holds us together, it is partly how we form up into our ranks, each beat marking our time. 33 years ago, give or take, I first saw my wife in a pub, she...
What remains – ghosts 1
I’ve built up a bow wave of subjectivity over the years about ghosts. I grew up in a lapsed-methodist household, my mum’s background was very low-church, the residual extent of which was she liked singing hymns in the kitchen at Sunday tea time. My dad sometimes, but...
Noisebox
This is primarily simply a list of all the records Noisebox in Norwich put out. Noisebox opened at the beginning of the 1990s. Set up by Pete Morgan, then fairly fresh in from Wales, and therefore known as 'Morgan the Noise'. Noisebox opened in the Old Fishmarket on...
On Landscape interview – Nick Stone
An interview by Michéla Griffith, reproduced with kind permission of On Landscape magazine, April 2019. For this issue, we have something a little different. Nick Stone describes his website, Invisible Works, as a series of fragmentary blogs and pieces about history,...
Brighton, before the fall
When I was a kid and on into my teens I used to dream about the stars moving. I mean, I know they are actually moving, but then I could see them in 3D shifting and jittering, I could see the satellites and spacecraft in amongst them like an animated model right there...
Graffiti Jam, Sovereign House, Anglia Square 2009
I'm a bit of a graffiti watcher, I like the stuff basically, it's that human mark-making thing. The 'remember me' trope. I've written about it a little bit before, arborglyphs at Blickling springs to mind. I've also watched a lot of developments with Medieval Graffiti...
Babylon’s Burning
I’m reasonably open about the fact that I have a mental health condition – I suffer from anxiety. I talk about it occasionally on social media, friends know, but I haven’t ever made any kind of thing about it apart from writing a piece about facing fear and the Great...