Persistence of memory
Present views of combined pasts
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...
Cambridge – persistence of memory
Persistence of memory My mum grew up here. Her and therefore my ancestors were here for hundreds of years working as maids and cleaners, labourers, cartmen, and brickies, laying the railways, further back pulling the root veg through the surface of the peaty soils to...
Sucking Eggs
My mum died over ten years ago at a ripe old age after period of massive emotional instability and half mad bought on by a large stroke. It was a hinterland for her and us – her children. A period which lasted 18 months from the onset – the invisible hole burning in...
Spitfire versus Hurricane
The workhorse and the charger. I lived in North Walsham as a kid. RAF Coltishall was only about 6 miles away. We all grew up with the English Electric Lightning; the cold-war emblems, a sliver flash glossily belting past on high, occasionally breaking the sound...
9/11 – the years on
Guest post from Louisa Griffith-Jones. Sometimes you just stumble across a remarkable piece of writing. Louisa posted this earlier today. I read this about 9/11 standing at a bus-stop, a lump in my throat. She is a friend, someone I remember from gigs in the early...