Persistence of memory
Present views of combined pasts
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...
On Utah Beach
We'd just been away. It didn't take me very long to remember that I'm not very good at holidays. The vacancy of it all gets to me very quickly, I find it difficult to relax and conjure 'fun' up out of being somewhere just because it's somewhere else. We tended to end...
Dear Dad…
I've resisted the urge to paint this incomplete picture for a while. I started writing this some months ago, it would have been my dad's birthday, that got me thinking about him and about how I'm heading towards the age he was when my mum had me. And I've written...
It’s beginning to and back again
We went to London. We do this journey quite often, from here, the east it is a fairly routine trip, a day out; one of those the ever shortening distances that only just hold us all apart. We have offspring who have set up shop there in the expense and dull glitter,...
Collapsing new buildings: Sheffield
I used to go to Sheffield a fair bit, less so now as one of the reasons we went as often as we did was one of my children lived there and she now lives in Greece, via Slovakia and Vietnam, she is one of the estimated 2 million Britons living in Europe that handily get...
Approaching Nirvana
Heroes are strange beasts, as is memory. Nirvana never were particularly the former for me, but are very much part of the latter. Retrospectively – 25 years on almost to the day, it's still quite nice to know you were present at the stuttering birth of a new squalling...
Vanishing Point: Rosebeke
A strange day. I've been working very loosely on an ongoing project called 'Vanishing Points' for a while. I'm a bit of a fan of VPs, lots of artists are as a way of leading the eye into compositions, focussing the viewers mind. Kubrick for instance is a master of the...
What’s THIS for…! Killing Joke in Norwich
You might recognise this scene for two reasons; Firstly you live in Norwich and have walked down either Duke Street or Oak Street or have sauntered down this chopped off continuation of Colegate beside St Miles Church with it's lovely flushwork and tracery. Secondly,...
Trench Fever
I thought it was about time I did a bit of quantifying, I've done a something in a previous piece here, which scratches at the back of a story but only tells the penultimate episode of it not the rest, there's other bits clanging and banging about on the internet that...