Once, on a night flight to Los Angeles, our pilot told us over the intercom that if we looked out the right-hand window we’d see Las Vegas. So I pressed my face to the Plexiglas and saw a strip of pure light blazing out from the Nevada desert like someone had just skimmed sodium pebbles across a vast black lake. It was utterly alien, unlike anything I’d ever seen in England, and quite jaw-dropping in its beauty. And, judging from an email we received last night, I’m guessing that Martin Deutsch must have felt pretty much as I did then when he woke up for the first time in E10 after moving across the Lea from Hackney: “It’s more glamorous than I could have possibly imagined,” he writes, plainly awestruck, and I can almost see his hands shaking as he clicks to attach the photo.
Matt Haynes
photo © Martin Deutsch
