by Andrzej Ryan
There is a bearded man in a pink dress behind me. He’s swigging lemonade from a two-litre bottle. For almost the entire year, the City of London is home to thousands of dark suits. Today, it belongs to flowing fabrics and shiny buttons. Today is the Pearly Kings and Queens’ Harvest Festival. [read more…]
Central
by Colin Tucker
I retreated to the bedroom determined to concentrate on work. My exercise books sat on a small table, one for the novel, three for short stories, one for general observations and two blank, though one of these had ‘BBC’ written on the cover. I opened it and unscrewed the cap on my Sheaffer pen. Motive, I thought, the murderer needs a good motive. Marigold came in and sat on the bed. My mind went blank. [read more…]
Bidet Is For Customers’ Use Only
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30 St Mary Axe: above and below [see more…]
by Nydia Hetherington
Not wanting to seem ungrateful, I popped the A-Z nonchalantly into my backpack and thanked the Map Gods for their timely gift. The letting agent had given me good instructions, but a map would definitely be useful too. Except that Cheriton Square wasn’t on the map. When I got to Balham and opened the A-Z, I found that it had slipped down the crease between pages 108 and 109. [read more…]
by Jess Sully
“Nah – they’re docile,” he replied, and proved this by bending and twisting the ferret into strange shapes. It was as if he was trying to create a balloon animal. The sight of a ferret being manipulated would, in itself, have been enough excitement for me, but then the owner’s young daughter insisted on showing me her party piece. She opened her mouth and the ferret put its head in, a modest variation of the head-in-lion’s-mouth circus trick. [read more…]
by Matt Haynes
The caffs round King’s Cross are full of downcast Scotsmen eating breakfast. Outside O’Neill’s, others stand in kilts and saltires, pints in hand. Soon, it will be time to cross the Euston Road and catch the train back home. [read more…]
by Matt Haynes
Out here, the river’s still allowed to undo its buttons twice a day and slob out across the mud with primordial glee. For one of the Thames’s more discombobulating quirks is that it’s wider upstream than down, where it’s been artificially banked and trammelled – no one paddles on the beach outside Lambeth Palace any more, not since Mr Bazalgette’s embankments went up in the 1860s and the Archbishop lost his deckchair concession. [read more…]
On the Pentonville Road by Howard Colyer
After three years of trying, my colleague, Malcolm Taylor, managed to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a bin five yards from his desk. [read more…]
Urban Intervention No. 51
On sunny lunchtimes, dress up as a giant duck and then sit by the lake in St James’s Park throwing torn off chunks of Ginsters pasties at tourists.