by Joan Byrne
It’s Friday afternoon and I’m in the sanctuary that is Tate Modern Members’ Room. I’m enjoying an elevated feeling of oneness with life and art, and loving the view of the City with St Paul’s at its centre. Sipping a coffee, I watch people come and go. Many of them are works of art themselves, but not this man. He’s dead ordinary, mid-sixties, impassive face, bland dresser. With him is a girl, aged about fourteen. [read more…]
by Matt Haynes
Despite, by law, occupying no more space than a horse and cart, each shelter could seat thirteen cabbies without recourse to contortionism or immodesty. An attendant sold simple hot fare, and the cabbies, in return, promised not to gamble, drink, swear or reveal how thirteen grown men could fit into such a small space and yet still go home to their wives without blushing. Not for nothing were windows frosted and moustaches kept trim. [read more…]
by Natasha Green
I saw Maggie slip a compact out of her bag and smooth her hair in the mirror, tucking a lock of it behind one ear. She smiled and waved at me. Gone was the curly-haired maelstrom, with eyes circled in crumbling kohl and hands tipped with chipped silver nail polish; the Maggie of early-morning telephone calls full of grotesque imitations of spurned lovers abandoned in the night, calls that left me laughing and gasping for air on the other end of the line. [read more…]
Please Do Not Touch The Walrus No. 2
A fantastic new series in which we attempt to catalogue some of the amazing things you can’t do in our fabulous capital city. Today: discarding teabags in Villiers Street. [see more…]
by Dale Lately
A “hip, funky, upbeat kind of stay” is how one online guide describes this distinctive London accommodation, and the shiny-eyed receptionist – barely out of her teens – gives you a hip, funky, upbeat kind of swipe card when you hand over a grubby twenty. Cell 14, she tells you. Sorry? She smiles. That’s what we call them. It’s part of the theme. [read more…]
by Jess Sully
A known introvert from a town with wide skies and a vast, shimmering expanse of sea, I didn’t think I’d be happy among the hemmed-in crowds. What I didn’t realise then is that within the anonymity of the ever-flowing throng, those shoals of fast-moving fish who swoop and turn as one entity, I could move silently, unobtrusive and unremarkable. And now I know, too, that sometimes at low tide the Thames smells of brine and seaweed. [read more…]
Oblivious to lunchtime crowds, he strides towards Holborn Circus – sharp suit flashing in the Hatton Garden windows, mobile clenched tight – shouting: “You’re the one who told me you loved me…”
by Rachel Stevenson
I suppose one day Joanna will come to me and say: “We’re getting a place together,” and “we” will no longer mean she and me. And I’ll be living on my own with a cat. I wonder when a girl living on her own with a cat stops being fun and la la? When do you cease bringing boys home just to kick them out next day? Trying to get the man to stay on a Sunday to share the croissants because you’re sick of eating them all yourself? [read more…]
by Matt Haynes
If, on nearing the top end of Gray’s Inn Road, your response to the deepening pond of filth sloshing round your hush puppies is to lift your eyes heavenwards in search of spiritual sustenance, then you’re in for disappointment. For stiffly mounted on a pinnacle with his sceptre pointing skywards and his bare toes gripping a weighty ball is this cocky young lad making a most ambiguous gesture. [read more…]
As staff sweep up, a blue-haired Japanese girl sits in McDonald’s window, ear to mobile, lips unmoving, two dark wet smudges fixed through glass on somewhere that’s not Pentonville Road.