by MW Bewick
Hattie also remembered that when my father was a child he had described the river as a yawning snake, which to me seems precocious. To him, snakes meant danger, and the space below the bridges was filled with slithering horror. They found things in rivers too. It said so on the news. Whatever people secreted in the unfathomable water eventually washed up. [read more…]
by Howard Colyer
Goalkeeper’s fumble,
Bywater can’t hold the ball,
then the rest follows.
Old Canary Wharf Pier
some photos of the old pier…
[see more…]
Number 53 by Howard Colyer
Help me. You can! wrote the young man in the mist on the window as the bus headed south along the Old Kent Road. [read more…]
by Matt Haynes
In the grass are, unmistakably, the ghosts of abandoned roads: cracked tarmac and kerbstones, carless and homeless, fading to brown and green. And here’s the thing: if you look in an old A-Z – one from the sixties, say – Burgess Park isn’t there. But those spectral streets are; and they have names, and purpose, and they’re drawn in hard black ink. There’s also a line of turquoise, running dead straight between them. [read more…]
On the delayed 22:34 to Dartford, a boy with an earring and pair of Hoxton glasses pores over a musical score, humming intermittently. The carriage look on with benevolent confusion.
She was far too old for him; and he was far too gay for her; but, that night on the 188, he thought what the hell, and took her dancing.
Someone told me Patrick Stewart often gets the tube at Bermondsey; I picture him softly mouthing shwoosh when the platform-edge doors open… just secretly, to himself…
The small boy in the red-white-and-blue hat looks up at the skies, looks back at his father, looks out to the river. “Is she the lady off of CBeebies?” he asks, gummily. The gold boat glides past Blackfriars. “She’s not as good as Mr Tumble, Daddy.” [see more…]
