by Doreen Joy Barber
Feet sticking to the floor, you squeeze past customers to collect the empty glassware to be returned to the bar, to be baptized in the hot water of the glass washer and to be reborn again as a vessel for ale, lager, wine or rudimentary cocktail. You think about when you can be reborn. You think about when you can have a shower to wash off whatever the hell is black and sticky on your arm. [read more…]
Removing his coat, he breaks through the buses and levers himself over the railing that divides Upper Street. Dismounting, he smiles at me drunkenly, then jigs into Angel’s welcoming mouth.
The sending of the first Smoke book to the printer is celebrated with a trip to Erith.
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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…]
Please Do Not Touch The Walrus No. 4
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: congregating in Tower Hamlets. [see more…]
by Sno Flo
Spotting johns is easier. I see one in Ryman’s, buying pens. He’s fifty-odd, tall and bladder-bellied, with a sundae-swirl of fifties hair and a hot-pink polo shirt. Pink crocs too, the unsavoury bastard. I walk out. [read more…]
by Matt Haynes
Although obviously the stupid machine couldn’t actually see her. Probably a good thing too: right now, she must look every one of her eighteen-plus-forty-odd years. Such an awful day. All the financial stuff… she’d just never taken an interest. Never had to. And now here was this… this computer telling her she couldn’t buy a small bottle of red wine without “approval”. She hadn’t known they made them so small, not till she’d seen the display. [read more…]
In the tombless gloom of bombed St Mary’s churchyard, between the Elephant and the looming shell of a dead hotel, he carefully unfolds a music stand, and uncases his trombone.
Sadly, despite all the hoo-ha, the internet never really caught on in Deptford…
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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…]