“He’s asked me to sing in a proto-punk band,” said the man in the suit on the phone in the sun on Piccadilly. “I don’t even know what that means.”
Jun 232014
Jun 162014
by Steve Lake
But maybe my memory is playing tricks, for working at Foyles in the 80s wasn’t unlike a trip on some fairly serious hallucinogenic drugs. There was, for example, the story of the disgruntled employee sowing seeds into the specially moistened carpets of the rarely-visited Philosophy Department on a Friday evening and returning on Monday to find a small field of cress, ready to be added to his sandwiches. [read more…]
Apr 212014
by Lucy Munro
I’ve been re-reading Sherlock Holmes. Not in the doorstopper collection with almost see-through paper I bought when I was thirteen and lugged to school and back for a blissful fortnight, immersed in its foggy miasma and gleefully drinking in the details of Holmes’ not-so-secret drug habit, but in a £1.99 Wordsworth edition comprising everything up to his demise at the Reichenbach Falls, a death from which he was never intended to return. [read more…]
Mar 272014
by David Riddell
What’s this? I’m… I’m falling. That’s what I’m doing. Must be. Wasn’t expecting this. Totally outside my experience. Don’t think I did anything to precipitate it, not that I can think of. Well now. I’ve done some daft stuff, but – nothing like this. I wonder what’s going on? [read more…]
Mar 102014
“Do I look like someone who needs a sorbet-maker?” he dolefully asks the bleary-eyed flotsam piled up on the N3’s stairs as birthday gifts are passed between strangers for appraisal.
Mar 032014
Traditional London Street Games
Number 3: Pigeon Hide-and-Seek
[see more…]
Dec 022013
Please Do Not Touch The Walrus No. 7
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: climbing on the horse in Spring Gardens. [see more…]
Jul 312013
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…]
Jul 012013
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.
Apr 092013
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…]