Iain And Will Have A Cup Of Tea
by Matt Haynes
Iain stared glumly at the stained formica. “It’s like I said, when I told you how Hackney’s pre-Games decontamination and realignment into a fugitive cartography of designer lock-ups and guerrilla sofa bars had created a hallucinatory Ballardian nexus of dystopian interzones – some of the ley lines they dug up to build the Basketball Arena had been there since the days of King Lud.” [read more…]
Threnody on the Death of a Street Lamp on Lollard Street, SE11
by Matt Haynes
O noble lantern ’neath whose kindly fire
my love and I did oft together lark,
our bodies, lust-engorged, ’twined in desire –
why hast thou gone and left us in the dark?
[read more…]
“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.”
The whiteboard at Southgate station says services are normal on all lines except the Central; on the Central, it says, they are good.
For The Greater Good by Matt Haynes
Mother, by the time you read this I will be in Tegucigalpa.
Don’t worry, I’ll be fine; I just wanted to let you know
That I have buried the body of Nigel Farage
At the back of Uncle Terry’s garage
In Bow.
[read more…]
Leyton Lights by Matt Haynes
Once, on a night flight to Los Angeles, our pilot told us over the intercom that if we looked out the right-hand window we’d see Las Vegas. So I pressed my face to the Plexiglas and saw a strip of pure light blazing out from the Nevada desert like someone had just skimmed sodium pebbles across a vast black lake. [read more…]
“I’ve heard there’s a new park here, where is it?” demanded the man in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park information centre in the middle of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
by Matt Haynes
Hedonism, of course, was the name of the game, and pretty much anything went. One night, Boy George nearly brought Duran Duran’s career to a premature end when, clutching a garish mojito, he hurtled down the slope using Simon le Bon as a toboggan; luckily for the course of popular music, the chubby Brummie took it in his pantalooned stride. [read more…]
JACOBVS SECVNDVS, Trafalgar Square by Matt Haynes
Don’t be fooled by the Roman garb. This effete nob with his toga tossed casually over his shoulder – part Brideshead, part Duran Duran circa Planet Earth – and his tunic hoicked over his knee like a Year 11 schoolgirl at a bus stop in Watford is, in fact, King James II, his body languidly bowed like a small fey banana and his upper limbs polygonically disposed as if to remind us that, truly, this was the noblest teapot of them all. [read more…]
“Did you know they found a mammoth under there?” She nodded across at the derelict Drummond Street entrance to Euston station I was trying to photograph. “A dead one, obviously.”