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…]
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…]
“Is the flood returning?” says the board outside Herne Hill United Church; but drivers descending to the plain below won’t be saved, for the temptations of Camberwell Green are many.
by Simon Sylvester
So I pick him up from the Camberwell depot, depot, and he’s there with his flat cap and his dreads and his fingerless gloves, leather for better grip, see, mouthing off with all that niggatalk, but I don’t dig his vibe. Not at all, man. I reckon he tries too hard. I reckon he be days away from being busted. [read more…]