Letter From Arcadia
Ice Station Tigernut
ja
your blue-knuckle crevace de coeur set my dinner cold. jack london turning in his grave. frank barlow on ice at the hippodrome. here we kept the sledges loaded and the braziers lit. the way to the lake still ditched in old grey coats of last year’s decomposing snow. arse [...]
Letter From Arcadia
Snowfalls.
dp
whilst you are surrounded by snowdrops here it is only snowfalls as the ice age of arcadia takes hold, threateningly for good. the ponds are ice soup and the riverbank has gone, washed away by one cold brown onslaught. the heath is more glass than grass, more water than walks. arcadia is [...]
Letter From Arcadia
Snowdrops.
ja
thanks for pulling the black-outs down. feared arcadia was in aspic. or you’d missed the last chub before christmas, not tunnelling out of highgate to a waiting troika. your s&r was like a smuggler’s beacon on the romney marsh. i couldn’t do one; accident in the word factory, fingers lost in the [...]
Sick Note From Arcadia
ladies and gentlemen
for all those of you who may be preparing to travel to spitalfields tomorrow i am afraid to tell you that due to an outbreak of vicious bream cough in arcadia i will not be there but will return as usual next thursday 4th february.
in the meantime to sate your appetite i [...]
Letter From Arcadia
The Frost Fair Thaw
dp
the frost fair on the heath has finished, the fires on no 2 pond have been extinguished, the birdmen have put away their costumes for another year and the fieldfares have left to roost deep in the woods having spent days feasting upon apples in the open. no 2 [...]
Letter From Arcadia
Penny Buns at Ease.
ja
sad times indeed, when the like of mr rickards is taken by the black pike. your obituary is tolling round the french hills, it being pike time in the pools and the ossuaries. rods inverted. cane denis pye 78s snapped over the knee; beanie off to the man who [...]
Letter From Arcadia
Pestilance.
dp
hearty thanks for your telegram from a distant european autumn. a welcome message of solidarity dropped in an empty bottle of pelforth, left on a table outside the bar on the corner of the boulevard of broken dreams. back in blighty it is not mushroom clouds that fill the mind but hordes of [...]
First Cast at the Loch of the Green Corrie
22 October 2009 // Arcadia // Books
by Andrew Greig.
the third and final installment:
The Loch of the Green Corrie has a silence that is not silent. Lying there I can hear air drift through heather and over rock and water. Air and invisible streams are gathered and reflected back by the slopes that soar around us, as though we lie within a [...]
First Cast at the Loch of the Green Corrie
21 October 2009 // Arcadia // Books
by Andrew Greig.
(continued from yesterday..)
We were so eager, fresh to the place, wondering who was going to be first to catch that fish for Norman. A single fish, caught by any one of us, would fulfil the mission, but it would be good to be the one who caught it.
The first ten, the first twenty [...]
Dexter Petley
20 October 2009 // Arcadia // Books
Dexter Petley has been a part of Caught by the River from day one.
As dp, in Arcadia, the correspondence between him and John Andrews (ja) has intrigued, baffled and entertained us and our readers on a weekly basis, earning Dexter (and the ‘Letters From Arcadia’ series) a true cult following. It has also played a [...]




Caught by the River