The Navy Lark
ja osterley. even the name sounds like catacombs of doomsday pike, bones piled and sifted in their field of honour at the foot of that dam wall. and maybe when the wind snuffs out the parallel world, the sound of the M4 becomes a ghostly perlon whistling through the ceramic rings of bill keal’s pike [...]
Coldwater
dp while you were digging in the town pit for half scaled medieval relics, fat monks with red fins, me and jeff took the sixties back streets from white city down the A4 towards isleworth. every traffic light scene a sweeney set, every turn off a light industrial dead end with more broken windows than [...]
Last Train Out Before The Lines Were Blown.
ja your kind words leave a fireside blush. as long as you laughed, and it echoed down the empty corridors of the dead mansions like a shoal of bream-coughs in a kent borstal, you can skip the iodine chapters. i hear your fishing fixtures are being cancelled one-by-one as the participants drop like 3oz leads [...]
The Original Anglo Saxon Chronicle
dp the apothecary’s bottles have been drained and i even thought of raiding the bramble covered house where you and bob discovered that cache of pills back in the eighties. the lingering bream cough was banished with the final spoonful of syrup that was a day in front of a linewinder fire spent reading ‘one [...]
Blood on the Matchmaker’s Apron
ja i trust the clank is now the distant thud of an empty bottle in the recycling bin, that your apothecary has other brows to wipe, that the bream-cough has been weighed on the reaper’s own avons and returned undersized to frank barlow’s locker upstream of us, and that your convalescence involves a healthy dose [...]
Irvine Welsh meets H.E.Bates uptown – by the Wimpy
dp just when my copy turned up in the post. thanks for the dedication – will read it in a sitting this weekend. just recovering from the flu – knocked me sideways for almost 3 weeks my latest letter from arcadia was no more than a note in an empty benelyn bottle cast into the [...]
The Clank of the Apothecary’s Bottle.
dp thank you for your letter of the 12th and for your kind words in your year of shadows and reflections. my reply is long overdue. whilst you were roasting spuds around the ceasefire and nailing barbel by the tail to every door in laure’s village i have been marooned in a shiplake punt in [...]
Dead Mans Cove Flows Back Down The Absinthe
ja dead man’s cove came a-knocking here, a swell on the road, conger lobs washed past and set off speed cameras, fish clinging to wrecked trees just to stay in the rivers. been pretty much clinging to the raft myself the last fortnight, bronchial and broke, pre-publication inertia. have yet to stock-take 07, round-up the [...]
The River Absinthe Flows Into Dead Mans Cove
dp your photos of the absinthe and letter from behind the lines, from beyond the imaginot line – wonderful stuff. a heady brew, a winter ale for the soul. oh to pass a saturday afternoon after a five franc rabbit lunch by fishing from jane birkin’s ducking stool, a sister to the marianne faithful cottage [...]
Stret Pegging for Zola
ja that old black box of ted hughes’s frayed lines you picked up from autumn’s last bung fair came in handy on your drive home then. you conjoured illusion there, the grit they forgot to spread on saturday night for blizzard sunday, for the snow that caught the bulldozer rusting behind the smoke sheds and [...]
Caught by the River