cuckoo spit & dripping yarns
ja was beginning to despair of a despatch from your sector. lines down, snipers, pickpockets, village hooligans. it must be rough up highgate. thank christmas for the hampstead ponds, their toothless pike and broken perch, ladies of the silt, cutpurse carp who once saw katherine mansfield, and landlocked eels who were there before betjeman. i [...]
vapour trails
dp the nearest blue plaque to here belongs to the memory of john betjeman who lived up the hill in a yellow stuccoed villa. he who saw the screens in hospitals like the kent and sussex in bluebell vistas and heard the bang of the coffin nail in the peal of a church bell. everything [...]
Old Mortality.
ja relieved you spratt yourself up highgate hill. the lost village tench ponds, blue plaques floating in the margins, lift bites off discarded murder weapons. a stolen handbag under every bush, olde tench silted from the days of the poisoners. you must’ve won the pools mate and pulled the black-out curtains down; was beginning to [...]
Letter From Arcadia
dp, the season is over and thanks to the weir-rash I stayed away from the river. On the last day I was carried by bath-chair up Highgate hill to the smallpox hospital and suspended in a large jar of sprats. I am cured! The air is good up here, we have pitched camp and are [...]
Letter From Arcadia
dp, the season is over and thanks to the weir-rash I stayed away from the river. On the last day I was carried by bath-chair up Highgate hill to the smallpox hospital and suspended in a large jar of sprats. I am cured! The air is good up here, we have pitched camp and are [...]
Spring Offensive : Leave Cancelled
ja tragic luck that, in dry dock with thames pox. angler’s curse, pepys’ revenge, and falling at season’s end is a court case under sod’s law. may the scales and scabs fall from your eyes and the spume of cess ridden weirpools glance off your shield. sipping claret in a punt as your herrings bob [...]
Half A Guinea A Look
dp whilst you were running round in the blackout trying to plug into the sun i was taken by the victorian weir rash. the same one that g had three years ago. it came up on my return from wimbledon, i thought it was a flea pit infestation caught from the car boot car park [...]
Dynamo Kev
ja sorry for the delay… lines were down after a nuclear strike from the electric company, a well aimed million volt power surge knocked out the 8 houses in my hamlet, smoke pouring from electrical goods two fridays back just as we were all plugging in our toasters and downloading the morning post. my modem [...]
You’ll Never Make The Station
dp the last of the few marched from the birdtable via redan hill and sebastopol road to the east bank aldershot with a pint of bull’s blood from the crimea fresh in our throats. to stand in a february fog in tailored red coats with brass buttons, led by a drummer boy who took the [...]
Fish-Fingered
ja thanks for that buchaneering tale, nabbing a duke’s pike under flush winter sky from a punt, clapping butler and cooing maids. there should be tapestries and painted ceilings of stag party pike inside the dutchess’s boudoir. you know the old song of course, “pull out the stopper & lets have a whopper/get me to [...]
