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The Ice Storm by Mark Beldan

Kingston, Ontario. January 1998, Mark Beldan.

I went to art school in Kingston, Ontario.

From the name down – the king’s town – there’s a kind of colonial imposition. Rather than any big industry, it’s a city built around a series of big institutions. There’s a university, a teaching hospital, a college, a military college and a military base. There are also nine prisons. The old institutional buildings are made of local grey limestone.

I was there from 1995 to 1999. Kingston isn’t that far from Toronto or Montreal but I felt isolated from both. It’s a small city. There wasn’t much radio or internet. The only local TV station showed bingo every Saturday, endless hours of one person calling out numbers.

So culture came through friends. We’d lend each other books and music. We’d watch films together. Something would come up in conversation and I’d write down a name or a title.

Over Christmas 1997 I was visiting a friend in Toronto. She gave me a cassette she’d made. Nico’s The Marble Index on one side, a compilation of shoegazey things on the other side. She handed it over casually, maybe I’d like it.

At the start of January 1998 I listened to it driving on the 401 back to Kingston. Some of the music made me feel anxious, like it was out of sync with itself, like it was going to lead me into some sort of hideous car crash. The words of ‘Frozen Warnings’ were another caution. But the music under those words felt hopeful, coalescing into a sort of harmonious pulse as I drove across the flat grey landscape.

Frozen warnings close to mine

Close to the frozen borderline

That week it was cold in Kingston. Too cold to rain but it started raining. And then it kept raining. It was an ice storm, a rare weather phenomenon where precipitation falls as liquid but freezes on contact with the ground. Or a tree branch. Or a power line. If conditions stay cold the ice just builds up. On the third day the electricity went off around 9pm.

I was on my own, everyone else in the house had left town or crashed with friends. Even our cat had been put in a carrier and taken to a parent’s house. But I’d been too slow to get away. 

I managed to find a candle and a lighter in the kitchen and make my way upstairs. There was nothing to do so I put out the candle and got into bed. My room was on the second floor, facing onto Montreal Street. Everything was invisible in the darkness now, but there was a small churchyard with tall trees opposite. I guess the ice just got thicker and heavier and eventually each branch had a point where it couldn’t be supported. I listened to the trees falling down.

I never imagined a disaster would be like that. There were no sirens, no screams. Just things collapsing under a few centimetres of ice. The world stopped by slow processes of relentless accumulation. It was dark and somehow I fell asleep.

From without a thousand cycles

A thousand cycles to come

The next morning was grey but bright, the rain had stopped. The entire city was encased in ice. Completely hazardous but also beautiful. The front steps, the railing, the sidewalk all like glass. On the street the safest place to walk was down the centre of the road. Hedges crystallised, every twig encased. Birch trees arched double, their top branches touching the ground. Cars crumpled under fallen maples. I took detours to avoid the power lines draped across the road.

At the university campus there was electricity. I had some coffee and hung out at the art building for a while. A few people had stayed over on sofas in the studios. I found my camera there, and took some photos on the way home. By the time I got to the house the power was on there too. 

The house wasn’t too cold. I put on the tape of Nico in my room. As it got dark again I remember ‘Ari’s Song’, so terrifying and reassuring all at once.

Sail away, sail away, my little boy

Let the wind fill your heart with light and joy

Somehow the unknown didn’t seem that bad. For the past year I’d had a profound feeling of being stuck. Maybe I was in the wrong town. The wrong university. Some of the people on my course were my closest friends – they still are – but maybe it was the wrong course.

In a roundabout way, Nico had led me there. In school I’d seen pictures of her with Andy Warhol in books about Pop Art. I loved The Velvet Underground & Nico album instantly. I’d imagined art school as one long Exploding Plastic Inevitable. But happenings weren’t really happening in the small art department of a conservative university.

Too often our professors had that peculiarly Canadian censoriousness – that anything sexual was pornography, that weirdness and vulnerability were kinds of weakness. It’s so unhelpful when you’re 21 and trying to figure out what you want to do. I’d swing between different reactions. Sometimes I’d paint a perfunctory still-life. Other times I’d write expletives across my studio wall. Neither approach really lead anywhere. 

I’m not sure I believe in self-expression, but any sort of sustained work has an element of obsession. You set yourself a problem you can never completely solve, and the joy is in coming at it from different angles again and again. 

Can you follow me? 

Can you follow my distresses?

The winter became a normal winter. The ice melted and branches were cleared away. It snowed and that snow melted.

I started making paintings of Kingston. I walked around taking photographs of all the buildings that I found oppressive. The Plaza Hotel strip-club on Montreal Street. The Econo-Coin Laundromat where I’d have to wait for hours. The concrete bulk of the Princess Towers looming over town. The canvases were primed in black gesso, then oil paint, building up layers of cold earth-tones and sludgy greys. All the skies the colour of dirty snow.

I even started driving around the city looking for other buildings to paint. One day I kept going into the country and found myself in a strange place. Along one side of the road, what had been a pine forest, but with every tree snapped off at the base. Now a field of jagged stumps. On the other side there was a steep gravel embankment falling away. At the base of the slope where the gravel met the grass there were about a dozen coyote skeletons. The bones clean and white so not so new.

Back in the studio, I listened to The Marble Index on headphones as I painted. Music is great while working but it’s not like the painting will necessarily transcribe a mood or translate sounds into pictures. It’s just a way of tying up those verbal and rational bits of your brain that might get in the way.

In the morning of my winter

When my eyes are still asleep

Across the songs there was a weather in the lyrics – frozen and windy, with rain and snow. The same weather as Kingston. Sometimes the music almost seemed medieval, but then the strings would screech like car alternator belts on a cold morning.

I loved the album so much but for some reason I never played it for anyone there. It was a private space. I didn’t want anyone to laugh at its extremes, and I don’t think I had the language to defend it. No-one else ever coyly mentioned that they’d been listening to Nico.

Walking home one night from the art building I found our cat a few streets from the house. She was wandering around in the middle of an intersection. It was quiet. The traffic lights were just flashing because it was so late. I scooped her up to carry her home. She settled into my arms and purred.

When I finished the new paintings of Kingston I put them up in the hallway outside the studio. I was happy with them. They’d started in frustration but they’d become more open than that. Maybe they still looked like student work. But there was something there, something that relates to the paintings I make now. The simple volumes, the tonal palette, the specific and familiar buildings. 

There’s nothing more to sing about

Not now or when they carry me away in the rain

Now, all these years later, I really want to find the tape. The cover made of a folded photograph of clouds, the titles written inside. My fingerprints in oil paint on the clear cassette. But maybe it’s long gone. I did find a box with my photographs of the ice storm. Shot on colour film, a little underexposed. They miss some details but catch the disorder and the cold of that day. There was also a photo of the cat in my room, and this reminds of how that winter term of art school ended.

One morning in April, we heard a horrible yowling right outside our house. Our cat had been hit by a passing car. She was conscious and alert but unable to stand up. The next few hours were a blur of getting her inside, phone calls to vets, trying to make her comfortable, driving to one vet, then another, and then finally the tough decision to put her down. 

Afterwards we drove to the spot with the broken pine trees. We parked on the side of the road. The three of us made our way down the embankment awkwardly, carrying the cat. We found some branches to serve as a marker. We dug a hole at the edge of the gravel and buried our cat beside the coyotes.

Mark Beldan is a London-based painter originally from Toronto, Canada. His work explores the strangeness of familiar places and things. Often painting small houses, in 2025 he also made a stage set of big flowers for the dance company Corali. 

Photograph taken by Jon Archdeacon.

Midnight Winds by Richard Cabut

Nico, New York, 1970 by Brigid Berlin.

Earlier this year, I was asked to discuss Nico for a film to accompany a version of  Femme Fatale on an album released in support of the Teenage Cancer Trust. 

I talked on camera about my friendship with Warhol silver Factory photographer Nat Finkelstein (his picture of Lou Reed features on the back sleeve of the VU and Nico LP), who I stayed with in NYC over one crazy summer in the 80s (fictionalised in my novel Looking for a Kiss). He hated most of the Factory crowd, but respected Nico. I also talked about the strongest version of her voice – a new poetry of bleakness and sorrow – found on Janitor of Lunacy from the LP Desert Shore; and the pre-historical pagan magic (definitely disorderly magic ) that filters up in Evening of Light – my favourite Nico song – soundtrack to a short 1969 film featuring a young Iggy Pop by director François De Menil.

I also asked: where do the midnight winds go? 

And I thought, and still think, about:–

Chelsea Girls on a slow/fast loop, with screen-printed souls, silver fluorescent haze, ghosts of Superstars in broken looking glass. Femme fatale in a turtleneck of shadows, lip-curl velvet, existential bravado – Nico; the kind of person you meet, in whatever way, and emerge transformed to some degree. 

Beat drops. Patti-Smith bite. Siouxsie eyeliner like a midnight scythe. Clash-cut rhythm, downtown hymn – 1976, first time her voice slid into my room – contralto made of smoke, from ash and cathedral shadows – a voice too low for the baby-girl 60s, too dark for the sunshine pop factories. A voice like the world’s last cracked prayer. 

Old Europe twilight. Disorderly Magic forever. 

Nico sings like snowstorm silk, atonal, androgynous, thick with centuries, thick with Dresden flames impossible to forget. Wearing beauty like an insult and tossing it away like a match – one that lit bonfires. Beauty denounced as casual tyranny – darkness as armour, mystery as oxygen. Feeding flames.

And style as wound, wound as song, and song that can outlive every/any man who ever tried to claim/tame/shame.

Iggy said she taught him Beaujolais and art-school tricks disguised as lullabies. He filmed her in a field for Evening of Light, a crack-between-worlds moment where mandolins ring to viols singing, and the midnight winds land as warning. Berlin-ashram meets Michigan-gutter. Music collapsing into beautiful violence. A tribute wrapped in awe, and regret, and the kind of affection and affectation, too, that can only exist between two people who might survive, for however long, their own mythologies. 

A shining light for every singer who ever needed to drop their voice below pretty, or permission; or anyone who felt that a woman doesn’t need to shine to illuminate; and who treats beauty as something breakable, burnable, something you could set down and walk away from without saying how very sorry you are; above all anyone who wants a different way to carry their own shadow.

And I am hearing dreamscapes full of dark echoes and erotic street energy. Cosmic ennui that reflects the myth back to the crowd like a funhouse mirror. In a voice that comes from somewhere deeper than the throat – somewhere prehistoric. Silence that knows too much. Whispered in harmonium breath and lullabies sharpened into razors. 

Midnight winds circle.

I am also thinking 60s/70s Avant-Garde/Berlin School harmonium drones, tape hiss, proto-industrial rich deep minimalism, European nocturne atmospheres. Cold wave pulses, cabaret limelight dimmed, war-memory spectrality. All of it transposed over the years to Ibiza, New York, Los Angeles, London et al as a poem that moves like a Super-8 reel found in a basement in Kreuzberg, or somewhere like that. Yes, begin with a hiss. Analog snow falling across a broken tape. A low oscillator trembling. A train leaving some empty cold station at 3 a.m. – slow, metallic. 

Then: contralto voice carved from coal-dust. The sound of a city learning to breathe after the bombs stopped but before the memory ever could.

Pulses flicker – messages to forgotten futures. Where the streets are half dream, half gaping wound, and art is the only currency. Reverberation as survival strategy. 

Christa Päffgen, with Factory scars under her coat, Warhol apparitions, spirits and spooks deep in her pockets, and a harmonium strapped to her soul as life and death-support machine. Dressed all in black because colour is hope, and hope is sin. 

This is not pop. This is architecture. Built from absence, steel, and memory, perhaps. Nico steps into the drone. War Memory as Original Drone. Repetition becomes revelation. Revelation as trance. Grammar of ruins turns into ritual.

I thought, and am thinking, about slick pavements, streetlamps rattling and failing like old ballroom pianos struggling to project their tone. In the silence between footsteps you can hear the rumour that darkness is not the absence of light but the cradle of it – and that some voices do not break – they remain unbroken, untranslated forever.

Where do the midnight winds go? To the end of time, of course, honey, to the end of time. 

Richard Cabut is a London-based author, whose CV includes the sister books, the popular work of modern literature/poetry Disorderly Magic and Other Disturbances  – ‘subterranean scenes, picturesque ruins, neon glowing, Chelsea Girls, the damned, the demimonde, the elemental, being on the edge of being pinned down by our ghosts’ – and Ripped Backsides (both Far West Press),  a dreamlike, dislocated and fragmentary Situationist drift through the noir cities. Also, the Freudian 80s cult novel Looking for a Kiss (PC-Press), which has been adapted for screen. And, Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Zer0 Books).

He’s also a journalist – ‘NME, BBC, anarchy’ – a former punk musician, a cultural theorist, playwright and long-time chronicler of the underground. richardcabut.com

St. Nico – An Invocation by Jarrod Campbell 

Nico in Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1967).

Bless us, St. Nico, we who need a mirror when no one else on earth understands. Save us, your flock, from threats of dreaded normalcy. Especially faggots like me – reared in the deep, rural south, suffering through adolescence starved for a savior anti-Madonna fierce enough to hold her own. We once were lost but your evening of light helped us see. 

Give us strength these days to confront unforgotten failures on our own. Your mercy doesn’t wash away the sins but instead lends credence and visibility to our disgrace. Through no intention of your own but because of who you were then, are now and will forever be, you are canonized as a patron saint to jilted lovers, downtrodden vagabonds, misunderstood, unwitting geniuses, the woman underestimated by men of art and industry. You remain many things for many people, yes, again, even an impetuous, lowly faggot like me, and so many more who find themselves on the other side of popular prayer. 

Never one to be eclipsed or upstaged by so many men with half your divinity and faculties, you showed us a path to perpetual salvation. And though the road leading to the lawns of dawn be paved with the best intentions that trick the feet with false feelings of comfort and success, your gospel grants the reassuring guidance necessary to leave overdrawn caresses as we continue our pilgrimage through this travesty called life.

And through thorough examination of your documented life journey, we find that you had faults of your own, all too common prejudices of your day and age. You, too were human. Too late to forgive and too grievous to forget. We address your own sins to show how failures of flesh and mind exist even in the holiest of people. Base level skin and bone shells are capable of only so much. With this recognition we more easily see our own faults and become grateful for what life we have left to correct our mistakes and right our wrongs. We add a prayer here for you, St. Nico, that you have or will realize and reckon with these trespasses. 

Your art, Elysian. Your influence, limited but crucial for us who know…we, the innocent and vain. We’ve got the gold and with this transmutation we now have a way to wrap our troubles in dreams. May our holy headphones make us mediums for your message of insouciant misery, your promises of ways around instead of directly through adversity with little confrontation. 

We close this prayer to thee, Teutonic saint of uncompromising individuality, with waves of gratitude lapping at your detached, disinterested and icy shore. You come into our lives when we need you most. You offer salvation in the form of an unfeeling monotone that warms when we recognize a shared__________________. You imbue us with the power to suffer, resilient and beautiful, any hardship the world throws our way. You point us in the truest direction, we see and go wherever your gaunt fingers command. All this and much more which we will never be truly worthy. You fell on accident and hemorrhaged for our sins. We know this and we hate ourselves for this interpretation. Solace comes when we listen to your songs. Forgiveness comes when we sing along as if these hymns have the power to restore. Transcendence comes when your droning voice overshadows our own and lifts us up with you in heaven before sending us crashing back down to reconvene our suffering here on earth. But highly blessed, strengthened and remade by your redeeming grace. 

And the people said: My Heart Is Empty

Jarrod Campbell is a writer living in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. His fiction, essays, poetry, non-fiction and reviews have appeared in print and online with Heavy Feather Review, Northwest Review, Boner World (Berlin), Modern Literature, and more. A collection of short stories, The Reason I’m Here, (Stalking Horse Press, June 2023) was named an anticipated LGBTQIA+ read by Lambda Literary the month of its release.

In the Dark by Nate Lippens

Still from the film Athanor (1972) by Philippe Garrel

In the dark room at night, the walls enameled black, so dawn arrives as a violation, she smokes. She smokes without conviction, almost without need, but then deeply as if to prove something to herself. Flicks the butt into the grate of the ruined fireplace, heaped with little cartons, each cigarette emptied and smoked, each added to a mountain. A plate of ashes. She makes sure, twice, that her cigarette is extinguished before she does this. Philippe scolded her. Ari found one smoldering and rubbed it out on the floor. How could Philippe be angry? When they moved from the Montparnasse Hotel into this apartment, he gutted the place, tore out the twentieth century and some of the nineteenth too. Gone: gas, electricity, hot water, heater, lighting, furniture, carpets. A penitentiary but there are no locks. 

She yearns to go back to New York though nothing good comes to or from there. The not-good is familiar. She needs that now with her mother dead. Can still smell the air’s heavy scent in the room where she knelt before the empty bed and cried. She hadn’t wanted it to be like that and knew her aunt Helma blamed her for not visiting the last two years of her mother’s life. It had always been hard, then became impossible. The immobility she feels now, lying in bed undead, waiting for light to come in the room and peepshow the mess. Philippe shifts beside her, groans. They are covered by his overcoat which doubles as mattress and bedding, sleeping partly on it, partly on the floor, the faint smell of piss. Ari makes sounds across the room, asleep or awake, she can’t tell. She’s never alone lately but never accompanied either. Everything has fallen to repetition. They score, they get high, they have no money, no need for food after they’ve fed, only to make certain the boy eats, he must eat. Then they go to museums or wander the docks, up and down the same streets of Paris. Was it last week or the one before—prior has no hold here, all is prior but there is no history, only the past—that she saw someone, a London person from New York, who startled at her appearance and said what did you do to your hair. The blonde dyed crimson, bluntly cut. You like it, she responded, nearly leering, surfacing from the not-slumber, suddenly awake on the street in the face of that collaged ghoul made of the spare parts, all mean, all pushing, all saying her songs weren’t good, she needs a manager, she needs to be blonde again, she needs better clothes, not these ugly robes and caftans Philippe sewed himself for the film. The film! They hate it, just the idea of it. A woman and a man and a child in the desert, shot across three—Sinai, Death Valley, and Iceland. All blend together to her. She knew they weren’t one. Each had its own qualities and peculiarities, but like people, places were mostly the same. You met one or two and you’d met all of them. The man on the street, upset or disappointed by her appearance, had scurried off, back to his little life, perhaps some lunch in a café. The thought made her feel ill. 

She would get back to New York and show them, she would book some gigs. She practices the harmonium every day now and she has new songs. The best she’s done, she’s sure, or thinks she’s sure, but can already see the faces of Danny and Paul and others who will tell her what is wrong with them, not knowing they are about her mother, Jim, the deserts, Brian’s death. Misadventure by accidental drowning, the coroner’s report stated. She knows no accidents and no misadventures. Dark spirits, yes. A man goes for a swim and never surfaces as himself again. A woman in a bar, her face cut, a fury and a glass thrown and stitches. The voices of New York, seeing Lou in a rehearsal space, having to flee, first to New Jersey, then the country. Shows canceled. Back to this room. Can she ever escape this room. Will she look over and find Ari is now a man and Philippe is dead or nearly, and they will still get up and find dope and not eat and wander the streets and walk the docks and pretend to see new things, pretend they are attuned to things other people don’t register. And the people don’t but they do see two junkies and a child and worry for the child and maybe they will do something about it or call someone to do something about it. Maybe they will make a problem, make her become a problem. Then what, when someone appears to ask about the child and she doesn’t even have blonde charm now, or good skin. Cheekbones still but hollow not haughty. This is why Ari must be a man. It is better for twenty years to pass this morning, the hour before dawn or is it. The black night and room seem to have changed a bit, added a bit. Not the usual things she sees on these mornings. Not the nights Philippe taught her to liquefy and use the needle, not broth and Coca-Colas in the palace, not the circle of fire in the desert and the boy unable to cross it to his father, not all the words she wrote only moments before she spoke them to the camera, the way time slid in and out of view in those long shots, hours stretching, and one day no longer waiting for Philippe to yell cut, just riding, swaying slightly on the horse’s back, the sound dropped out, and the sky grown dark but never like the room or the nights here. A vast star-punched ongoingness. Her mother’s bed in the sand, Ari the boy hungry always hungry, Pierre Clémenti naked and ranting lines, a pleasant body, good cock, eyes like Brian’s, Jim passing in his car not recognizing her, a box of books beside him, then the news of his death later that night, the long line, the drone she had found she could follow and it would vary, it would create the sound she craved, defeat. No one else heard it. They heard failure. Defeat is not failure. It isn’t surrender. There is no grace or wisdom or beauty in it. Defeat holds itself. A friend at last. She wants another cigarette. She can make out the outline of the pack. Dawn but not yet light. One more cigarette before the day again. 

Nate Lippens is the author of My Dead Book, Ripcord, and two forthcoming novels, Box Office Poison, co-written with Matthew Kinlin, and Bastards. 

Author photo from Carolyne Loreé Teston.

Nico in The Closet (1966) by Graham Russell

Nico and Randy Bourscheidt in The Closet (1966)

The Closet (1966) was Nico’s first film with cadaverous Pop Art visionary Andy Warhol and thus represents her cinematic unveiling as a Warhol Superstar. It would be a fruitful relationship. As the Factory’s inscrutable Garbo / Dietrich equivalent she would star in several more Warhol films (most famously Chelsea Girls (1966)) while also featuring as chanteuse for Warhol’s proto-punk “house band” The Velvet Underground.

The  Closet’s “plot” is absurdist and minimal: a couple living in a closet kill the time (they make small talk, split a sandwich, share a cigarette, kvetch about their cramped surroundings) and contemplate leaving but never do.

For the first few moments the camera is focused on the exterior of the shut closet door in grainy black and white as we hear only their voices (audible but muffled; in fact the sound remains muffled for the rest of the film, poor sound quality being a stylistic trademark of Warhol’s films at the time). Creeping horror that the entire 66-minute film will stay like this is averted when the door belatedly does open and we are finally permitted to see Nico and leading man Randy Bourscheidt (a cute, preppy art student-type) seated inside the closet surrounded by hangers, ties, clothes, etc. While the couple talk or sit in silence, Warhol’s camera either sits totally stationary or prowls restlessly and randomly.

The film is unscripted: instead, we get an improvised, wandering conversation between the duo who have obviously been instructed to ad-lib for the 66-minute duration. Most Warhol Superstars were amphetamine-fuelled, garrulous motormouths and exhibitionists; Nico and Bourscheidt are atypically more reticent. Both seem shy and hesitant, and their conversation is often stilted but characterized by a genuine sweetness on both parts. Some viewers have deciphered the hint of a physical attraction between them which is complicated by the pretty, long-lashed and collegiate-looking Bourscheidt’s apparent homosexuality (The expression “coming out of the closet” was already in use in the 1960s and could be a relevant coded meaning to the film’s title).

Certainly Bourscheidt seems dazzled by Nico, which is understandable: The Closet presents her at the height of her flaxen-haired beauty. It also reveals the complexity of her persona. The performers in Warhol films are essentially playing themselves, so The Closet is a snapshot of Nico the woman at this particular point in her life rather than an actress performing a role. She looks like a statuesque Nordic Amazon but is wispily spoken, reserved and uncertain rather than intimidating or forbidding — her sweetness dispels the cliché of Nico as ice maiden. And her voice – routinely described as guttural or “Germanic” – is infinitely softer than you expect.

As an avant-garde filmmaker Warhol withholds most of the conventional pleasures audiences expect from films (narrative, character development, editing, technical proficiency , etc) but with his Superstars in lead roles he does provide one of the enduring attractions of film-watching: scrutinizing beautiful people. So, while “nothing happens” in The Closet, we do get to appreciate the physical attractiveness and hip wardrobes of both Nico and Bourscheidt at great length. Nico wears what was then her signature look: an androgynous white pantsuit, turtleneck sweater and boots combo that would be the pride of any Mod boy, feminized by a curtain of long blonde hair.

Nico would have been in her late twenties by the time of The Closet, and Bourscheidt (at a guess) between 19 and 21. She speaks to him in tones that shuttle between maternal concern and big sister-ly teasing. Both seem vaguely embarrassed and self-conscious on screen, but unlike Bourscheidt Nico possesses the poised armour of sophistication: by 1965 she travelled the world as an in-demand fashion model, spoke several languages, acted in films like La Dolce Vita (1959) and Strip-Tease (1963) in Europe, was the mother of a young son, and had started her singing career.

In addition to this hauteur, Nico utilizes her experience as a seasoned model: she is clearly un-phased by the camera’s roaming gaze and is skilled at graceful self-presentation. She has a neat trick of looking down moodily so that her long blonde bangs obscure most of her face and then suddenly looking up and tilting her head, dramatically revealing sculpted cheekbones, Bardot lips and sweeping false eyelashes.

“Are you afraid of me?” Nico suddenly asks Bourscheidt towards the end of their awkward filmic encounter. He looks startled and doesn’t know how to reply. “I’m not trying to embarrass you!” she assures.

At the film’s conclusion Bourscheidt teasingly asks Nico if she’s forgotten his name. Indeed, she has, and tries to cover by asking him, “Is it Romeo?” He says no and she answers, “Why not?” He asks if she wants him to be Romeo and should he get down on one knee. She replies, “Oh, no. You be Juliet and I’ll be Romeo.”

Like the Shangri-Las song, Graham Russell is good-bad, but not evil. He’s a trash culture obsessive, occasional DJ (Cockabilly – London’s first and to date, only gay rockabilly night), and promoter of the Lobotomy Room film club (devoted to Bad Movies for Bad People) at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston. As a sporadic freelance journalist, over the years he’s contributed to everything from punk zines (MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, Flipside, Razorcake) to The Guardian and Interview magazine and interviewed the likes of John Waters, Marianne Faithfull, Poison Ivy Rorschach, Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins and Jayne County.

Sketching Clouds by Bo Mandeville

Photo by Bo Mandeville

Driving from Edinburgh to Cairnryan, still in a state of dulled lucidity, unable to fully grasp the enormity of the journey. Once boarded, sounds, smells and motion wake me. I notice the dissipating sleep inertia while cruising. I observe how coastlines move along the ferry. Waves delineate the present, allude to the past and possibly a future. In my mind, I draw the shores with cliffs and hills, inlets and rivers flowing. Sketch the clouds too.

Some ancestors endeavoured the same voyage. Probably many times. Perilous on occasion. From Argyle to Antrim. Settling. My family’s history, a fragmented genealogy, has recently become more important to me. I’ve managed to connect dots, milestones and major events.

Forefathers joined rebellions and fought for hope. Romantically perhaps, I wish valorous and chivalrous men engaged in battles to protect the vulnerable and those who couldn’t stand up for themselves. But I know these forefathers — particularly the first ones who crossed from Normandy to lead the charge at Hastings — were mercenaries. Medieval warriors for coin who later became part of more rewarding and legitimate causes. Fights for freedom. Something I like to mention with pride.

Thinking of those many descendants and generations through centuries of being and remaining unsettled. Stories to make sense of my own existence.

The crossing is smooth. Too short for elaborate meanderings. As I never used this ferry crossing before, ruminating through history appeals, is pertinent. Locations as markers of my mariner heritage: Loch Ryan, Carrickfergus and Whiteabbey. An ancient maritime route. Connecting Scotland and Ireland, trading and exchanging stories, for centuries.

Docking in Belfast comes as an interruption. Like the ancestors, who feel so discernible now, this is a brief stay. Layover, a pause. I walk and my antecedents walk with me. Unsteady and slow, vague and opaque. But they are there. Here.

. . .

Reaching Ireland feels like an achievement, culmination of many attempts and struggles. There’s a sense of accomplishment. Finality or not. So…I tell myself this won’t be the last time. Self-reassurance feels like cheating life. And death. Perhaps I have always been a cheat, an imposter — a syndrome that has plagued me since early teens.

I see opportunity for new experiences, even repeats, as a welcome sign, a bonus, a rewarding gift for my own persistence and perseverance. An inherited determination that has possibly prolonged my life, or slightly plateaued the progression of symptoms and appears to have altered the course of expectations, both from the clinicians perspective and our (family and me) own.

“Life expectancy is six to nine years for most. Some get twelve.” It says so on the website, in the leaflets. Nine years in, I sincerely believe I have more than three years left in me. A calculation I have never expressed, never shared. An aspirational awareness.

When the new neurologist affirms the diagnosis — Corticobasal Degenerative Syndrome — he immediately adds ‘atypical’ with a gentle smile, referring to an uncharacteristically slower decline than expected. I return his smile. As if we bond in a complicity to deceive the expected. Gratitude, an element of self deprecation and a desire to cheat the norm. He tells me there’s no certitude, no predictability or any clinical factors to provide a reliable prognosis. But he knows the numbers as well as I do. He too, understands time. And he knows it’s irreversible and incurable, degenerative. Curtains are closing, slowly yet very surely. He knows, he alludes to it and he gives me another, now even more compassionate smile. I like his manner, his tone and expressions, his clarity, his twinkle. A shimmer like tiny stars on dark curtains.

Some use the word gift, as if a benevolent creature rewards me. I accept it all: my condition, the illness, the lack of clarity and certainty of prognosis, the inability to obtain assurance. There’s defiance and acceptance. I resist limitations while embracing an increasingly disabled life.

I no longer drive myself. I miss it. The car, the independence, possibilities and destinations. Actually, I no longer have the ability to do much myself. Beyond some thinking. And even that is difficult. For more than three quarters of the hours of the day, I struggle with everything. 75 per cent of the time I exist in near to full obscurity. I live in the vicinity of perpetual fog, my life floating around mist banks. Fog formations over bodies of water with me on a boat without mast or sail, no oars nor anchors. To me this mist, the fog, appears monochrome, as rudimentary woven linen and lace. Écru. Raw and untreated. Weirdly tangible. Veils, retaining some elegance and delicacy, rather than heavy ruby theatrical curtains. They open a few hours each day when I feel freed, am allowed to wonder and be lucid.

Definitely happy. Really happy. Childishly happy.

Despite that, some hours later, I am always ushered back to my veiled sense. An uncertain existence, where all true consciousness evaporates, just leaving some cloud-like space I fill with unknown. Unknowns. Plural.

Repetitive oscillatory motions, erratic pendulum patterns. Yet, I am truly happy.

Embarking on this road trip, I emphatically exclaimed it — “I am the happiest I have ever been.” — unsure if anyone would believe me. And maybe it did sound unreal, not credible, callous even. Surely, key events in my life Have rendered me happier. No! Maybe this is a different connotation of happiness, or as I see it, another realm, a new dimension.

An end-of-life prolepsis, ahead of time. An early fictionalised version, or view, with sea horizon clarity on a bright day. Translucent and floating above aquamarine, turquoise, cyan and seafoam. Tangible glee, near-delirious high spirits I can hold in my hand as tanzanite, reminding me of trichroic properties. Appearances of sea blues, sunset violet, with lavender tones, hints of tangerine, blood orange and burgundy.

It is not contentment, not merely gratification, neither fulfilment nor a feeling of comfort. It is an elevated joy, elation and the discovery of tingling delight. Even a somewhat tantalising notion of new found jouissance, discovery of late life ecstasy. Rather apt, timely. My own renaissance.

As physical excruciating pain has a hold over me, like a threatening hang-man standing on a scaffold not too far away, smiling. Agony always is an ugly face.

When I mention joy and happiness, others often find it impossible to imagine. Maybe because of my facial expression, at times anguished, when muscles jerk and spasm and my entire body is assaulted by torrents of aches.

Or maybe because of the finality. What appears contradictory makes it even more special for me.

The north to south drive crisscrossing counties and sceneries is not so much a reminder of previous returns home, but a refreshing perspective of an amazing varied tapestry of places and meanings. New, old, new, old. Non-linear meaning, circular mapping, a cartographer’s wild dance and rites of spring. Around a fire with flames reaching up as if to colour the night sky yellow to amber. Past autumn, in a brightness of winter. Anticipation of renewal.

Closer to home, it is more recognisable.

Memory-lane is flanked by old copper beach trees whose drooping branches appear to prepare for weeping. Nature’s anticipation of sadness and a reminder of cycles. Limbs surrender. This is not my dolorous time. Not yet. Desolation emerges in shapes from crystalline and fluid to sharply outlined and clear. Coloured or black. Sorrow hangs on branches as a substitute for once vibrant leaves. They all fell and are heaped along the path to form floating ephemeral dams and ditches, they’re soft-walling the roadside but it’ll only take the lightest breeze to displace them. I like the lightheartedness of that thought. Any glumness I might have carried on my shoulders floats away. Anticipatory melancholy instead of deepest darkest grief, is what I note about this lane.

Sweetest melancholy. Pensive and pending in this moment. Slow yet still rhythmic. Poetic and impressionistic vibrant.

While I look at the sky, we’re driving slowly towards the river, swollen as if the banks are no longer able to contain the landscape, flooding the cartographers precision with new impressions. I settle for seeing clouds simply move. Different boundaries. New horizons. Not for me. Or not for long for me. Again, I wonder if cloudscapes, seascapes and landscapes, those I happily contoured or traveled through for decades, are as inviting to generations following the imprints. In sand or dust or ash.

This visit is about letting go. Like clouds. Or feathers of smoke from the wood and peat fire that invites me to sit down. Perhaps have a drink. Smile. Or not. Yes, smile.

Smile…

. . .

In 2013, Bo Mandeville moved from Ireland to North Wales to run the National Writers’ Centre. After less than two years in the post, he had to retire due to a neurodegenerative disorder. Over the years, his multidisciplinary practice has taken him from Ireland and Belgium to France, Netherlands, Germany and the United States. His work spans cultural anthropology, film-making, writing and creating (mainly) anonymous, ephemeral land art. He set up and directed several multidisciplinary arts projects and festivals, curated film events and was a board member of an EU Film Festival organisation. Bo has scripted several film projects, produced and co-directed documentary films and gave talks about film at events and colleges.

There Is Nothing To Forgive by Marcel Krueger

Memorial to Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte. All photos by Marcel Krueger.

The border is the maddest line on the map, the most fluid, unnatural and dangerous.
Tomasz Różycki, from Trial by Fire

On the 3rd of November, 1730, Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte, then 26 years of age, was led from his arrest cell on the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin and, under guard and by carriage, transported to the fortress of Küstrin and his death.

Katte had been an intimate friend of the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick, who had been constantly abused by his father Frederick William I. In August 1730, the prince planned to desert the court and go to England. He wrote to Katte informing him of his intent to abscond and that Katte was to join him in The Hague. But in his haste the prince did not add Berlin to the address, and a diligent Prussian postmaster delivered the letter to another Lieutenant Katte who in turn reported its contents to the king.

The response of the father was to beat his son up, so badly that a member of the court had to step in to prevent the king from killing the prince. Frederick was then sent to the fortress of Küstrin under arrest, and the king ordered Katte’s unit to court martial the lieutenant. They did and sentenced him to life. The king was not happy, and asked the court to come together as: “They should administer justice and not gloss over it. The court martial should reconvene and rule differently.” They nevertheless upheld their sentence, and in the end it was the king alone who sent Katte to his death.

I am 295 years late to his execution. My journey from Berlin does not take me to death, yet, but as so often when travelling in Germany, to calamity and ruin. Leaving from Berlin-Lichtenberg, once one of the main stations of the GDR, in the early morning, I take a small regional train past the brown and green fields and forests of Brandenburg into the floodplain of the Oder, the Oderbruch. Autumn frost lingers on the forest paths and in the shadows of the railway embankment. This must be among my favourite things in the world: travelling by train on a glorious autumn morning, to look at the ruins of the past. My journey to the death of Katte is, after all, not only a Prussian pilgrimage but also one across the layers of the recent history of Europe and its leftovers.

The line I’m travelling on, now a branch line connecting the smaller towns and villages of Brandenburg with the capital, was once part of the Prussian Ostbahn, the eastern railway of the German Empire. From 1867 on it connected Berlin with the far reaches of the Reich, the province of East Prussia and its capital Königsberg, Kaliningrad in Russia today. From Berlin you could reach Königsberg via express in six hours and 38 minutes, and it was here that the successors of Katte in the Prussian army transported men and guns east, in 1914 and 1939. Double V’s of flocks of geese on the way to their winter quarters cross the blue autumn sky above my train chugging east, and I wonder if Katte saw similar things from his carriage, and if he thought about a future he would never see.

The empire is gone now, but its legacies remain. On the old station building at Seelow-Gusow the distance marker to the capital (Berlin 63 kilometres) is still intact, but the one indicating Küstrin has been chipped away, as if the authorities of the GDR did not want to remind their citizens of a town lost. During the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin and the western Allies had agreed that Poland would be given former German territories: the southern half of the province of East Prussia and the provinces of Pomerania and Silesia. The German population was forcefully expelled and the areas repopulated with Poles expelled from the Kresy regions in the east of the country, which were in turn divided between Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. Over five million Germans were forced to move west, and over three million Poles forced to follow them, all leaving their homes behind. The river Oder became the new border between Germany and Poland.

Ponds and creeks are increasingly visible from the train, and then we arrive at the Oder proper. The stream here is not a single border river with high banks, but more meandering, older, untamed. My train crosses at the confluence of the Oder and Wartha rivers, and rolls over two long bridges crossing both rivers and the low-lying marshlands between, before it comes to a halt in Kostrzyn nad Odrą in Poland, German Küstrin before 1945.

Kostrzyn nad Odrą is a newer settlement however, expanded from a former German suburb. In front of the train station there are signs indicating Stare Miasto, the old town. In many other towns across Poland, that means the medieval centre, places of cobblestones, cozy pubs, Christmas markets and buskers. In Kostrzyn however it means an absence. I walk towards the rivers again, cross the shiny new bridge for cars and pedestrians across the Warta and reach what was the border crossing until Poland joined the Schengen area in 2007. There’s a hotel, a McDonald’s, a gas station and one of the ubiquitous Polenmärkte, a market where Germans from Berlin and Brandenburg came — and sometimes still come — to buy cheap booze and cigarettes and get a haircut. Behind the hotel is the old town, or to be precise the lack of it.

Because of its position between the rivers, the Prussian authorities had decided to build a fortress here in the 16th century, which had grown into a sprawling red brick edifice with massive bastions when Katte and Frederick arrived. Following the unification of Germany in 1871 it was expanded again and became a mixture of civil and military architecture, with impressive merchant houses lining the cobbled streets along which trams clanked and the new middle class of the German Empire strolled. All of this existed until March 1945, when the Red Army defeated Wehrmacht defenders here in a brutal battle in which over 3000 men perished. When the smoke cleared, Küstrin lay in ruins. Over 90 percent of the old town and the fortress were destroyed. But unlike many other towns it was not rebuilt as the new Polish authorities preferred to develop the settlement nearby, its bricks instead shipped to Warsaw as building material.

The overgrown ruins of Kostrzyn.

The overgrown ruins of Kostrzyn.

Today, what’s left of the old town is overgrown, trails and open spaces indicate where streets and squares used to be, sometimes still lined with curb stones in front of houses long gone or a few meters of cobbles poking out between the grass. New street signs in German and Polish point nowhere. Some of the Prussian bastions have been rebuilt and house a museum, but even on a sunny Saturday I have the former fortress almost for myself. There is a couple walking their dog, and a man in military fatigues is flying a drone over the ruins, but other than that it’s just me and the German ghosts.

I reach the rebuilt Brandenburg Bastion. Here, in the morning hours of November 6, 1730, Hans Hermann von Katte was led and forced to kneel, while his friend was made to watch on the orders of the king. According to some sources, Frederick shouted in French to Katte: “Please forgive me dear Katte, in God’s name, forgive me.” Katte called back: “There is nothing to forgive, I die for you with joy in my heart!” Frederick then fainted. Katte was allowed to say a prayer and then beheaded by sword, his body covered with a black cloth but left under Frederick’s window all night.

Katte’s friend never escaped the clutches of his father. Frederick remained imprisoned for another two years, and then joined to Prussian army. He would later acquire the moniker ‘the Great’ after fulfilling his father’s dream of a Prussian empire. While he married he remained childless, his court was almost exclusively male, and he is buried with his favourite dogs on the grounds of his castle of Sanssouci.

. . .

In the walls of the bastion sits a memorial plaque to Katte next to a passage to a small harbour by the banks of the Oder. The inscription reads, in German and Polish: Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte, born 1704 in Berlin, beheaded 1730 in Küstrin as escape agent of the Crown Prince Frederick. I step down through the gate, and a quintessential European panorama presents itself to me: red brick and catastrophes by the banks of a tranquil border river under a blue autumn sky.

As I walk back I look at Katte’s plaque again, and realise that someone had added two words in German to the frame in black marker. The memorial now reads: Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte, born 1704 in Berlin, beheaded 1730 in Küstrin as lover and escape agent of the Crown Prince Frederick.

. . .

Marcel Krueger is a German-Irish writer and translator living in Berlin. Through family history he explores the tragedies of Europe in the 20th century and what these mean for memory and identity today, especially focusing on Ireland, Germany and Poland. His essays have been published in The Guardian, Notes from Poland, 3:AM, Paper Visual Art, CNN Travel, New Eastern Europe, Przekrój, and The Irish Times, amongst others. Marcel is the co-editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, and has published five non-fiction books in English and German, among them Berlin: A Literary Guide for Travellers (written together with Paul Sullivan, 2016) and Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (2018).  

http://marcelkrueger.eu

Tangerine Coast by A.J. Lees

The North Shore, Blackpool. All photos by Stefan Svennson.

Every year, in the last week of June, the mills, engine rooms, and coal mines in Oldham closed down, and an exodus followed. My great-grandparents, George and Alice (both born in 1867), dressed to the nines, would board the ‘Wakes Week Special’ at the station and head for Shangri-La. The railway served as a steam-powered conveyor belt that shifted human assemblies from the factory floor to a manufactured seaside resort I had the best of reasons to return to Blackpool. It was a joke of a place where you could let rip, lose yourself and fall in love. It was my seaside heritage and had become synonymous with northern soul.

The West Coast express from Euston was packed with jovial passengers, many bursting with stories, but even before Watford Junction, I was in the zone, oblivious to my surroundings, absorbed totally in forcing sonic madeleines up to the surface. The first to return was the voice of my father, “Look, son, can you see it, there, faraway beyond Crow Wood?” From the same vantage spot on Billinge Marilyn looking out to where the skyline met the Irish Sea we had seen an island of unearthly beauty covered with trees. Once he was certain I had spotted the thin vertical silhouette that he said was the Eiffel Tower, he started to parrot, “There’s a famous seaside town called Blackpool, that’s noted for fresh air and fun, and Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom went there with young Albert, their son. “

I eventually arrived with my bucket and spade at the advanced age of eight and a half. Outside the Fun House on the South Shore, an automaton with large, round eyes, bright red lips, and a disconcerting gaze sat inside a glass cabinet. A crown was resting on its frizzy hair and a sad Pierrot sat on its lap. As it rocked on its throne, it emitted a deranged cackle that I felt compelled to imitate and which, like a nursery rhyme, would become indelible. At the Winter Gardens, I had been mesmerised by a magician in his tailcoat and white bow tie called the Amazing Yoxani who was bound, placed in a bag, and then locked in a large trunk by a female assistant. The heavy curtain fell, and when it rose moments later, there he was, bowing and smiling at the audience. He then bounded over to the trunk, unlocked it, and liberated his female assistant. I knew it was a trick, but it didn’t matter but it felt very real. Cinematic flashbacks of the wooden hut for lost children at the entrance of Pleasure Beach, the pennies that never fell from the shelves in the amusement arcade, sheets of spray spilling onto the promenade and the drawn curtains of the fortune tellers’ kiosks flooded in as the train approached Warrington. In the menagerie at the Tower, I listened to a recording of Stanley Holloway reciting his monologue of Albert and the Lion. Dressed in his Sunday best, young Ramsbottom had stuck a stick with a horse’s head handle into Wallace, the lion’s ear and paid for it with his life. My father had frightened me by telling me it was a true story.

My paternal grandparents, Ben (born 1892), a machine fitter and Doris (born 1899), had also gone to Blackpool by train from Oldham during wakes week. Granny once told me that when the Tower and the gleaming sands came into view through the carriage window , the atmosphere changed. The starchiness vanished, and the excited holidaymakers burst out singing, passing round bags of sweets. She also told me of a rainy day on the promenade when she had watched with astonishment as a group of miners she recognised from Wood Park Colliery had passed her jigging with joy.

I changed trains at Preston and on the last short leg through the flat and characterless Fylde plain a man sitting opposite me asked me if I was off to see the ‘Lights’. When I told him I was going dancing, he replied, “You’ve got the right place, pal, they even dance in the street.” Blackpool North had an end-of-the-line feel. Its platforms were deserted, and its surroundings resembled a sanitary landfill. Inside the station, there was a large concourse with no seats that served as a holding area beyond the automatic ticket barriers. Two long queues of passengers snaked round its perimeter. A gaggle of officious station foremen guarded the platforms to ensure orderly boarding for the trains to Lime Street and Manchester Airport. Outside the station, there was a connecting underpass to the tram interchange. Head down, I hurried past a group of inert heroin addicts and a man wrapped in a layer of homemade lard, clutching a can of ale. Behind me, I heard the low hum of a modern tram gliding towards the shore. Talbot Road felt edgy, cut off and run down with swathes of arrested brownfield development. Even in the town centre, there was a moribund low season feel. The many multi-storey car parks and spacious lots were almost empty and the few people in the street seemed in a hurry to get home

In a few minutes, I reached the Golden Mile . The priapic Tower was lit in indium blue, and the Prom bathed in electric sunshine. There were many live shows and music venues on the strip. At the entrance to the North Pier a middle-aged woman where I bought some sticks of rock called me ‘sweetheart’ in a cheery Lancashire brogue. The illumination and movement had lifted my spirit. Someone had written in chalk on the pavement, Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present. It was a sin to be unhappy in Blackpool. The Scots and Scouse hordes were walking the walk, and there was a hen party from Yorkshire. I could hear the sea booming in the dark dusk. Ocean Boulevard, The Esplanade and the Atlantic were the set for our shared illusion. Dray horses with jingling bells were clip-clopping towards Central Pier pulling pink Cinderella carriages sprinkled with tinsel

There was already a line of old souls outside the Tower Ballroom, intent on securing tables close to the dance floor. I walked towards Pleasure Beach, hoping to hear the bellowing mechanical laugh of the ‘King of Fun’, but all I could reconnect with was uptown Motown and Stax music coming from the crowded bars. The scaffolding of the roller coasters resembled glittering lattices in the darkness. Their cars, full of screaming late-night riders crawled up the steep inclines before shooting comet-like through a starless sky. The Blue Waves, The Windmill and The Sands were derelict, but there were still plenty of pet-welcoming boarding houses advertising Free Showers. The Sea Front Camelot Tea Rooms, which I felt I remembered from seventy years ago, was offering every permutation of the Full English breakfast.

When I returned to the Tower, the queue had been replaced by a strong smell of vinegar and fried onions. I looked up at its archways, stained glass windows and the vertiginous criss-cross lattice of iron and steel. I showed my ‘Togetherness’ wristband to the smiling doorman and climbed the stairs to Circus Walkway. As I rounded the first corner, I was hit by the sound of Frankie Beverly belting out If That’s What You Wanted. I started to mouth the lyrics with the same autonomic reflexes that compelled me to mimic heading a ball every time I watched a corner kick:

Ha! Since I’ve been left here, darling,
I’ve been walking into closed doors, call yeah!
I needn’t tell you how much I love you, but I just can’t take it no more, ah yeah!

The final three in the Dance Championship, Tower Ballroom, Blackpool.

The ballroom on Level 3 was rococo with Victorian knobs on. It was adorned with columns, arches, cherubs, friezes and balconies. A large crystal chandelier hung from the sliding roof. An invocation to the dance written by William Shakespeare, “Bid me discourse; I will enchant thine ear”, written for Venus in her seduction of Adonis, was emblazoned on the top of the proscenium arch. Below the stage, the Mighty Wurlitzer used to orchestrate the quickstep, tango and waltzes lay dormant for the weekend. The disc jockey, Richard Searling was tucked unobtrusively between two large LED video screens whose purpose was to magnify and project the spinning discs. The music was rawer and looser than Motown but had the same mono, four on the floor backbeat. Every record had a hook line that was repeated over and over and the beat was kept heavy. I imagined the clanking and grinding of engines, the honking of forklifts and the rhythmical high-pitched clatter of looms on the mill floor. A fervent, supercharged excitement rose from the ballroom’s sprung wooden dancefloor. The dancers’ intricate backward swerves, dervish spins, Soul Train turns, backdrops, swallow dives, and somersaults of the dancers reminded me of the amphetamine-driven rats I had studied in the speed laboratory. The music seemed timeless. Soon I was floating out on the floor, feeling the syncopated horns and strings, galvanising my thinning muscles. I was still the old modernist, making moves I didn’t know I still had in me. I owned the music, kept the faith and was not too old to dream.

The stars of the northern soul scene were black American artists, almost unknown to the general public and a handful of blue-eyed white singers like Frankie Valli, Timi Yuro and Dean Paris. The disc jockeys were unfussy magicians who constructed an illuminated reality from pieces of plastic and were able to create an illusory willing suspension of belief . Most of the favourite tracks were obscure flops from the sixties and seventies with furious melodies, heavy syncopation and powerful vocals. Years of communal connoisseurship had led to an impeccable quality control. As the hours passed, listening to the music, I fell into a trance. There were moments when I was carried back to the Abracadabra magic show with a white rabbit materialising from an empty top hat and a bunch of scarves rising in defiance of gravity. The music became a healing force that loved me back.

Around midnight on the second day, I climbed up to the sweeping upper balcony and looked down, scouring the floor for the Dopamine Dancer and for David, the Boy Miracle from Stirling, who had been brought back to life after a brainstorm by a northern soul tape. The stomping was spontaneous, improvised and high energy. There was no leader, everyone was free to express themselves in their own way but a strong sense of etiquette existed on the floor. Each dancer reacted to those in closest proximity and avoided getting too close by steering an instinctive course, which returned them to their own spot sometimes marked by a pool of sweat. Everyone was committed to having the best night ever. Fifty five years after it began northern soul was now being kept alive by the children and grandchildren of the pioneers from the iconic venues like the Torch, the Highland Room, The Casino, The Catacombs, the Pier, the Ritz and the 100 Club, Some renegades from the funk and disco scene who had belatedly found the holy grail and a few visitors from the Japanese, Australian and Canadian scenes injected new blood. Some of the old soulies were now too unwell to dance but still got high on the music, and there was still plenty of fast footwork in evidence from bald elderly men in Fred Perry shirts, vests and baggy trousers and glowing women of a certain age with long circle skirts and lightweight tops. The motion was soulful, passionate and beautiful to watch. First, I spotted David in a white shirt sitting with friends in ‘ Scotch Corner’ close to the stage on the left in front of the record stalls. Then I picked out Anne, the Dopamine Dancer freed from the shackles of Parkinson’s disease, dancing in the middle of the ballroom. Music had released her handbrake and she could dance all night

From Left to Right: David, Anne, A. J. Lees and Richard Searling, on the stage at the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, November 8, 2025.

On Sunday afternoon, I took a tram back to the station with my heartbeat still turned up and wreathed in a glow of animation. A burly man with a loud voice told me it was a free ride then warned me to transfer my wallet to my back pocket. As my train pulled out of Blackpool North. I felt that I had become truer to myself. The invigorating make-believe world of northern soul was a portal to authenticity. It brought home that the high bogus of scientific fraud, doctored clinical trials and the sale of counterfeit medicine had dragged me down. Some technological titans who believed in the infallibility of machines were trying to reduce medicine to a measurement and I had read about unaccountable customer-friendly chatbots that encouraged the suicidal to kill themselves. Moving to the music had helped me rebuild and resynchronise. The trip to Soul Town told me I needed to take more time out to dance on the edge of volcanoes and spend time watching the sunbeams flirt with the shadows. I would continue to respect data, but I must never lose my delight in magic and faith in God

Footnote:
In 1923 Blackpool football club founded in 1887 adopted a distinctive tangerine shirt with its team wearing it for the first time in a 2-2 draw against Oldham Athletic. I associate tangerine with warmth, high energy, adventure and cheerfulness.

. . .

A.J. Lees is a Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital, Queen Square and University College London. , He pioneered the use of apomorphine for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and has received international acclaim for his expertise in the treatment of abnormal movement disorders. He is also an original member of the Highly Cited Researchers ISI database. Born in St Helens Merseyside, he qualified in medicine at the Royal London Hospital Medical College, Whitechapel in 1970 and received his training in neurology at L’Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, Paris and University College London Hospitals. His book Mentored by a Madman, The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill and New York Review of Books) published in 2016 explains the unlikely association between his neurological career and the author of Naked Lunch. His latest book Open the Door to your Heart describes the importance of dance music in his own life and in the restoration of function in some of his patients.

Journey To The Centre Of Dictatorship by Line Stockford

Photo by Caroline Stockford

Once you see past the cellophaned shop-window of tourism and into the infected stomach-wound of political history you begin a journey to the centre of dictatorship. And you’re likely to survive. Because in their eyes you are a mere fly on the wound, spinning on the spot, feeling sick and having to suck it all up. They might feel an occasional tick at the discomfort of you’re reporting all their business, but with a quick swat, the threat of being locked up, they will send you packing. Off you fly back to your country. You’ll soon be back again. You’ll come because the scent of such drama and the chance to ‘make a difference’ is so seductive.

You will climb into airplanes and out of airplanes, stand in queues at airports listening to psych rock on repeat to make it seem cool to be wearing a suit. You will walk into climates where heat makes a sudden pass at you. The hotels will have terraces descending to cake-crumb concrete, ornate cities choking politely below you. You will blag free afternoon tea in the hotel where Agatha Christie disappeared. You will do this for years and years. Buoyed on the beauty of this city, by the people from whom you learn the meaning of solidarity.

You might go to courthouses larger than a demigod. Where justice is not just blind, she’s in intensive care. Every now and then, to fool the concerned Specialists from overseas at the bedside of Democracy daughter of Anatolia, there is a blip on the heart monitor in the form of a ‘good’ decision from the Constitutional Court. Everyone from Europe nods and puts a tick on their clipboards, smiling at each other from behind the surgical masks.

The British and French have scalpels in their pockets, just in case they get another chance to make choice cuts. It’s all they can do not to dot lines on the flesh, “Je vous en prie, madame mais j’ai l’envie de vos cuisses remplis de l’huile noir dorée.” They want to take her back to last century. She is confused and they all think she’s easy. She has had a lot of lovers in the past. They think they can own her just like Croesus tried but those silly billies don’t even know her real identity.

While Consultants from the EU compile assessments on the health and usefulness of the patient, the rats go on eating the body from underneath the bed. Small regional judges rebel against the Supreme Court. The government opens cases against the Istanbul Bar. Everyone visiting agrees the patient looks passably robust if you just don’t get too close.

The brochure that prompted your journey to the centre of dictatorship will be social media posts showing Kurdish boys dead on barricades and their families looking out from front windows, prevented from collecting their corpses due to sniper fire from the Turkish state. Dogs devour sons’ bodies near the door. You’ll see four old people, wearing white and waving flags be gunned down as they sneak out with a stretcher. Neighbourhoods and a city flattened by airstrikes and tanks. Sur, Cizre and the walls of Diyarbakır. It was 2016, just nine long years ago.

You’ll stand up, then, in your kitchen and say, “Yes, I am ready. Show me the treatment of women, show me culture of queer, show me the mothers of the disappeared, show me cyanide gold mines and grandmothers’ resistance, show me trans women called Hande and show the teeth of the police and what they did to her, show me 5000 teenage girls on a Women’s March, kettled in the super highway street of Istiklal, show me that lady in her eighties who sat on a rock with a staff, soldiers in a row behind her, trying to take over the olive grove as she blasts, ‘The State? I am the state here!’’’ You’ll say, “Show me oppression, the politics, police brutality, show me torture, show me 64 guards kicking a dealer to death in the prison at Silivri.” You’ll notice there are less and less women, they’re vanishing at a rate of one to three per day.

There will be an old man to clean your shoes on the pavement before going into court, but because you speak the language and had a family here, you will really talk to him and he will cry tears down a maze of lines from cornflower blue irises, telling you, “Inflation means it’s twenty lira for a few tomatoes, we don’t eat meat and we can’t make a go of it”. You’ll agree it is a sin to take over the Central Bank and to let inflation run at 168%.

By now you will be an international advocate. You will monitor 200 trials, hoping it will all get better. But fascism doesn’t need much sleep. When it’s too late you’ll see that you were not creative enough. You weren’t armed to the porcelained teeth or in league with deep state. How can you succeed? You don’t belong to the right cult. The President will laugh you off: “These people, they come here, make up a few numbers and leave.” At one point you won’t want to believe there are 185 journalists in prison. But you know them, you have met them and hugged them.

In seven years you’ll be scared for twenty minutes. Those twenty minutes on the day you decide to stand up are like being in an iron maiden, seeing your essence squeezed out and poured into a glass phial. You hold it up to the light – it is the right colour. You hand yourself permission to resist. Go and find them. They will show you the meaning of solidarity. They really will. Your dear fierce legal colleague who sticks with you, no matter what. Court reporter girls who stand up to the judge and are the subject of court cases written in the purple official bruise of his ego. The woman with 185 court cases against her, who still sends salvos to officials. The lawyers, physicians. They’re resisting so hard, are we with them?

The first court case you monitor will be Zaman newspaper, the journalist, editor, author and unliked man Ahmet Altan. Why don’t you sit in the front row, a copy of the OSCE Trial Monitoring guidelines on your knee? That’s how you monitor a trial, you see? Are they abiding by procedure? How much spare paper do you have? The trial will begin and you’ll write it all down. Then comes an undercover cop. He’ll lean his whole upper body onto you, staring down at the pad on your lap to read what you’ve written, “Are you with Human Rights Watch?” You should go on to record the rest of the hearing in Welsh shorthand. Barmouth Welsh.

You’ll fly over Mount Ararat, fancy that, with a lawyer called ‘the arrow’. Your combined presence, the lawyer’s arguments will get Berzan out on bail that day. You can change things if you put your energy right into the room. In these times of outsourcing intelligence, of never meeting, of cost-saving, if we stop meeting face to face, stop putting our physical, personal energy in the place where it is needed, where it will be seen and counted, then we will fall down either side of the abyss that is separating us, and will meet in a bloody mess at the bottom, wondering how it happened. The best advocacy strategy meetings will be twelve people around a table in Berlin, or in Brussels, or Istanbul, all equal in struggle and all winning. Slowly some of the elitist ones will unpick themselves like the decoration on a shawl, unwind and leave others in the cold. You’ll work on. Your reports will change the law.

How much is the ticket, you ask. Is it a time machine that will eat tokens made of years, of intimacy, friendships, of all else that exists outside the job? Will it be fuelled by all the poems you wrote and never published? You might only take one day off in seven months in lockdown. What else was there to do but work? When you see how bad it is every moment feels like the threshold of a potential win, of standing with them. And every time you think you’ve made a difference, the state will impress you with their newly proposed law to ban all mention of homosexuality on the internet; their throttling of the airwaves. One small squeeze is all you need once you’ve mastered and collected the horse of freedom, put in the brutal bit of police violence backed up by millions of canisters of poison gas at protests.

You will continue on this journey until the road kinks back and kicks you off the path. You will cling on by your fingernails, while life floats far away. You will stay on the road until a new boss steers the car into the back of a truck marked ‘Investment Bank’ and steals your integrity. Then you will lie about your reasons, out of politeness, and you will leave. You might believe that you can still go on, and that the road will welcome you back, but the road knows you can leave no more tread. That you belong in a field, walking over a bog with a small dog, looking up at the range near where you were born, thinking about sixth century poets, because the remaining road travellers, those local dissenters and human rights defenders, they will go on along the road, two thousand miles away. The fight was always theirs, and they will win. It was never about you.

. . .

Line Stockford is a Welsh poet, editor and translator of Turkish literature. An adviser on Turkey for PEN, she designed and ran human rights projects around linguistic rights and media freedom. She studied the History of Turkish at SOAS, London.  Her book-length translations are published by Parthian, Palewell Press and Smokestack Books.

On Pilgrimage by William Parsons

Photo by William Parsons

The Paradox of Connectivity

Modern life is increasingly connected: central heating to phone, fridge to supermarket, watch to heartbeat. Without touching a button we can chat with friends in Australia, while eating strawberries at Christmas.

Yet beyond this glimmering convenience looms a shadow-side. For modern life in Britain grows ever more disconnected. Food comes from a shelf, water from a tap, and community from an app. As for travel, it occurs at unfathomable speeds, as we rush along tarmac strips, strapped into metal boxes watching screens, following other cars and road-signs, turning when the sat-nav says so. Where travel once generated constant discovery via deep interaction with places and people, modern journeys have become a dream of pure destination, an increasingly impatient thrust toward instant arrival.

Travel by car (or train/plane) performs a conjurer’s sleight-of-landscape, a folding of the map, to magically shift us over vast landscapes without ever experiencing them. This is journey-making with minimal connection. Temperature is thermostatically controlled, sound is piped entertainment, hills are reduced to a slight extra weight in the heel, and rivers to the bump of a bridge under tyres. Between start and finish, everywhere becomes similar grey roads.

All of which causes separation, isolation and disempowerment. With our hyper-reality and digital lifestyles, we have forgotten how to look in our neighbour’s eyes and see how well they are. The smog of mortgages and motorways, and the ever-increasing pace and price of work/life, leaves little time to simply connect with the land, with ourselves and each other. Traditional guides fail us, religions plagued by scandal, and science proclaiming that spirit doesn’t even exist. In this modern landscape, it isn’t easy to break through to the Light.

The Way Forward

But there is good news. An ancient spiritual technology has been rediscovered, offering direct engagement with Source. You don’t need to dress smartly, sit still, feel guilty or get bored. No gurus are required, no intercessors or priestly authorities. It is a natural form of whole-body movement, a deep dance through imaginary labyrinths, and a hearty adventure.

Folk call it pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage is the ritual short-form of your life’s journey from birth to death. The aim is that by walking a short way correctly, you can put right your longer journey.

The basic technique of pilgrimage is to set an intention for wholeness, choose a holy place destination, and connect the two by walking. It is as simple, and infinitely complex, as that.

Walking is the oldest, slowest and deepest way to move across the earth. Intention is your motivation, the inner hope for healing that pushes you to make pilgrimage. And a holy place is somewhere in the world you feel can offer the wholeness you need, whether spiritual, mental or physical.

Finding your intention is the first step of pilgrimage. What lack needs filling, what question needs answering? Bringing this into consciousness – as words that can be repeated like a mantra – is a vital cog in the technology of turning a vague walk into a pilgrimage. If you don’t know which port you are sailing to, no wind is favourable (Seneca).

Next comes your choice of destination, a holy place that will harmonise in some way with your intention. You might choose somewhere intensely personal, the burial place of an ancestor or the site of a childhood memory. Or you may prefer to seek somewhere more universally well-known. Certain locations in this land have held the dreams of hundreds of generations of seekers, and in such holy places, deep echoes linger from those whose journeys went before.

You may find this word ‘holy’ troublesome, as if signalling pious spiritual exclusivity. But ‘holy’ doesn’t necessarily mean religious at all (though it can if you want). At root, the word derives from the Old English Halig, meaning wholesome and complete. The Scots word hale (as in ‘hale and hearty’) is its nearest living descendent. The same root word gave us ‘healthy’, ‘holistic’ & ‘healing’.

‘Holy’ is a very distinct word from ‘sacred’, though the two are often used interchangeably. Sacred derives from the Latin sacre, meaning set-apart, distant, unobtainable. ‘Sacred’ is like a distant star, beautiful but untouchable, while ‘holy’ is like a jug of water for the thirsty, something vital to integrate into the depth of your being.

Ultimately, what makes a destination holy is you, your need and the journey you offer. Wholeness (holiness) doesn’t sit around throbbing. It is activated by relationship. The healing magic needs you to need it. And there is no better way to activate this holiness than to take the time and energy to slowly walk toward it. The unreasonable dedication of an intentional journey on foot is a powerfully sincere sacrifice of time, energy and focus – making pilgrimage an effective key to unlock holy places in the land, body, mind and heart.

Deep Moving Roots

Bipedalism – walking on two feet – is our species’ original advantage, the biological life-hack that cast us as the upright strollers of the monkey family. Once we sourced this tech’ of walking, for two million years our ancestors were nomadic, roaming the planet in reverent pursuit of the herds and seasons. Constant movement shaped our evolution, creating the bodies and minds we have inherited today. Our species is homo perigrinus, and who we are grew from life on the path, our oldest home.

Yet a mere twelve thousand years ago, humanity ceased her restless roaming to begin cultivating agriculture and raising static dwellings. Arguably this was a bad move, leading to general imbalance.

Pilgrimage as an activity distinct from normal life arose in response. By providing a ritual reconnection with our ancient wandering freedom, pilgrimage helped keep alive the ancestral strength, beauty and wisdom of humanity’s nomadic inheritance.

Once you start seeing it, pilgrimage appears as one of our species’ great common forces. Wherever a stone has been raised, a temple built, or a spring recognised, so people have come (usually on foot) from near and far, bringing their hopes, dreams, offerings, prayers and songs. If you squint your eyes a bit, even our modern everyday journeys to the shops, to school or work, appear as (debased and frustrated) forms of pilgrimage.

The pilgrimage instinct is as fundamental a law of the human soul as gravity to our atomic reality. It doesn’t matter what faith (or lack) you follow, nor whether you believe in gravity or not. The apple always falls, and pilgrims always come.

But the path has not always been smooth, and pilgrimage has waxed and waned in these lands, attacked by the sharp hopes of kings and industrialists. While I was growing up, the peregrine precedent was almost invisible. Wanderers rarely passed my window. The Romany seemed settled, druids drove vans and troubadours endured mortgages. To be a tramp seemed to require alcoholism.

Yet today we witness the return of honest wandering society, as pilgrimage revives into a living British tradition, like Arthur awakening from his hill of slumber. Our hour of need has come.

Annoying the King

Those who decide the rules in society enjoy imposing their will upon us, because there is advantage to be gained in so doing, and because they can. Pilgrimage offers a shortcut to evade these heavy games of control. By taking the path, you can restore your ancient state of animal liberty, becoming wholly in charge of your time and passage through life, if only for a short-ish while.

Two hundred years ago, to be a British pilgrim you would have been sent to the workhouse or charged with vagrancy. Three hundred years ago, you could be transported to a penal colony or hanged. But today, pilgrimage is free for the dream.

You may feel you have little choice in life, pushed along by the normal forces of work, family and friends. But pilgrimage provides an opportunity – and challenge – to reclaim your personal autonomy, to plant a staff in the river and stride upstream.

For many people, there is a guilt response to this idea. The wonderful inefficiency of pilgrimage makes its time-demands look like gluttony. How can you possibly take two weeks to walk somewhere you could drive in two hours?

Such are the harsh internal shackles of convenience that govern the modern mind. For the responding question must surely be: to whom does your time on earth ultimately belong? Dare you stake one small portion for yourself? Can you really afford not to?

This is difficult to answer from the sofa. No matter what I write, you won’t really know until you step out, staff in hand and home on your back. Not even the ultra-rich truly own their time. But between the roads, the pilgrim inherits the earth.

As medieval scholar J. J. Jusserand said, pilgrimage has always had the power to “annoy the King”. And in our modern age, under the ever-watching eyes of state, corporate and digital kings aplenty, the freedom of pilgrimage shines brighter than ever.

“Liberty calls aloud, ye who would hear her voice…” (from a confiscated broadsheet, 1793)

I hope to see you on the path. Bring a song. It is not getting dark.

Walk well!

. . .

(The above is an extract from William Parsons’ forthcoming book, The S.O.N.G. of Pilgrimage.)

. . .

William Parsons has worked in British Pilgrimage since 2004. He spent his twenties as a wandering minstrel, in his thirties he founded the British Pilgrimage Trust, and in his forties he returned to freelance pilgrimage with a focus on writing. His work has reached most UK newspapers, TV channels and radio stations. He even got pilgrimage into Vogue. William lives in Glastonbury where he guerrilla plants Holy Thorns.

http://www.willwalking.com

Walking In Circles by Paul Tritschler

Photo by Paul Tritschler

Midway through the event, a woman seated in the front row of the audience asked the panel of four authors, all of whom had made an appearance for the purpose of promoting their recently published travelogues, if they could explain in simple terms how their notion of travel differed from what most ordinary folk called holidays. Nothing is more difficult than to be simple, but the elitist charge implicit in her question, one that was somehow rendered more pointed by her affected pleasantness, laid another layer of complexity. The moment demanded deflection by way of a pithy response — l’espirit de l’escalier might have suggested a poignant quote from Ibn Battuta or something whimsical from Rabelais. Instead the panel, with a tad too much haste, dug themselves into a defensive trench, and in the process shovelled dirt on what they ill-advisedly and repeatedly referred to as common tourism. And they wouldn’t stop digging.

Conversations erupted throughout the room but eventually settled into silence, and no indication was given that the audience would assist her in pushing the panel off its platform, if indeed that was her intention. That being said, it most likely nudged it a little; peering through the newly created cracks in the edifice, the panel’s itinerant forays and desultory wanderings would have appeared to some people as lofty peregrinations wrapped in pompous superiority…or thoughts to that effect. Their somewhat clumsy efforts to enumerate the differences between what they get up to and what everyone else does would not have helped in that determination. On the other hand, some would have interpreted her question as self-aggrandising, one motivated by conceit, point-scoring and the desire for audience adulation. Either way, the nourishing conversations that were until that moment shared between the panel of authors and what felt like a roomful of friends, now a breathing mass of strangers, failed to revive.

Possessing an air of originality, mystery and spirited adventure, the mention of travel arouses more curiosity than that of the humble holiday, and there can be little doubt that by describing oneself as a travel writer rather than a holiday writer one gathers greater cachet. Yet it often seems that, at core, there is no difference between them. Indeed, the travel writers sharing the podium might easily have described their journeys as holidays. After all, three were promoting books about relatively short stays in what many would deem holiday destinations, including a fortnight in Paris, three weeks in a wine-growing region of France, and a month in Tuscany. Only one took a longer and more varied route, that resulting from an unplanned year of backpacking.

Putting it this way perhaps challenges their street cred, yet many philosophers, among them Seneca and Thoreau, were greatly inspired by the odd holiday, during which they created notable works of reflection on nature, on the human condition, and on life’s meaning or purpose. The same is true of literature. Agatha Christie developed the idea for a well-known detective mystery whilst on a leisure cruise down the Nile. Virginia Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse whilst on vacation on the Isle of Skye, and Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April was inspired by a month-long holiday to the Italian Riviera. The list goes on. In the end what matters most are the stories, and to this one might add a degree of self-discovery.

. . .

Old Cathy used to come into our house to wash her money. Though she scrubbed the stairs of every last one of them, and had done so for years, ours was the only flat in a long street of tall black-sooted tenements where she could come and go as she pleased. She even had a key. Some people would rinse out and refill her bucket, but she would have to remain at the doorstep, door closed. To be fair, Old Cathy wasn’t one for conversation, and in fact blanked most people, but that wasn’t the only reason people covered their doors. For much of her life she lived between the mental asylum, as it was then known, and the street, and when that information got around the neighbourhood by the usual whispering campaign people kept a watchful eye. During the time our family knew Old Cathy she had secured permanent residency in a Salvation Army hostel not far from where we lived: a small room with an iron-framed bed, a chair, a cabinet, and a cross on an otherwise bare white wall. Visitors were not allowed, but we visited anyway, my sister and me, and whilst some residents occasionally looked at us with suspicion, neither the warden nor anyone else ever refused entry.

My sister always firmly insisted that if anyone were to question us I should stay silent and let her do the talking. When neighbours or anyone else asked questions she generally cut in to finish my sentences in ways I could never anticipate. Three years my senior but in reality much older, I guess my sister would have been around eleven or twelve when we visited Old Cathy. She doted on us, and was always steady and sunny, but I doubt if many people saw that side. She just kept her head down as she scrubbed the stairs, her metal bucket echoing in the close as it clanked down each step, then reached back up to draw intricate floral patterns with white chalk on the margins of every step. This was a common custom in our neighbourhood, an area that outsiders called slums, but unlike Old Cathy most women just chalked a quick zig-zag or squiggle. Either way they only lasted a day at best.

A woman notorious for malicious gossip once stopped us to ask if our dad knew that our mother allowed a pauper lunatic to wander in and out of our house when he was at work (he worked almost all the time). We of course knew who she meant, but as instructed I buttoned up. I would have liked to have said that we loved Old Cathy, who was one of the kindest people on Earth, and that not only did she visit us, we visited her; but as my sister later reminded me she would most likely have called the police and had her thrown out of her residence and into the street. Adults were a different breed, and I dreaded the thought of mingling with them. Even at the early stages of adulthood most people showed signs of becoming distinctly unpleasant. I think Old Cathy felt the same way.

This was a time when mothers who took to their bed for days or weeks or maybe even months were generally considered to be indolent rather than depressed, a time when postpartum depression was for the most part unknown, and a time when having a stillbirth — regardless of the sadness, guilt and anxiety that were at heart a cry for help — was hushed up as a shameful failure. Mrs Bogus, a pathologically nosey upstairs neighbour of ours — listening at the letterbox, she fell into our hall one time when my dad opened the door on his way to work — stopped me and my sister on the stair to ask if my mother was still lying in her bed. She called her a lazy article, jolting her miserable mongrel on a choke chain before briskly walking on. No one ever explained to me the meaning of article, but I got the gist. Just ignore her, my sister said, and don’t repeat what she said to anyone. I didn’t have to: everyone seemed to know that my mum had sunk under the covers and let the house go to hell. It even got around the school.

For the best part my sister looked after things at home, organising clothes, tidying up, making meals, but after a while things began to slip there too, and the mess just piled up. We made a space on the sofa between heaps of clothes and coat hangers and ate cereal from the box. On one occasion we heard our mum mumble to herself that she wanted to cut her throat, and I was told never to repeat that either, not to anyone, not even to dad — especially dad! She didn’t mean it, my sister insisted, but I couldn’t quite dismiss the possibility. For all their promises to the contrary, adults were notoriously unpredictable. My friend’s sister killed herself over a stupid fiancé, the mother of a boy at my school was murdered by his dad — just one punch, they said, whilst she was doing the ironing — someone sunk an axe into someone’s front door, another put a petrol bomb through a letterbox, men filled with rage and hearts of hate fought to the death outside pubs, and psychopathic razor gangs roamed the streets and alleyways. No adult could be trusted entirely.

We came home from school one day to find all the mirrors in the house had been smashed — why mirrors? — and immediately I wondered if my mum had taken a shard of glass to her throat. I envisaged it. My sister made me wait in the hall until she checked out the bedroom. Mum was sobbing under the blankets, but otherwise okay. Old Cathy was there, calm and calming, picking up the pieces. She would have known worse, and most likely understood the situation better than anyone. For several weeks no stairs were washed as Old Cathy stepped in as our femme de ménage, arriving before we went to school, and leaving in the evening. Between those hours she did the shopping, made breakfast and prepared dinner, looked after my mum, washed clothes, tidied the house, and even found time to play board games with us — she was a master at draughts. In time, when my mother got back into harness, Old Cathy got back down on her kneeling mat to scrub and chalk the tenement stair, the distinctive sound of her metal bucket once more echoing in the close as it clanked on each step. Thereafter she would rinse out her bucket, brushes and money in our small scullery whilst the kettle boiled before settling down to sit with my mum, gazing into the embers in silence.

. . .

For some people, travel writers are escape artists sharing their secrets on how to break loose from sameness. Others live to wander, to find stillness in motion, and perhaps by chance to find missing parts of the story that made them who they are. It was whilst perched on a doorstep under a hot sun in Tamil Nadu that Old Cathy, for the first time since childhood, wandered into my thoughts. I was watching a woman take great care to create a kolam at the entrance to her home, a decorative chalk circle with floral designs that is said to bring good luck and prosperity to the occupants. The drawings are walked on, scuffed and washed out every day, and whilst illustrations and meanings vary, each in their own way presage the transience of our existence and the impermanence of all things. The process was hypnotic. With eyes squeezed shut I remembered Old Cathy with head bowed drawing similar floral patterns with her piece of chalk on the steps to our door, and for a moment that door opened. The long journey to India had led me back to the start, and perhaps, after all, that was the point.

. . .

In addition to teaching psychology in universities, adult education and colleges across the UK, Paul Tritschler has managed organisations within the fields of brain injury, sensory impairment, mental health and community activism. He has written for a variety of magazines, including Aeon, Psychology Review, Bella Caledonia, Counterpunch and Open Democracy.

excerpt from “Coolheaded “by Sara Wainscott

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“Semaphore Trousers” by Jay Besemer

Continue reading ““Semaphore Trousers” by Jay Besemer” →

Womannotated – And Thou Shalt Judge The Expiring Soccer Mom

January 30th, 2021

And Thou Shalt Judge The Expiring Soccer Mom

after Servant, Season Two, Episode Three, Pizza

Surveil from silk sheets your mortal estate.
On suburban streets, death, afterlife vie
behind grandiose gates. Above play dates,
teammates, cheese pizza parties, skeletonize 
with the greatest of ease.  Caretakers doze
in proximate chairs.  Delicate wraith
tiptoes upstairs in prim servant’s clothes 
with bowls of puréed sustenance.  Your faith 
remakes a cadaverous countenance,
nasal cannula dispensable soon. 
Expiring soccer mom circumstances 
avoidable if you only commune 
with a macilent maiden magistrate.
Worthiness for rebirth, she calculates.

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Womannotated – Wide Eyed

January 23rd, 2021

Wide Eyed 

I get disheartened when an artist tells 
me they’re bored.  It’s especially brutal 
if I’ve adored you and the art propels 
my own rhetoric, research,
collections of folders some might besmirch. I think 
Stanley Kubrick would have approved though I’ve 
no warehouse of boxes when I’m extinct 
to prove my passion for working still thrives 
between poems and books.  We live 
amidst fascinations.  If we stay spry,
wide eyed enough, work is transformative. 
Suture eyes shut someday after I die
with the stories I’ve written, some I hoard. 
I’ll die exhausted.  I never lived bored. 

Continue reading “Womannotated – Wide Eyed” →

Womannotated – Madonna & Manchild

January 9th, 2021

Madonna & Manchild 

Bury bereavement in cellar below 
with buttercup onesie, Château Pétrus  
Merlot  — a godless sacrament you know
is mortal sin.  Silicon reproduced
to simulate skin so your spouse can 
begin, maternal virgin, again. Sleep 
walk through mutual grief she countermands,
rationing love, plastic in pale hands. Keep
cries deep in your throat until she’s asleep.
A baby monitor projects its first 
weep — graveled, full grown. The hell two have reaped,
one remembers alone. Insatiable thirst
nursed by propped-up bottles inside brownstone,
She suckles a doll while you drink alone. 

Continue reading “Womannotated – Madonna & Manchild” →

Womannotated – You’re At The Grownup Table Now

December 27th, 2020

You’re At The Grownup Table Now 

after Servant 

In vermillion lipstick, a Dorothy 
blue dress, borrowed ruby, ring finger, beaus
to impress, submit to a coy lady’s 
request for your red shoes before she goes
another night to Oz, woos a tasteless
Lothario.  Leave you with a boy, shrewd 
serpent in a kitchen sink.  First, you finesse,
send for something red to drink. Latter, you  
will batter until still quivering, peel.
Boy who prepares, serves eel on a plate rues 
the bell which summoned him, the man of steel 
who waits to throw him out; you must stroke his rage.
At the grownup table, you will come of age. 

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Womannotated – Oh The Places You Will Work Bitch And Not Be Free

Oh The Places You’ll Work Bitch

And Not Be Free

for Britney

For Disney, Pepsi, Bela Karolyi

(who USA gymnastics cut ties with

in pedophile controversy at the

remote training space, national forest

woods), Star Search, Broadway, Rolling Stone

(at seventeen in push-up bra, baby

blue velveteen rabbit inside her own

small town bedroom.), the 24, maybe

more, varietals of perfume; Sbarro,

Nabisco, HBO (Emmy wins for

concert docu shows), and their fathers, though,

even if estranged, legalities restore

a golden gosling to its violent cage

without telephone, medicated rage.

Continue reading “Womannotated – Oh The Places You Will Work Bitch And Not Be Free” →

Womannotated – Hirsute

December 6th, 2020

Hirsute 

In middle school, bullied for body hair. 
Matched hair, eyes, contrasted fair skin, a shroud
I wear everywhere. Was so scared
to shave above the knee. Was told no one 
should look there anyway.  Was whispered of 
so many days in locker rooms by some 
with blonde peach fuzz which was what love
looked like, at this time, to me, Florida 
yellow/tan uniformity.  Was called 
a fiend, witch from another place, not of
the beach I breach, a plaited pouting pall 
their boyfriends chased, animal they want to taste,
shadow to hide inside this golden place.

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Womannotated – The Dirty Truth About Butterflies

November 29th, 2020

The Dirty Truth About Butterflies

It’s easy for a religiously bred

(misled) girl to make an Eden of

a garden, angels of winged soon dead,

repopulating in three weeks. But love’s

amino acids butterflies won’t find

in agapanthus nectar, waterfalls —

Continue reading “Womannotated – The Dirty Truth About Butterflies” →

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