“Depression” is a filthy word. It smacks of weakness, lack of determination and/or moral fibre. It conjures up images of those with no spine; pasty coloured ninnies, “freeloaders, the lot!” “No balls!” “Tossers!” “They’re the sort that are just as likely to let the side down.” As if it were a lifestyle sort of thing, […]

Read more "Black Dogs"

Christopher was not quite three when Tom and Juani left him and Patrick with us in Paris, in the spring of 1981, for a few weeks whilst they went down to Nigeria. Tom worked in the oil business – for Texaco I think – and business had him down in Africa with some regularity. I […]

Read more "Mi primo: Christopher Dunleavy"

I was still quite shy of four when my Father’s job took us from Colombia to Holland in the spring of 1976. Up to then I’d been a child of the tropics and perhaps my earliest memory of the Netherlands is one of walking the streets of Rotterdam with my Mother and Father, feeling the […]

Read more "Sketch: Hertog Govertkade"

It wasn’t the sudden realization of the many ways that I had managed scupper so many of the good things in my life that finally sent me to seek a guiding hand last autumn. Many of those around me – those perhaps inclined to be generous – might find it fair to describe the sum […]

Read more "Sketch: Yakety Sax and all those black dogs."

We were twelve or so. The precise assignment set itself no longer matters but when our various essays were returned to us, the one that Jennifer Hamilton chose to praise was Helena’s description of the desperate last gasps of a drowning man. Where she had succeeded, over five hundred words of cold, clear descriptive writing, […]

Read more "Sketch: We were twelve or so"

A misleading intro to be honest; the gym has a pool and I swim at the gym but I rarely venture upstairs to spend time in the hall of mirrors. Once in a while I’ll drop in on a Saturday, after a good cycle, to exercise the rowing machine for half an hour before rounding […]

Read more "Urban sketches: at the gym 1.1"

I had been dragging flu-light for a couple of weeks; not man-flu but flu-flu. My request to not have to go into the office the two days I should have was granted and I had spent the whole week working from home. I’d been feeling all the usual things you expect to feel when your […]

Read more "Domestic sketch: Cat shit"

Albert Pierrepoint hanged James Inglis on the 8th of May 1951. Inglis was 29 and, by his own admission, guilty of murder. Having not appealed his sentence when it was handed to him, it was carried out after the passage of three Sundays. It stands on record as the fastest hanging in British history, taking […]

Read more "Sketch: In memoriam"

I walked past Can Pep yesterday evening on my way to the pool and I remembered that I’d been meaning to write something about this place for a while. In fact I was there yesterday afternoon for a quick coffee, having dashed down the six flights of stairs at around five for a walk around […]

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The evening before Maman died my Mother and I saw what seemed like a porcupine running across the path we were walking on. I was eleven so my memory might well be distorting my notion of distances and dimensions but we saw it cross from right to left, not fifty meters from where we stood, […]

Read more "Sketch: Our Months of Living Dangerously"