It is remarkably difficult to manage a discreet business in modern Britain. Gone are the days of bootlegged whisky, of smothered lanterns and boat keels grinding across beach pebbles. When clandestine activity is not made impossible by CCTV, urban creep, and light pollution it is impinged upon by idiots walking their dogs or morons waving mobile phones. Those of us who wish to avoid attention have had to diversify. Continue reading “Urban Creep | Short Story”
Imagine a person on any news website, any glossy magazine, any television advertisement. Done? I’ll bet it’s a face you’ve pictured. Am I right? Airbrushed, tinted, perfectly lit? The problem with faces is that they lie. You only need to watch the lips move to know that.
Hands, on the other hand… Continue reading “Twenty-Seven Bones | Short Story”
Happy Friday folks!
A couple of haiku to keep me honest… Continue reading “Call and Cavern | Haiku”
zzzZZZIP.
It is a molar-rattler of a wind that bursts through the tent canvas. It is a wind that makes a person’s eyes run and their cheeks burn, a wind that pulls and shrieks and buffets and tugs and moans. Nevertheless, even the relentless howling commands only the tiniest flicker of attention from my senses. What I hear cannot compete with what I see. Continue reading “Capturing the Mountain | Short Story”
Not my usual kind of post this morning but go with it…
I’m approaching the end of my first year as a doctoral student. Aside from the energy-sapping workload of juggling a family, research, a career, and a blog [insert applause here please], there is nothing that suggests to me that taking on a Professional Doctorate was a mistake or that my topic – Scottish Gypsy Traveller interaction with the Criminal Justice Service – was the wrong one to choose. Scottish Gypsy Travellers heritage and culture form an important part of modern Scotland. This culture celebrates close family values, an oral storytelling tradition, and mobility, whether corporeal or reflected as a symbolic identification with mobility and change. Nevertheless, discomfort with mobility on behalf of the sedentary majority in Scotland is still very much apparent. A lack of access to health services, poor political representation, biased and caricatured portrayal in the media, a non-assimilationist education system, and local authorities unwilling to tailor basic services to a semi-nomadic ethnicity all contribute to huge inequality between Scottish Gypsy Travellers and the rest of Scotland’s population. Continue reading “Serving a Semi-nomadic Community | Doctorate”
Happy haikuing!
Talk of the town, it was. The old Swanson place had finally sold. Three years it had been on the market, its balconies covered in gull mess and the gardens creeping over the gravel chips in the driveway. Dusty bay windows looked out over the estuary, bulging and blank, as though unable to bear the sight of the cheaper dwellings at the bottom of the steep hill. Then one day the estate agent’s sign was gone, rotten stake heaved out of the ground. Continue reading “The Old Swanson Place | Short Story”
