the bloom of sodium lamps
Sodium lamps outside bloomed orange in the condensation-covered windows.…
Newcastle revisited
Returning to Newcastle 25 years after living here has been a disorientating experience. Walking down familiar streets, there are unfamiliar absences and presences, and, which is even odder, buildings that I can see are new, but I can't for the life of me remember what was there before.…
adventures in social media
Today I travelled to Newcastle to start on my MA in Creative Writing. I don't really remember what it felt like to come here 29 years ago, to start my PhD.…
eliminating LGBTphobia
Before assessing the benefits of eliminating homophobia, biphobia and transphobia, it’s important to understand that you can’t eliminate those without eliminating their causes. So what are the causes of LGBTphobia?…
the centres cannot hold
I was interested to read a news story the other day warning that town centres could become ghost towns because experts have been warning that this was going to happen since the mid 1980s.…
spaced out on synths
Any of my friends who have spent much time in either my dwelling or my car, have probably noticed that a lot of the music I like is low on singing and drums, and high in synthesizers, particularly those fuzzy old analogue synths.…
fantasy world
in my fantasy world, I would have enough time to read all the books I want to…
open source? Microsoft?!
Microsoft announced recently that it has developed *its own* distribution of Linux. Having followed the IT industry since around the time MS-DOS came out, this is hard to digest and gives rise to some complicated feelings.…
eulogy for LiveJournal
For 15 years near the start of this century, I had a kind of blog called a LiveJournal. It was like public blogs crossed with Facebook...…
memoir
I find the sound of a heavily-laden freight train comforting: as an infant, waking in the night, I would often hear the diesel locos labouring along the line across the fields, hauling thirty heaped wagons of coal from colliery to power station…
mirrors should reflect
Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir davantage.…
a lake
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature…