remember that day when we saw the kite caught in the big tree the little ginger cat from your neighbour’s garden had followed us all the way to the shop the red kite in the big tree and you with grass stains on the knees of your jeans i think every boy in the park [...]
All about my mother In the middle of every Shabbat service, just before the shema, we read: Blessed are you God who forms light yet creates darkness, who makes peace yet creates all. ‘The mother is God in the eyes of a child’? Perhaps it’s something like that. She is my creator, after all, and [...]
All about my father When I think of how to begin describing my father, I think of the things he and I have in common: we are both Londoners (my mum is not) and we share a deep affinity, a love for the place that sometimes people can find a little hard to understand. I [...]
One from my notebook: Bryn. BRYN is a boy who could be any age between about 17 and 28. He is pale with pretty jade-green eyes and a dreadhawk which is dun at the roots and then dyed to a subtle, denim blue tending toward slate; I want to say it matches his eyes, but [...]
The day of the red feathers We were walking down to the shops one early evening at the start of May. We were on the street two down from ours, a quiet, broad street where there’s a school and some flats and a closed-down shop and a beautiful old building that used to be a [...]
One rainy night in Edinburgh: I met K tonight, for what she calls in her inviting text ‘post-work brunch (?) like proper grown-ups’. After the ‘brunch’ (at Biblos in a comfy corner sofa), we moved on to Sandy Bell’s, where I’d never been before but, being situated in the middle of student-pubs-ville, have been drunk [...]
We go to Francis’ and Mattia’s farewell drink, planning to drop in on our way to A’s, so we’re unfashionably on time and only the two celebrants are there when we arrive – they’re sitting outside on this slightly chilly, bright evening and looking even younger without their aprons or their shirts and ties, their [...]
A small, spread out ‘congregation’ hardly congregates, more politely distributing itself evenly among the sparse, simple wooden chairs in Old Saint Paul’s tonight, high-ceilinged, candlelit and draughty. More people are there alone, and there’s perhaps a slightly younger average age than I’d expected – it’s not just little old ladies, in other words, though there [...]
