Oh hello. So you've found my online writing briefcase eh? That means I either know you or I've simply bumped into you and told you how to access it. Whichever. Why not stay awhile and have a browse, you might find something you like, you might not (sigh). Oh and please leave it as you found it so someone else might find it.

Thank you.

Nick

All contents: © 2008

Latest:

With James and the Dragline Silk
© 2008

I see him now, only now. On that very day we went
To Nunhead Cemetery. At the doorway, grave
next door neighbour: James. Clad, not seldom in vest.
Seldom, or too few. Like the pristine plots? Visible now,
from the wet Yorkstone at the gates. "Un-reachable by the Underground -
bought for one pound by Southwark Council in nineteen hundred and seventy five.

A working cemetery? A park to play in? A nature reserve?
Watch the children decay while your dead play. While finally recognising -
A Mature Elm…" Untouched by my attempt at wit. Untouched,
the terracotta tomb, Magnificent in the midday sun!
At the fork, unintended
we take a path,
seldom clad, yet
half-hidden
in the venous
clot of thicket. Not before:
"They shouldn't allow planes to fly,
over the airspace of cemeteries. Disrespectful."
"Have you noticed - there are lots of James's - here?" "

Why fill the dead air Between us with such clatter, anyway?
I am, at once, regretful - I want to apologise. Or I want to smile - to say
He is 73, James, if a day and then, through a gap the Dome of St. Pauls,
as small as a bud the size of a fist. If a day - and what a day!
Yet deeper, sink I and he, into the cracked foreboding woods.
Deeper yet, toward the tumbled graves.
And tombs, upright.

A fork of light falls
A tongue of ivy forms.
A hooded figure slumps,

picking cob-webs from the
sundered statuary. I turn, And James, breathless, still now.
Some paces behind, contrapposto.
Or a study of concessions, accrued NO. That is cruel.
And he is pointing; banana in his left hand, Ready. To sermonise
on a plant, neither of us know. "I might not know what it's called, Nick
But i know how i'd look after it." (It needs for little care, shade,
the odd dapple of sunlight…) "Not unlike the cemetery
Yes! But disgraceful how it...
(i bite my tongue) Can't you enjoy it for how it is?
No. Disgraceful. I wouldn't want to be buried here.
Are you going to eat that banana, here?
No. Hate the bloody things!
Yes! You liked them a minute ago -
No I don't, didn't.
Yes you do ... can I have it then?
No."
Turning, awkwardly
into the bight of a young spiders
first, hopeful thread, that has caught - wait -
or is it, my little friend, is that, and this, but St. Theresa's washing line?
- and I leave this place for a moment…

Through the scullery to the courtyard;
as she hunches over the hours,
spent, picking hunched knots and
Dangling threads to the wind -
hoping one might make it. One of the children.

And maybe one does, and the whole earth shakes
and Time is still. No. Time to get to work.
Scuttling, to and fro, fastening, binding, the silken-staves,
To great girders of straws NO. That's not good, enough.

James has left the plant and is stroking the bud of a spider's
Abdomen; much to my horror.
"Why are you so scared of it?"

And I talked of it, but not of that, it.
The it.
The sense that I am never there, or present
Until here. Until I am
Removed. As you read this.
As he won't. As we were there, together. Keeping others' company, that day,
any other day. We meet
throwing threads between the houses. The rote, the rent and the washing line:

The Dragline Silk.

Lovingly tended or left undone - the
regrettable or just plain forgettable.
Wrought of semi-precious ruminate -

The frame; the late changes; the later staves that just -
might catch James and I; elements just
among the tumbled graves and the midday sun.

"Oh, Like The Living Dead NO.
Don't be -Yes. Perhaps.
Well, more, like a working cemetery.
Oh. No, I envy you. I fear only death, now. That's all."
And so we agree on one thing this day.
As we exit in silence, past the tomb of the Scottish martyrs.

I hear him now. And know him. And yet I saw him only once after that.
And why, that day, and the conversation
Remembered, decorated
with a series of childish, if somewhat comic, estoppels.
Which rile me now as I did him then, in that rare, hot midday sun.
I saw him only once after that. Dear James.
At the doorway, clad, in his vest.
It was difficult. Although, predictably so.
Unlike the print only he liked on my wall back then
and the question of The train and if it really is,
hurtling forward -
Or back on itself.
The only visual clue being:
the billowy smoke from its furnace - its Dragline Silk

painted over now.

Plays:
The Island
Dark and sometimes, richly comic 'State of the Global Nation' er, extravaganza! Welcome to the anachronistic dystopia that is The Ilsand. You might just recognise it. Highlights:

"Now, we are accompanied by the King’s son and heir, Prince Jefferson Final Offer the Second…"

"Oh don’t worry about him, the headless always seem to lack a certain nuance. And besides, won’t the Cahow and the sea take us all in the end?"

"Good question again, Minister for Questions!"

"One tries all the time does one not Minister for Exclamations?"

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The Moleskine Of An Agnostic
Another dark and some might even say richly comic tale set in the noughties. Robert Alsace, a self-employed DM copywriter, takes a sabbatical; his idea is to write everything that enters his head, banal or otherwise, so to analyse it at a later date in his life. Sadly, events gather pace around him and he is quite rudely awakened from his reverie. Tsssk. But what is it that links the Lilo, the Diplomat, the Old Theatre and the Ants in the Apartment? Highlights:

"Up until last summer I had come to feel that the pendulum had swung a little too far one way. That; the freelance market; a difficult and protracted root canal procedure and a sudden blackout on a train bound for Glasgow, had left me, my friend, in a somewhat feverish state of mind."

"However, surely the self will, on rumbling itself, like the naked bather, only then reach for the nearest towel thus covering and moderating behaviour to such an extent as to render any further scientific observations as much use as a spoiled ballot paper?

No, the more and more I thought of it the more convinced I became, that if I were to do this properly I had to somehow trick the self into believing that the self, itself, had itself gone away on a sabbatical too."

"And she goes. (Now!)

To Sicily, anyway.

And so here we are again, My reflection and I (And the minutes and months and the moths)

Who is the lonelier? (Now)

At least my reflection has the mirror, to hold it – and however fleeting."

"Thonk!"

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Short story:
The Beauty & Bile of Jolyon Tuflaw
The last Private View of an ailing Art Critic. Think Brian Sewell meets Robert Hughes. What is it about Art galleries and memory? What happens when the doors close on the first night of a blockbuster at the Royal Academy? A dark and richly comic tale set in the noughties. Snippets:

"The first, delicate pastry closed up as quick as a fly-trap between the ends of thumb and forefinger spilling, and tiny, precious portions of crab and mandarin, tendril with dill. "

"Always the first discernable voices – for those who have exhibited with them before – are the dancers; their transition like spring to winter; nearly a century of gay uninhibited dance in front of millions: just a tangle of limbs, rust, and chat - full of black bile."

"Imagine the violent aplomb at which a chef slices a red cabbage in two and the two halves gently coming to rest. And that, is where we find him. "

"He's beginning to enjoy this as suddenly he feels like the only passenger on a train within a train, again. Slicing through England's sleeping body. Unstoppable. Passing stations like judgements. Saying 'Sorry!' like making critical diagnoses.

But, he can hear singing now. Something's swaying. Is that me or the train? And then a collection of bright twinkling lights up ahead? Are they signals? Is it Branson's gay charisma? Is that the buffet car?"

"- A good critic is one who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces."

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