Shape Shifting

Stories from (outside) the Studio. I work in a small studio on a pedestrian street and, sometimes, stories come to me uninvited when passers-by stop oblivious just outside my open door and spill their life stories into their phones… For once, this time, I wrote down what I heard because…

Inspiration on a train — Hi! How was your summer? I escaped the heat with an Interrail ticket and spent a blissful month listening to other people’s stories as I trained it through some of Europe and the UK. There is nothing like eavesdropping for inspiration and the art of listening is done best on…

A Muse for our time? Along with most of France, yesterday, I got on a subsidised train and went in search of Culture. The “Journees du Patrimoine” take place over a weekend in September every year. …

A stream of consciousness — and a premonition in 2016. — 7.30pm — Saturday night — on a TGV — thinking of Small Spaces: Slate and stone on spindly legs with crawl drains, ladders and tower-views. …

Confession of a failed climate activist. O — I failed! I failed to lead a fight back by example. This crisis of climate that we simmer in will boil us all yet! I thought that by changing my lifestyle (which was already low key), I could persuade anyone noticing to…

It’s on a “need to know” basis. — My man is lying, etherised, on a table. He has eaten a hopeful peach but has yet to see a return for his risk, or a reason for the loss of feeling in both legs, suddenly. Meanwhile, skilled men and women lower their eyes to the floor — at a…

Temptation “in extremis”, blasted by belief in the Now. Like a rat in a cage, she prowls the foetid air of the shuttered room, willing synapses to wake, to be, to do something to break these hundred days of humid haranguing — taunting torment of arrow heat that shafts through…