2019-11-03 23:07
I saw your eyes twitching. I hoped you'd wake up.Such a voice. Each vowel a journey, a voice like the sweet lower notes of a cello, heard in a warm bath, whiskey in hand. A voice whic… Read More
Blog Directory > Arts & Entertainment Blogs > Borrowed Philosophy arts-and-entertainment Blog >
2017-02-22 17:47
I am in Madrid with my eldest daughter, Daisy, who is fifteen and a half. It is early August, around six weeks after the disastrous Brexit vote, and it's very hot. The heat assaults us eve… Read More
2017-01-17 18:27
Her father leaned over her and kissed her forehead, his breath sweetened already by tobacco and instant coffee. She pretended to be asleep but she had heard him on the stairs seconds earlier… Read More
2017-01-17 18:19
My old economics professor used to tell a story, I don't know whether it's a true story but I suspect that it isn't. He told me the story in a tutorial but I also heard him telling it… Read More
2016-03-19 18:53
The plan, I imagine, was for a night in town, but we never made it that far. We stopped into the Thresher at the bottom of the hill and Mass bought a packet of More (not the Menthol on… Read More
2016-03-19 18:53
When I was a kid, he tells her, fourteen, younger probably I suddenly became conscious of what my face looked like. What? she says. He laughs at himself, What I mean is, look obviously I'd s… Read More
2016-03-19 18:53
He came out of the supermarket having forgotten what he went in for, holding only an apple. At the bus stop outside a woman was attempting to wrestle a small girl into a push chair. The ch… Read More
2016-03-19 18:53
A Ghost StoryShe found them in a charity shop, run for the local hospice. An old woman arranging nick-nacks in the window and an unhappy looking girl in her late teens at the till. It wasn… Read More
2016-03-09 12:41
Here is Richard Finch: a bony Englishman, forty-five years old, in earth-tone slacks made out of some kind of stretchy fabric and a polo shirt from Marks and Spencer, hunched over a pushchai… Read More
2015-02-18 00:49
Younis loved his country, all of it that he had seen anyway, and he had seen more than everybody he knew. He was a commercial traveller, buying fabric mostly, and some leather goods. Busin… Read More
2014-12-29 20:01
Along the Embankment in a white Transit knees knocking like marbles sun on the water flashing low H with the Star shielding his eyes can't see my mirror put it down man before you get us all… Read More
2014-10-06 22:16
IThere was a time, which seems distant but really was not so very long ago, when very few people lived in cities. Back then people lived in small villages or in solitary houses a long way f… Read More
2013-07-16 21:14
Everyone was expected to participate. Those who were physically incapacitated were encouraged to attend; to hand out water bottles or finishers t-shirts to the runners at the end. The t-sh… Read More
2013-03-18 23:48
She got to the top before him, her neck shiny from the effort, dancing up the incline on rubber pedals. A red oxide gate in the high hedgerow let them look down over the valley. They slid… Read More
2013-01-19 01:53
It was his ex-wife's dog, a German Shepherd with a white beard and sad, gunky eyes. She had run off with a sales rep who turned up once a month at the office where she worked. Who would le… Read More
2012-12-22 06:48
No poetry after he fails to find a way to saythe essence of you, finally, the thingness the actual thing that might actually be somehowreduced call it an essence, a concentrate, concentrate!… Read More
2012-12-22 06:47
I hold onto the last thing that you said,each word a lifebuoy to a drowning manadrift without your voice, unanchored.If your breath cannot save me, nothing can.I'm no less lost ashore though… Read More
2012-12-21 00:20
Bill had been a fine dancer, not a great one. He had married young and had a ten year-old boy who told his schoolfriends that his dad worked in an office. Bill and the kid's mother had split… Read More
2012-11-25 22:49
Ben came down from the hills brown and peeling, his last few drachmas spent and his spirit exhausted by a month of too many stars and resin wine and the odour of sheep dung never distant. H… Read More
2012-11-04 23:39
The padlock was heavy, a lump of polished stainless steel the size and shape of a cigarette packet. His uncle, who ran the hardware store near the cathedral, had engraved it for him. ANNA… Read More
2012-10-20 23:44
It felt good to be looked at the way she looked at him human and brown-eyed in this case dark and shining like polished stone but warm somehow amused and alive and completely present. Bette… Read More
2012-10-12 00:39
He woke up to a new face. He was wearing a hospital gown which was neither green nor blue but some kind of non-committal shade thereamongst with a pattern on it. The bleached-out logo of t… Read More
2012-10-11 23:46
They arrived home within a month of each other. Toby was a year older. He had recently divorced and his wife had kept the house. He had exhausted the patience of his friends, in whose kit… Read More
2012-10-11 23:46
Natalia watches her father on the evening news. A still portrait with a caption at first, his learned face and bright white beard spread across the screen, then him suddenly live, respondin… Read More
2012-10-11 23:45
The east side of a tower block blazing orange on a late spring evening, with the building's shadow stretching beyond the horizon and traffic noise from the overpass heard like the sea throug… Read More
2012-10-11 23:45
Everyone agreed that the kid was an extraordinary talent. His parents were not the sort of people who would normally choose to nudge a child into the hothouse of celebrity. His elder siste… Read More
2012-09-09 23:50
He hadn't turned up for work. There had been no calls, no apologies. It was completely out of character, that's what his fellow players said, though none knew him very well. They couldn't… Read More
2012-05-17 21:12
There is a green plain between the mountains, and a railway line. The train pushes through the clamouring paddles of cactus and great high grasses, following the river into the city. St… Read More
2012-04-09 21:30
There is a music in the way she says his name, but now that she's not speaking to him anymore he thinks that seeing her will be halfway or someway at least towards the experience of hearing… Read More
2012-02-23 23:17
His father told him he was staying with a friend, threw a holdall over his shoulder and walked away. From the doorstep the boy could hear his mother crying, an unfamiliar sound, somewhere u… Read More
2011-11-17 18:37
Ten, she is, lowering herself gingerly onto the riverbank grass, amidst goose shit and the patter of punters on the Cam. “Milton, Newton and Winnie-the-Pooh”, their names jangle… Read More
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