The cloud lifted and everyone was dancing
Dec 2021
She drove for hours, going down. She tried to resist the idea that she was sinking into herself, her abdomen puncturing her pelvis which might melt into the seat.
November 2020
From man who got in massive fight outside the pub downstairs last night: he was shouting and crying talking to the doorman and he said ‘he’s my best mate, I can’t believe he’s done that to me - but he’s a Man City fan, I’m a Liverpool man, so i can’t believe this hasn’t happened before’
April 2022
We used to talk, you and I, about a day where we’d never leave bed. We planned what we would do for food, taking it in turns to go to our shared kitchen, avoiding our housemates, throwing on jumpers and making rounds of toast. We wanted to stay in bed all day, you and me, have sex and watch films then have sex again. I nestled closer into you as we talked, laughing as we walked in cold air. Our secret conversation about our secret world, hoping that nobody could hear us. What a dream that was, you and me, so simple, just there, never really done, the easiest thing in the world and we never really did it, just wanted to, just loved the idea of it. Just loved each other, despite it all, us two, we loved each other and shared an easy dream. The day that we would never leave bed, your name on the tip of my tongue.
Jan 2022
Sitting at gate 33a at southmead hospital on 8th March. It’s snowing outside, im sitting in a wide, long, bright, quiet corridor looking out of the windows opposite me, which stretch from floor to ceiling. Snow is falling white and heavy outside, it blurs past the window in its continuing downwards path. I can hear the sounds of the hospital around me, the ominous rush of a trolley being pushed down a faraway corridor, the industrial echos of faraway doors slamming shut.
Every now and then the slap slap of rubber soled shoes as a doctor walks past. A man has come up through the rolling of the lift, his wife pushing him in a wheelchair. They wonder where to go, settle in the burns inpatients section. I find it soothing, being in the big airy hospital. The ladies voice in the lift punctuates the moments, lift going up and doors opening. People speak softly in the hospital, the walls seem to absorb the sound.
I catch snippets of doctors’ conversations, I like listening in to medical stuff. ‘She’s had more medication, she says it’s gonna bung her up.’ ‘Tony Wallis is medically fit, but the care home don’t want him back til he’s had his baselines done. One of the nurses is talking to them now’. There’s so many lives going on in the world. ‘One leg’s worse than the other’. I like knowing I’m just one and I’ve got a lot left of it.
I’m drinking a warm coffee, I’ve got thick socks on and boots. The snow is still falling outside, it’s sort of funny to have a burn when it’s one degree outside, like some sort of derma-therma split. It doesn’t really hurt anymore, it’s healing fast. In a way, it’s good to have tangible proof my body is working. I can get so lost sometimes, I can feel so rejected by this body, I can treat it like a foreign object that clings heavy to my soul, that I lose all concept of the fact of it. It works well, I’m not sick, I’m not unhealthy, my body works well. Someone is coming down the hall on a bed, he looked pretty ill, he was flanked by 4 doctors, lying small and rigid on the big white bed.
The snow keeps falling, it’s a little less heavy now. There’s nice art in this hospital, I think it’s actually good. In Manchester, I have to go to The Christie every now and again to get blood taken and looked at. The art on the walls there is dark and unsettling, it’s reaching towards something, like a pit or some deep-down trench. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing in itself, but I prefer a hospital that wills you towards leaving, through the big doors, not the open window on a long journey north. The art here tells you about organ donors, it’s hung like it’s in a gallery, on picture rails and in nice frames. When I was on morphine the day before yesterday, wandering through the sleepy hospital on my way out from a&e, the art was what I noticed, Zoe and Fergal kept leading me away as I stared at the pictures on the walls. It’s nice, when you’ve been scared, to then be focusing on art rather than pain, thinking how nice the little landscapes look behind the big wooden piano. I thought they looked nice today as well, my mind opiate-free.
The snow is heavier again, swirling around itself. Some of it falls quickly, other parts slower. Every time I look up it’s going at a different speed. Now it’s fast, and the bits look bigger. The windows of other wards look out at it as well, we’re all very lucky to have this big airy place to come back to.
March 2023
On grey wet mornings that you can feel on your cheeks, that’s when I love Bristol the best. By the concrete and water, the wide open harbour with the hills behind it, the misty green of just over there country side, that’s when Bristol feels like home. Maybe it’s the rain-dancing Mancunian that I am, imprinted with the penine weather map, I feel a deep calm when the rain is a fine spray and my forehead is suddenly wet
July 2022
Kate loves the Christmas lights on houes, she calls them amazing
Dec 2021
There was a chill in the air
That day
And maybe summer was ending
And maybe that was autumn at her back
Calling to her from the end of things
She sat on the bench in the park she once knew and waited for someone to tell her what to do
It didn’t come, she stood up and left
Held her suitcase on the bus and watched the streets roll past, the grey sky and the turning leaves
Got to Piccadilly and boarded a train, said ‘goodbye, you won’t see me again’
Watched the city shrink behind her like a piece of rotting fruit
Thought about what she was leaving and what she had left
Closed her eyes and listened to her head
The northern accent fading at each stop
Closed her eyes and flitted through
murder and exes and moving alone at night
Felt very far away from home
In between her two houses
On a railway track that spelled out her name
August 2021
‘All I know is I have never loved harder since my breakup, nor dreamed bigger. This is no reflection on my relationship, but rather the freedom engendered by busting open your horizons. Here’s to 2022, a year of big breakups. Losing love has never felt so liberating.’
- Moya Lothian-McLean for the Guardian
Jan 2023
Or maybe I don’t love Bristol like that
Sometimes I feel so swallowed up in it
Sometimes I feel so sunk in it
The 0117 getting stuck and lost on the line
Dec 2022
"You know, they straightened out the Mississippi river in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding: it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was."
Toni Morrison
June 2022
Where the flyover goes behind the roofs on Stapleton road it looks like the cars are driving on the sky
Feb 2022
