Soft men…

Soft men with soft hands

‘In order to survive your skin has to become hard’ Ukrainian resident

In prison, it occurred to Smith that there were only two things people could not take away from her: "my tattoos and my education.”

Thomas De Quincey became a visionary in 1791 when he was six years old. His older brother William was looking for a way to walk on the ceiling upside down like a fly.

Richard, whom they called Pink, signed on to a whaling ship and was captured by pirates. The other siblings were depressives. Thomas leafed listlessly through the pages of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp.

“I ordered him a brown book” Overheard

“Buy one birthday cake, get one free” Overheard

He was feeling shut out, as he waits for key-hole surgery.

If you see something that does not look right.

Beginnings and endings are always awkward. I am no good at hellos and she’s useless at goodbyes.

"It's really fun to write a ghost story when the lights are on. When the lights go out, nobody needs a ghost story any-more. They need hope." Shonda Rhimes

"And then in Switzerland, you have the mountains but you don't have the sea.” Hans Ulrich Obrist

In 1995 McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks with lemon juice on his face believing it would make him invisible to security cameras like invisible ink. He even smiled at the cameras and was caught within hours. His case inspired the research that led to the discovery of the Dunning Kruger effect. Wheeler’s lemon-juice blunder has since become a textbook example of this effect. It demonstrates how ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowledge, it can foster misplaced certainty. His case, though humorous in hindsight, underscores a universal human flaw: the less we know, the more likely we are to overestimate our abilities.

There steep growth in the sale of ‘gourmand’ body scents that smell of food, like chocolate, pear and coconut. It seems commensurate to the rise in weight loss meds. New fragrance obsession has replaced emotional eating; instead of eating the cake, we want to be it.

We can ask…

‘We can ask and ask but we can never have back the things we thought we would have forever’ A Month in the Country, JL Carr

Weaponised incompetence

The decision to learn a foreign language, John le Carré wrote shortly after the Brexit vote, is "an act of friendship... It's a promise to educate - yes — and to equip. But also to awaken; to kindle a flame that you hope will never go out ... FT Henry Mance

Dreaming spires and lost dogs / Take the corner down a trifle / We're only an inch apart on the map of England / He kissed her all over the map of Europe / He hid his face amid a crowd of stars / Fooling over clouds / Swimming with women / The sea is green / World of wood / Small man with a big hat / Gizzard Park / Dogs blanket / Pillow talk

‘But when from the long distant past nothing subsists, after people are dead, after things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more enduring, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of their recollection.’ Swans Way - Marcel Proust

You can fit a lifetime into an hour over a few pints in a Welsh pub.

A grandmother who collects pebbles?'

Sugar plum.

Poetry is when words touch each other.

He left lying down looking at his feet

‘You should have been talking to Sunny Man’ overhead

‘His neck was fat and he blamed the shirt. Top Man’ overheard

She had waterproof eyes

His face was…

His face was the colour of old bones

She talks in italics

His was the sort of face that sheep count in the night when they cannot sleep.

Scarcely has a lyric carried so much freight and remained airborne.

The white man drew a small circle in the sand and told the red man, 'This is what the Indian knows,' and drawing a big circle around the small one, 'This is what the white man knows?' The Indian took the stick and swept an immense ring around both circles: 'This is where the white man and the red man know nothing? Carl Sandburg

We sleep in linen, we cook in wine

What with one thing on top of another

Useless Bay / Despised Lake / Deceit Island - places in Tierra Del Fuego named by explorers

For nearly the first century and a half of its existence, America's geographic position kept it secure from the world. As one European observer noted: "On the north she had a weak neighbour; on the south, another weak neighbour; on the east, fish; and on the west, fish."

I was drowning…

I was drowning 2,000 feet above sea level.

For what we know as history 'proper' is always made between times, as, rooted in the present, we negotiate a past that is not, as we commonly think, unilinear but multilinear. The past is not the action of the arrow of time pointing forever forward, but more like the flames of a brazier, constantly changing, reaching up and then falling low. Fire and water.

Time is like a river on which we move, but the banks through which the river flows are themselves in constant movement too.’  Patrick Joyce on the photographs of Josef Koudelka

The Space Between Friends / Out of Order / Humbuggery

Sailor Step / Sailor Step / Stomp / Slide / Shuffle / Half Turn / Pivot line dance moves

The positive power of pessimism

This is what a scream with no vowels sounds like. This is the weight of the soul leaving the body. The arms are no longer connected to the legs, the legs have been severed from the lungs, the lungs have lost contact with the heart and the heart is getting ghosted by the brain. Amanda Anisimova sits on her chair, baking in the heat, stewing in sadness. She dabs her face with a towel and hopes people won’t notice she’s wiping away tears.

A silence passes…

A silence passes between them, brittle and porous, like old bones.

Europe spends more on facial fillers than the world spends on research into emerging infectious diseases.

The bits I wanted to edit out are the bits I needed to keep

Hard edged thinking

‘She liked the saints, angels, miracles and mysteries, and the fact that, for Catholics, 'anything can happen to anyone.’

In the 1860s photographers everywhere advertised their services with the slogan "secure the shadow ere the substances fades".

The weight of a life/ the air smells of stone

‘What did she hope for, he wondered, as she scrutinised these men over plates of oysters, fish tacos and bone marrow?’ A Big True, Dinah Nayeri

Many Andean cultures practised the curious art of cranial deformation - binding a child's head to achieve a particular shape. Living at opposite ends of the canyon, the Collaguas and the Cabanas traced their origins back to different mountains and their ideal head shapes reflected the profiles of those peaks. The Collaguas tried to achieve a pointed shape, like the summits of the Collaguas mountains, while the Cabanas wanted more of a flat-top look like Ampato, which looms above the canyon.

Some people have started to call her a "star" since the news broke, she says. "When I was young, a 'star' meant a film star, but now when I think of stars I think of the stars in the sky, which is where you go when you're dead. And I don't want to be that kind of star." Marlene Dumas

Sips turned to straws…

‘Sips turned to straws turned to syringes of water we carefully squirted into his mouth. His swallow migrated. We dipped pink medical lollipop-sponges in ice water and moved them like dentists around his mouth.’ FT Laura Coffey

Section 46 funerals - public funeral of those with no known relatives or next of kin.

Time to look at beautiful things, marvellously done.

Ageing is a privilege and not for the faint hearted.

She said the secret to her longevity was "never arguing with anyone, I listen and I do what I like".

An expression of interest.

The older he gets the more he stares into corners.

‘Jenny's legs had gotten so thin his pants hung off them. Whatever sickness he had seemed to be getting worse. His face wasn't smooth and puffy anymore. His cheekskin hung on two cheek-bones. Oily skin under his eyes the color of chow mein. Looking at it made me hungry, even though I hated chow mein.’ ‘Cougar’ Maria Anderson

Remain party - the prejudices of the suburban golf club are imported to the council-estate boxing club... a kind of ventriloquised xenophobia.’

‘My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste. She had radiant teeth.’

My dreams vanish…

My dreams vanish on contact / memory is inherently porous

The dadaist Francis Picabia once put it like this: “Our heads are round so that our thoughts can change direction.”

The happiness of people in a country is measured on their perception of the return of a lost wallet.

"suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting-room window:'Hitler is making a speech. I shouted back, I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.'" Leonard Woolf’s autobiography

favourable weather / fast moving things

Hertzbaracke = heart attack

Humblebrag

Robbers here have a sense of humour. If the door is unlocked, they won’t come in.

Pigeon lung - a condition of pigeon fanciers breathing in dust from feathers and dung

The French speak of un syndrome de glissement, a slide to death prompted by utter hopelessness.

Expecting / visible mending / young offenders

We carry in our coccyx what remains of a vanished tail

Caveat emptor must have been the motto of the shopkeeper: cayenne was mixed with brick dust and red lead, coffee was stretched with chicory, and chicory with parsnips. Tea was mixed with "lie tea" - tea dust stuck together with gum - and once steeped, the leaves were collected and sold again. Henry Mayhew interviewed a tea-leaf collector: "I get them honestly and sell them honestly, and that's all I can say about it. Every little helps, and if rich people won't pay poor people properly, then poor people can't be expected to be very nice."

You’ve got to admit…

‘You’ve got to admit that it’s difficult, he says, having a wife flying above you at 17,000 miles an hour. Never knowing where she is or where to find her.’ Orbit - Samantha Hardy

“No," she replies, emphatically. "It's just that over and over again I am really struck by how ordinary people get through their day. Sometimes it almost strikes me as a sort of miracle. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. People don't have a lot to hope for in average lives and yet they make do, and on the whole they behave, they behave very well. That is pretty amazing." Anne Tyler

Michael Rosen poem that starts: “I sometimes fear that / people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress.”

danger -  origin of the word was from the mid-13th-century Anglo-French word ‘daunger’, meaning arrogance or insolence.

Etymologically, hobo might come from "homeward-bound boys", American civil war soldiers trying to get home or to find odd jobs on which to build a new life after the fighting ceased.

‘Out through the window at a radiance doubling and redoubling. The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we're on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.’ Orbital - Samantha Harvey

He spoke in a whisper, even in the desert.

"Two main rules if you're a travel writer and married,' explains another of Theroux's gone-to-seed grouches: "Number one, don't whistle while you pack... Number two, don't come back with a tan." Paul Theroux

Short cuts / Small acts / Clearing the air

Keep your eye on…

‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.' David Lynch

Temporary escalation space (TES) is the translation for the hospital corridor.

‘I’m not good at multi-choice. Too many answers make me overthink.’ Overheard

‘I know guys going into battle loaded with weapons, tattoos up their necks, hardcore – but they’re not singing [Black Sabbath’s] ‘War Pigs’, they’re singing something pop, something easy, or perhaps a Beatles song just for the melody – a love song to make them smile!’ Ukrainian soldier

She is someone who lights candles rather than curses the dark

The boundary is the horizon

‘You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough‘ William Blake

‘Once I was visiting my auntie Marge. She was doing her laundry. She turned to me and said, “you know? I love this machine much more than I do your uncle Walter.”’ John Cage

In case you are awake…

In case you are awake, I don’t think Lucy will have seen my message . . gently wake her (text message on the death of her father by her sister)

Spare time / Loose change / Heavy weather

In vitro = in glass

‘I’m smart enough to know I’m dumb and can easily live with doubt, uncertainty and not knowing.’ Richard Feynman

‘She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen and among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation?’ Tess of the D’Urbervilles

2025 forecast - ‘good becoming poor later’ / ‘good occasionally poor’ / ‘showers good’ / ‘996 rising more slowly’

My caught phlegm echoes my late father’s morning cough. I warmly hear him in my chest, after all of these years.

Struth

‘A bright crimson bird, wingless, like the Penguin, but perfect in proportions, and of most exquisite beauty; its downy plumage brilliantly bright; its six perfect bird-legs, three set on either side... Then there are five white delicate toes, more like a fair lady's fingers, to each foot... and a beak like that of the great war eagle - all harmonious, but strange...’ An 1867 description of a mite glimpsed through a microscope

There is no such thing…

‘There is such a thing as the optimal degree of alienation, and it isn't zero. You want to see the world from an angle of about 45 degrees. Much more than that makes for a life full of tension. Much less, and the risk is innocuousness and complacency.’ Janan Ganesh FT

The medieval Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral has east at the top, showing Adam and Eve in Eden, and west at the bottom. This was an orientation that defined European Christianity for more than 1,000 years.

Strabismus - misalignment of the eyes

‘people all over the world in their back gardens, observing the multibillion-year history of the universe. And then they get up and have their dinner.’ Stephen Homer

“Pain leaves scars, doesn’t it?” Overheard

He treads lightly on the darkness

"She'd always told me that she could no longer swim there ever since her best friend had employed the Swiss company ‘Exit’ for her assisted suicide and decreed that her ashes be strewn over the clear, pleasant waters of the lake. My mother had said if she'd swallow a bit of lake water by accident while swimming, she'd be drinking Margie, and that was a ghastly notion to her.” Eurotrash - Christian Kracht

I eat the wind…

I eat the wind and drink the rain

She was the only person they knew who spoke in semi colons.

Semi-detached

Pancake

Hundreds and Thousands

She has synesthesia. She states that the word ‘apocalypse’ tastes of sausage.

According to a questionable experiment in 1907, the soul weighs 21g.

“He’s got short arms and deep pockets” Overheard

“Good at literature, shit at maths.” Overheard

The stitches of hip replacements are regularly compared among the men swimming at Hampstead Ponds - they can even identify the surgeon. They swim together in slow circles.

Taking Cover

Cauliflower is a variety of the common cabbage whose flowers are arrested at the bud stage, resulting in dense ‘curds’.

‘Good policy experiments produce results, telling us what works and what doesn't and allowing us to get better outcomes for less effort. Children learn more, criminals go straight, new drugs cure old diseases. Results matter, but they are not the only reason to aim for an experimenting society. Such a society values curiosity, the childlike sense that the world is full of mysteries to be solved. It values humility, the recognition that nobody has all the answers and that others may know more than we do. It values practical action, the drive to get things done and to solve problems.’ Tim Harford FT

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Walk on Air…

‘Walk on air against your better judgement’ Seamus Heaney

The store sells guns, fishing tackle and lingerie.

Some people in the Andes believe that the future comes up from behind you and the past is always in front of you.

Whisky is the twilight wine of Scotland

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck. Paul Virilio.

He goes at life at a wrong angle

‘Step out of the water. Who knows, you may find that you walk on it.’

‘Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping’ Gertrude Stein

That money talks, I won’t deny / I heard it once/ It said, “goodbye”. Richard Armour

Young actors overact. Older ones are measured, they say less and say it slower.

Rumble strips

Skipper Street, The Dirty Onion, The Cloth Ear

Frank is Diagnosed…

‘Frank was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Fading away, he smells like himself, but metallic’. Description by Moon Zappa of her father

Colonial history tells us that countries that are not at the table are typically on the menu.

His letter arrived coincidentally on the morning of our parade. He wrote: 'As soon as an Irishman leaves home and enters America, he ceases to be whatever he was but behaves rather more so.'

‘When you interact with the British people you can hear the rain in their voices’ Tina Brown

He was always trying to put on weight and walk without crutches

She longs to go somewhere….anywhere ….else

Lavender and dust

‘You also told me not to use Google no more.’ Overheard

You can hear the bones humming. Mis-auto correction

I don’t do full fat…

“I don’t do full fat, man. It’s not the same as back in the day. No cream, watered down.” Overheard.

This is the face of an angry young man. You should see him when he smiles.

Wars do not start with explosions, they start with silence.

No one said anything / Silence is not an effective foreign policy.

“Art isn’t the cherry on the cake; it’s the cake”

‘Lord, / When you send the rain, / think about it, please / a little.’ Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems, James Baldwin

‘The moment we cease to hold each other, / the moment we break faith with one another, / the sea engulfs us and the lights go out.’ For Nothing is Fixed, James Baldwin

The Romans thought aubergine were poisonous, and called them mala insana (the apples of insanity). The name stuck and in Italy are now known as melanzana.

Rene Magritte asleep

He heard the valves…

He heard the valves in his heart. He heard the quick, feathering action of the hinges. Extraordinary, he thought.

mouse jigglers = employees who pretend to work

I thought growing old would take longer.

To understand life talk to a 4-year old and then an 84-year old.

The etymology of the word haunt is tied to the Old French verb hanter, meaning “to visit frequently or regularly”. But it is also tied to the Old Norse word heimta, which means “to bring home”.

Most people’s lives contain half a dozen completely unbelievable incidents.

A real copy

Speak a living language

We live a perpetual state of informed ignorance.

‘God says he don't deal with Small Heath' / ‘This is the face of an angry young man. You should see him when he smiles.’ / The writer stood next to the wall and cried “This is the way I feel'. A Londoner said ‘Yes, but is it art?' Benjamin Zephaniah

“Call it Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)” Song by ‘T-Bone’ Walker 1947

Dangerous pavements…

‘Dangerous pavements / But I face the ice this year with my father’s stick.’ Seamus Heaney

‘The photograph fulfilled my deep need to stop things from disappearing. It makes transient less painful. Sometimes I want a picture to ask why, and to not be too easily deciphered and decoded, because our lives are often like that.’ Dorothy Bohm

‘When you’re younger, you’re scared of dying. As you get older, it seems rather fun.’  Barbara Hulanicki

He felt like a raisin on top of a cake, extraneous.

The Bee Gees song ‘Staying Alive’, with its 103 BPM tempo, was widely used as a guide for administering CPR.

The courage to fail is the same courage you need to succeed, so welcome failure. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying, so keep failing.

People hate anything well made, it gives them a guilty conscience.

‘The sun came up like a yellow rose and fell like a sweating orange.’ Alistair Cooke

A million seconds is less than 12 days, while 1 billion seconds is nearly 32 years.

He would sniff like a gusting wind and brush away the tear with the back of his hand the size of a cod.

He drowned…

He drowned his bonsai tree with too much love.

The self-storage centre is a park where people go and stroll among their things to think and forget.

“Being in a city without arts is like being in a room without windows” Stephen Knight on Birmingham

“Jesus’ blood never failed me yet / never failed me yet / Jesus’ blood never failed me yet /There’s one thing I know / For he loves me so.” Gavin Bryars’ appropriated recoding of a street drunk singing.

It was so special it was only used on high days and holidays

‘For children are natural impressionists, taking the adjectives of music and knifing them close against the nouns of sight and touch. Every child knows that colour sings and trees walk’. Alistair Cooke describing trees in fall in New England

Yesterday came suddenly.

We cannot stand still, even in the best of times

Customers were allowed to run up tabs – but had to leave their sets of false teeth as collateral, which were kept in a bucket of water.

Stone walls and silence, thank God.

I hope that you are happy, not happier.

Sussex lay under…

Sussex lay under a shallow sea, quietly knitting itself together from chalk and fishbones.

‘I think his obsession with curtains is partly the sense that they have that theatrical quality and that when the curtains part something is about to start, but they also have a degree of concealment about them. They might be hiding something.’ On David Lynch

The lightening bolt tattoo on his forehead was meant to be a sign of power; instead it’s signifies a need for more thought.

Strong stances are for weightlifters

“The story of the internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure.” Chris Knight

Sunny Jim

‘A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think that you control it.’ John Steinbeck

“You’ve just head butted him Delilah.” Overheard

‘I come just from the other side of nowhere’ Johnny Cash

It took about 24 seconds for the sound of Mount Vesuvius erupting to reach the bakery of Pompeii via Nola, roughly 19 hours for ashfall and volcanic debris to bury the building, and almost 2000 years for the secrets entombed within to be rediscovered .

Memories are…

‘Memories are dynamic, neither false nor true: they are constructed in the moment, reflecting both fragments of what actually transpired in the past and the biases, motivations, and cues that we have around us in the present.’ Charan Ranganath ‘Why We Remember’

I think we are suffering from toxic empathy

I like to be near the kettle

‘A soupçon of peril and lust sounds just fine’ Eva Wiseman

He always dressed heavily.

Time will tell

0.00am. The present: is always in the present. As we respond to the moment, it never ages: we are alive, now. It is, is.

12.00am The past: memories are otherwise, offering solace and surety that it was, it happened, and may again someday.

12.00pm The future: has no certainty. It simply might never happen. Or it might prove wondrous, a source of joy, life changing.

‘I sat, stood or paced around. I did a Wordle, read a Jack Reacher novel, ate a scotch egg. Everything felt a bit wrong.’ Adrian Chiles on the death of his father.

The trees had long lost their nerves

“It really doesn’t matter at all / No, it really doesn’t matter at all / Life’s a gas.” Song lyrics by T Rex

It makes you look up at the sky, fearful of what might fall out of it.

She could talk a glass eye asleep.

His voice, the roughest grade of sandpaper, stripped all conversation to nods and uncertainty.