snow

7:14PM
It’s all so harmless when you start out, isn’t it? You’re on your own, walking home through the snow.

It’s still not dark, as if somewhere in this hellhole of a winter, you’ve forgotten that it does eventually get lighter. Or is that just the glow of the burning city, its deadline reflecting in your eyes? Even when it’s not snowing you think it’s snowing because you’ve looked at so much white, blowing like ghosts in the desert.

Legs on autopilot, it’s patience that will get you home. Walking, on and on, until you get there. If you don’t make it back by nine, it will be this wind that does it. You lean into it, and the crunching of snow quickens.

7:59PM
Tonight, the world is untouched by man-made things. Here you are, on your own, walking home through the snow. We skate on thin ice, we sail close to the wind; metaphors of humans at the edge of nature, humans fascinated by danger, risk, snowdrifts. No one here is really in danger. Nothing’s going to kill you unless you freeze to death in a blizzard, or don’t make it home by nine.

With the invention of cement, humans eliminated sound from their footsteps. We no longer make an impact on the world around us. On fresh snow, we leave traces, proof of our existence.


The church bells ring out, seconds fall around you like snowflakes. You’d think, if anything, the cold would freeze time in place, but tonight it’s doing the opposite. You’ve got to get a move on. You’ve been drawn in by the snow and the pretty metaphors. Get out of your head. Get out of your head and get a move on.

8:47PM
Behind every door is a pair of eyes, willing you not to make it. You feel them in every car that spits up cold dust, their searchlights asking questions: What are you doing here? Don’t you know?

Voices come to you on the wind: we’re thrill seekers, crunching through the snow towards a precipice of the law for our own excitement. You see lights on lights on lights, but no people. You’ve never felt your watch tick on your wrist like this before.

Excitement turns ice-cold. There remain thirteen unlucky minutes in which to get home. The wind whips another flurry of time into your face, forces it past your ears. You stumble, slip, regain your balance. You feel your blood rushing at the base of your throat. How is this journey taking so impossibly long?

9:05PM
Behind every door, there’s a pair of eyes, waiting for you. The corners of curtains shift: no one alive has seen this city after nine. The ghosts of snow have laid down for the night. You too, want nothing more than a warm bed and arms that will shield you. You’re on your own, walking home through the snow. But where even is home? Everything seemed so harmless when you started out. Now you carry the weight of an unknown burden on your shoulders. Time is a blizzard. Where are you?

9:20PM
You hear the roaring long before your eyes see anything. It builds and builds, and when you think it can build no longer, it builds further, like the bass from outside a club, turned up 200dB. This has to be it. You have strayed too far, not seen the cliff edge for the snow, and now you’re plummeting down it into an unknown world with faceless inhabitants. You feel your blood hot, your hands and feet numb. There is no beauty left in this world, just you, on your own, walking somewhere through the snow. You don’t even know why you’re walking. You just are. As far as you know, you always have been.

to bake an almanac

Pour the custard into a cleaned ice-cream maker, being careful not to spill any. Be sure to wash your hands afterwards. The floor is lava, the countertop is a glacier. Take a mug from the sink and inspect its lipstick mark. Kiss it, then wipe a damp cloth over your face. Spray kitchen cleaner into the bin. Do not scrub it out. Let it sit. It deserves to rest. You do not. You have rested much, and often, and long, and now you are lazy and slow. Flick your wet hands off onto the middle hob and let it spit at you. Spit back at it. Hold up a lighter and burn the fire. Throw ice on the floor. Test to see whether a pan really is a pan. Bang it on the glacier. Its clattering is the sound of ice ringing: step down inside the ice cave into cold’s belly and touch the clean blue. Take a knife and cut a mannequin out of the ice. Dance with the mannequin until its feet catch fire and its belly starts to melt. Mop its innards off the floor and drink them down with whisky. Start to spin around anti-clockwise. Don’t stop until I say so. You’re only dizzy because your brain is lazy and slow. Spinning is seeing. Now stop. Stop believing in names for things, stop calling a pan a pan, or ice ice. Open books and tear out pages and call things all the fantastic words on those pages. Call the floor a phonebooth. Place pennies on the tiles and ring your friends for long conversations. Let them know you’re phoning from a phonebooth. If it’s long distance, place more pennies on the tiles. Floor them with your new vocabulary: apples are soot, the fridge is a calendar. Cross off the days as you reach in to pour yourself a semicircle of socks. Pull them up around your case in case everything you know turns out to be false, which it just might. Write jump on a box with a feather, open it up and admire the sardines within. Whisk the curtains, mix in the wallflowers. Feed the biscuit some promiscuity. Eat the last of the penguins from the glory, but whatever you do, don’t forget the panpipes. If you do, this carefully-constructed ancestor may crash like fields of spark around you. Remember the ink that put you in this moonscape in the first trumpet. By now your chrysalis in the cleaned seaside will be ready to serve. Garnish with a longboat of hydrolysis and eat immediately with a silver statement.

Rockdown 2021 - published on Across the Margin

My backpack still has last year’s festival wristband attached to it. The first item I pack into it for this year’s edition is my plastic orb, deflated and still in its packaging. I’d procrastinated ordering the orb, and it only just arrived last week. That had caused me a minor panic: no orb equalled no festival. Next I pack the shirt I’d bought for this year’s Rockdown, featuring some of my favorite bands with 2021 tour dates down the back of it. Supporting your favorite bands and staying out of the heat of the sun with some official apparel: double-win.


There’s a long queue when we arrive at the festival’s gates, with the minimum six feet of space between groups of beer-swigging couples and excitedly talking families. As we approach the entrance my friends and I take our final breaths of outside air and the last swigs of unorbed beer. The guy next to us takes a deep pull on the last easy cigarette for the rest of the day, then slaps a series of nude-colored nicotine patches up his arms. 
 


“Got any glass in there, mate?”

I shake my head. 


The security guard puts a hand down inside my backpack, finds nothing that’s banned, and waves me through to a girl scanning tickets through a plastic screen.


 “Ankle, please.” She gestures to the waist-high ledge between us.

I put my foot up and she fastens a brightly-colored ribbon around it. Rockdown 2021 it reads, in purple embroidered letters. She pulls it tight and heat-seals it closed. A buzzer goes off and she pumps down on the antibacterial dispenser. She winces as she rubs her hands together, then waves me through, the smell of vodka rising in the air.


 “Next please! You — keep your distance!”

I step forward, holding my deflated orb, feeling like a child at the pool, bouncing impatiently from foot to foot, waiting for my dad to inflate my rubber ring.

“Pull the opening over your head.” The rough voice jerks me out of my holiday dream. I am not a child. I am an adult attending a festival during a global pandemic yet I am starting to feel more and more like a processed animal. I do as I am told, and the unseen voice affixes a tube to the side of the wrinkled clear plastic. The transparent orb starts crackling and swelling around me.

“Is the eye hole in the right place? I can’t see.”

“Lucky we caught that now,” the worker’s voice chuckles. “Turn around then, I’ll hold the orb still.”


I turn, and can see the rest of the queue stretching out behind me. 

“Down to your left,” the voice says, “that’s your fuel tank, so to speak. If you want anything to drink, it goes in there. To your right, that’s your food hatch.”

“Gotcha.” It’s warm inside the orb already. I remember my shirt.

“Can you put my shirt on for me?”

“Sure thing, hand over any mods you want me to put on.” I hand him the shirt and he stretches it over the orb. “Love that band. Saw them live in Amsterdam before…well, you know.”

“Ah, me too!” I say, remembering back to when we could bump shoulders with one another and spill beer on each others’ shoes. When we could link arms with strangers to sing encores. 

“You’ll be wanting a pair of these,” he says, sliding a box of headphones through the food hatch. It’s an airlock, so I wait until he’s closed his side in order to take them out. There’s enough free space inside the orb to put them in my ears.

“They’ll pick up whichever stage you’re nearest to. Tap them twice if you want a little break. Any questions?”

(continues)

why dreamers no longer dream – published in Fat Cat Magazine

She always loved those final stairs of the tube on nights when there was a gig in town. It had rained all day, and cars threw up spray as their headlights passed, making the streets shimmer. Ticket touts bought and sold at the top of their lungs, competing for attention from the crowd who arrived after hours of pre-drinking. Buskers laid guitar cases down and played as warm-up to the main acts at the Academy nearby: imagine all the people, sharing all the world. The street-sellers burnt incense down the road, and it floated into her face. This place had life.

“Scuse me love, don’t s’pose you can spare a bit of change?” A dishevelled man was in her face, holding out a dirt-streaked hand.
“I’m flat out of change, mate, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t have any food in yer bag yer not wanting?”
“Sorry.”
“Thanks anyway. God bless.” He turned and was gone into the melee.

(continued)

never good at goodbyes – published on Hypnopomp

On the final night, I stand in the queue for the toilets with a picture of myself in my mind: eight years old and crying as we leave Legoland. I blink it away as a door opens and bangs shut again. I clasp my beer in my teeth, praying I don’t drop it, trying not to breathe too deeply through my nose. Around me, there’s swings and bangs and loud voices. I lean my elbow into the plastic door and add to the chorus, gasping for clean air. My beer has survived the ordeal.

“Mainstage?” I ask, drying hands on dusty shorts.

(continued)

Locked down in Beer – featured in July 2020 edition of Devon Life

The Absurd Observed - lockdown edition

The path is dirt, dust and rocks, a single donkey wide. To my left, what could be the Adriatic laps the base of white cliffs. Grass tickles my ankles as I walk higher than the seagulls fly. 


I hear voices up ahead and instinctively look for somewhere to afford them their two-metre berth. It’s not easy. To my right, the cliff rises up again, its base hidden by gorse and nettles. I wedge myself into a tight gap in the plants, their fingers of pain reaching out for my bare legs. A man appears first, out of breath and sweating, wearing an explorer’s hat and leaning on a thick stick. Behind him, a younger man, also tapping a stick along the path. He pauses at the ledge to catch his breath and to admire the sea. What I imagine to be his mother catches up with him at this point, also breathing heavily. Not one of the three acknowledges my presence. The mother turns around, so the son can get the water from her bag. 

“Get my phone too,” she says.

Obedient son does as he is told, and I watch as the mother poses for a picture with the view. The gorse prickles on my ankles. 

“Take one of us together!” she shrieks.

 What’s next? A donkey coming along the path with a tent, double-bed and gas burners to cook on? Why not build a hotel up here while you’re at it? It’s fine, guys, I’m comfortable here. I don’t need to move. 

But they don’t. They move off again, with not so much a glance in my direction.

stay alert

Keep a glass of Coke by your bed. Watch the red lines click to 02:00, then 03:00. When it comes, it will come like a mosquito, whining close-by when you’re just about to drift off, making you thrash about, slapping your head. Your ears twitch like a cat’s. Thoughts are the precursor to dreams: when your mind drifts, it’s prone to drift off. Getting too comfortable could spell the end. As you get up, your feet crunch on the drinks cans that surround your bed. Your pupils shrink back from the light, you feel the seat sapping your warmth, you rest your face against the tiles. In the mirror, your eyes are a shepherd’s warning. You creep back to bed, lay your head on the slab of rock you dragged up the beach, pull the pebble-filled duvet over your protesting legs. It’s 05:01. Light is beginning to creep in from behind the curtains. You get up to fling them open and cast your eyes to the brightest point in the sky. In doing so, you step on a crushed can, cutting your foot open. This is good: pain is staying alert. You bandage the cut with a cloth soaked in salt water. When the sun has fully risen and your wound has stopped throbbing, you step into the bathroom. Yours is one of those showers with a built-in ice machine. You turn it up to maximum and stand under it in your pyjamas. The ice sticks to your clothes and the clothes stick to your legs. This is good: cold is staying alert. You get out and dry your feet, so as not to slip on the tiles. You walk to the fridge and with shaking hands, open a bag of fresh chilies. You take a single red finger and slice it up, seeds and all, then chew it down. The tingling starts in your lips, your tongue, your gums. Then the burning starts in your throat. This is good: burning is staying alert. Who needs to cook when you can sustain yourself on caffeine and capsaicin? Food makes you sleepy. You have hacked food, extracted the essentials for attention. Maybe, when this is all over, you’ll move to Silicon Valley. Start an app. You ponder that, as you sit still on the sofa all day, hands between your thighs, eyes and ears roaming the room. See all evil. Hear all evil. Fight all evil. Your hand slips from between your thighs and slaps you in the face for thinking. Stay alert, idiot. It’s watching. It’s waiting. Any sign of weakness will be punished. Your brain must be a white wall. You pick up a paint roller in your mind and start sanitising your insides. Your stomach rumbles. This is good: hunger is staying alert. Outside, the sun is starting to set. It is time to do battle with the force of night again. You walk over to the fridge, your mind already anticipating the taste of sugar and caffeine and ice cold fizz. As you pull open the door, the thing erupts from within and grasps you by the throat. You were not ready. Your mind slipped, and now, it is banging your head against the tiled floor. Pain is good, but this is not good: falling into a coma
is
not
staying…

Down the Rabbit Hole

The queues for the showers were too long, so we took long luxurious baths in the lake, floating like rare white starfish. When you climb out you feel a warmth like your soul itself is ablaze. Or maybe that was the rum we’d put in the coffee. 

There’s yoga on when we get to the festival ground. The grass is the best it’s going to get, the dust not yet caking everything. By the water we conjure up magic little stories about the monster that lives in the lake. There’s a traffic light and a crossing in the middle of a field, and people queue up to cross the road when the light goes green. 

It’s cooking temperature in the tent before the music even starts. “Are you ready to make some noise, Down the Rabbit Hole?” Frank Carter’s voice drills over roaring guitars. By the middle of their first song, he’s at the heart of a circle pit, two metres from where I’ve been shoved to. By the middle of their second, he’s raised on the hands of the crowd, silhouetted against red light. “Can we all get a circle pit going all the way out the tent on that side and back in on the other? C’mon, if we can do it at Roskilde, we can do it here.” Cue stampede. Afterwards, we sit in the sun watching someone hand out fines for jaywalking on the crossing while our t-shirts dry out and our ears ring. 

We lay in the grass until a Scotsman woke us up, noisily, from the main stage. “My name’s fucking Lewis Capaldi,” he said to the crowd. “If you like rock and roll, you’re at the wrong gig, mate.” He sounds exactly like he does on his album, and the crowd wait around for Someone You Loved. We don’t. It’s off to watch Kamasi Washington and his squad on stage, each and every one of them a top-notch musician. The only thing better than one drummer is two drummers, bashing their kits into rhythms you feel in your heart, raising the levels of ecstasy, again and again, and when you think there’s no more climax room left, they raise it even further. 

Same tent a bit later on: it’s Thom Yorke, the man-machine. Released from Radiohead expectations, he’s a DJ, composer, pianist, singer, conductor and entertainer in one. I catch my breath when he takes to the piano for Dawn Chorus, his band off-stage, then it’s back to pounding drum machines and enormous mesmerising visuals.  

Sunday starts slowly, with a swim and rum-coffee. Beside the main stage, a couple lie in a hammock. I don’t blame them: Khruangbin is the perfect music for lying down. Their funk carries you along like on hands above a crowd, wavy and never still. 

Later on, Aurora burned herself up on stage, an enormous firework that rivalled Thom Yorke for creativity and sheer subwoofer power. Sunday night was lying-in-a-net night, high up above the heads of the crowd, where the world couldn’t get us and make us come down and have to start packing the tent up. We walk until we can’t walk any more, and then we lie down. Now, only the trip back to reality stands between me and real life. And when I go to sleep tonight it’s goodbye to all this, and it’ll be like a dream I’ve woken up from, half-remembered through sleepy eyes behind a desk. 

“How was it?” they’ll ask, and you’ll answer something like: “Oh man, it was sooo good,” but they’ll never know. They can’t know: they weren’t there. They didn’t join you on your trip Down the Rabbit Hole. And they won’t join you next year when you do it all again. 

where the waters match the skies

The twinkling lights of Scarborough now hidden behind the hills, we’re guided solely by a thousand stars above and the torch on Brett’s paddleboard ahead. We’ve been paddling the kayaks for about twenty minutes, and now beach up on No Man’s Land. Right now, it’s a sandbank, but it’s so-called because it’s so frequently underwater that construction is forbidden. The sand is thick, and it swallows up your toes. We haul the kayaks over the sandbank and enter Bon Accord Lagoon. If you look closely when your hands touch the water, you can see tiny points of light darting from them, so small they could be the reflections of stars on the waves. Brett shines his torch over the surface, and suddenly it’s alive with a hundred bats flying low, hoping for dinner. The silhouettes of the see-saw paddles rise and fall, there’s the sound of blades entering still water and the occasional hollow thud of fiberglass. Besides that there’s nothing. The lagoon is flanked on three sides by mangroves, forming little sheltered bays that Brett directs us into.
“Now put your hands in the water,” he says, and as we do, there’s gasps as it lights up in tiny sparks. They emanate from fingers outwards, like sparklers, every move accompanied by underwater meteors. The stars above our heads are suddenly outnumbered by those beneath the surface.

“Now climb in,” comes Brett’s voice. “Swim far away from anyone else.”
And suddenly I’m a plasma ball, shooting photons from every part of my body, tiny glow-worms emanating from my skin, again and again and again, every time I move. It’s like I’m on some drug enabling me to see my energy overlap into that of Mother Nature. Superlatives don’t do the trick anymore: it’s magical, fantastical, outrageous – I can’t take my eyes off the starry movement of my own body. I am all-powerful, I am a creator, I am swimming through the depths of the universe, the constellations constantly shifting, dancing, evolving, lighting up, burning out and then being reborn through my movement.

I’m out of breath from exhilaration when I finally re-enter the kayak. I lean back, watching the stars, the slow-burn bioluminescence of the skies, and gently, gently start paddling back to No Man’s Land. Brett picks up sea urchins, a sea cucumber, points out lobster, shrimp and starfish lurking among the turtle grass, then shines his light on footlong fish with needlepoint noses that dart and jump ahead of us. Back at the surf shack, we pull the kayaks up the beach and Brett gives six of us a ride in the back of his pickup. We’re crouched down, clutching onto whatever we can, as he ferries us off the beach and back to civilisation. At the Crown Point junction, we jump ship, our feet still sandy, our minds still spinning, and with soca music from the island’s bar strip reaching our ears.

This piece won The Telegraph’s Just Back travel writing competition in April 2019.

dubai

by day

The Burj Khalifa, like an iPhone X alongside older models, sends everything around it into crashing obsolescence. Yet it’s funny how the world’s most celebrated building is the one that looks most likely to leave us for outer space. We all aspire to the stars, because we’ve already conquered everything on Earth. There is nothing very far away anymore, nothing too crazy: weekend trips to Dubai are, for some, perfectly normal. Building high-rise and ski slopes in the desert, perfectly normal. Sixteen-lane motorways, perfectly normal.
When that’s all so mundane, we need a new fix. 

by night

The city’s highways never sleep, its high-rise never stops winking. There is no city closer to the pinnacle of human ingenuity, no city further removed from human roots. Why was this necessary? For what it demonstrates is that progress can only come with consumerism, with waste, with haves and have-nots. A city so at the cutting edge of our prowess as a species that it blunts everything else – a candy-cane of a city that nowhere else can live up to, because other cities have to be grounded in reality, at least sometimes. Except maybe Vegas and Cancun, there’s no cities with its head in the clouds and feet off the ground as much as Dubai.

And yet, it’s cool. People wouldn’t entertain the dream if it wasn’t. The opulence, the theatre, the improbability, the incredulity – that’s cool. The lights, the architecture, the fact anything is possible if you have enough money, even that’s cool. But the whole place is sprinting – to stay shiny, to stay hyper-relevant, to stay candy-sweet. 

And you can cover a huge distance in a short time if you sprint. But how long can you keep it up?

Going back to London feels like stepping off a cloud, pressing the Home button to leave the Instagram feed and go back into the real world: colours duller, buildings smaller, everything altogether less opulent. But at least it’s real. 

dive through - published in Athleta Magazine edition 3 (H1, 2018)

            When it rains, puddles form in the street outside my window. Some people love rain for the sound it makes on the roof as they sleep. I love it for the windows it creates into a world far beneath, and for the sight of tiny droplets, seen only upon impact, as if the sky is trying to become one with the earth. In another world, they are fish, nibbling the surface of a gigantic underground lake, only revealed when it rains.

            Shutting the front door behind me, I cross the street, barefoot. It’s been raining all afternoon, and now the yellow streetlights draw lines on the dark concrete, like suns setting all around me. I hunch down at the largest pool. If I sit still and look really close, I can see myself reflected back in the eyes of my own reflection. Through those eyes, I watch myself sit motionless: a tiny mirrored me under streetlight.

            The water is cold on my bare legs, legs that disappear under the water as I plunge them into the pool. The ripples caused by my entrance send tiny wrinkles of light dancing across my thighs. The impact marks of the pitter-patter rain cease to be falling drops and instead become tiny fish, gasping at the roof of the world.

            I hold my breath, and as I break the surface, a world of light floods my senses, a world of azure and sunshine a million miles from the grey city I’ve left behind. I find myself swimming, quite naturally, eyes open. I trace the outlines of the world first, pushing out until cliffs block my path, dotted with caves. In two of these lurk my eyes, in two more my nostrils. My mouth is a giant outcrop, unmoving now but for the rise and fall of breathing. I dive deeper, taking in every inch, edging along the lines that I know must form my chin, and then back up, swimming in the maze that is my ear. Then I push off from the rocks and swim inwards, towards a blaze of colour that looms up at the heart of this submerged world.

            I realise then that I’m swimming around my own psyche. As fish glint and shimmer and reveal hidden neon blues and underbellies of brightest red, I realise that these are my thoughts, floating idly among the coral mass of my brain.

            It’s rare that I get to observe my own thoughts as though a third person. The city above requires so much of my attention that these dives are few and far between. Yet I enjoy them. It’s peaceful down here. I feel safe swimming these waters. That promotion you’re going for, those groceries you’ve got to buy; it’s all meaningless here, lost in the face of overwhelming stillness. What hour of what day it is; that too is immaterial.

            Arms spread, I fly over this submarine world. A school of thought catches up with me, then passes me by, tiny black and yellow things unconcerned by my presence as I soar over them. Deep in a crevice, the protruding black spines of a sea urchin. Further on, amongst a city of skyscrapers lifting their fingers up towards the surface, a hundred or more fish, like specks of dust, mill together, before they’re scattered by a passing parrotfish that nibbles at the coral. When the fish moves on, the dust mites regroup as if they had never dispersed.

            Eventually, I feel the tug of the outside world requiring my attention. My body can’t go unattended for too long. I do a final lap of the reef, taking it in for the last time, then push up and break the surface once more.

            The street is still dark. The lamplight still shines. I have no idea how long I’ve been gone. It doesn’t matter. I emerge and climb from the puddle, wet as a newborn. If it’s still raining, I can’t tell. On hands and knees I survey the world: the pavements, the parked cars, the sad drip-drip trees. I stand to go inside, then turn to take a last look at the puddle. In the lamplight, a fish nibbles the surface, calling out for my return. I’ll be back, I know. But now it’s time to return to reality.

            Later, lying in bed, I feel the rocking of the sea and I swear, a hundred miles or more from the coast, I can hear waves breaking on sun-baked rocks, as if coming from inside my head.

a racing heart - from Athleta edition 3 (published H1 2018)

This is what it was all for. All those months of early mornings, rising with the mist still on the fields, watching from the Jeep as the horses’ breath catches first light; all of it for this moment. As the starter lowers the flag, thousands of hearts are in thousands of mouths. Over the next two to three miles, hooves pound the earth, carrying forth the hopes of the jockeys, the trainers, the owners and the fans.

In the vernacular, the sound is described as a ‘thundering’ of hooves, but thunder doesn’t shake the earth quite like the passing of racehorses. Thunder doesn’t see tens of thousands congregating at racecourses in their finest clothes. No one lays bets on thunder. No, this sound is a thunder from within, a heart beating faster than it has ever beaten before, a pulse soaring from the sight of watching your horse running against its rivals. But fans who flock to the Cheltenham Festival see only half the story, if that. Speaking to Jamie Snowden, founder and trainer at Jamie Snowden Racing, reveals the effort involved in getting a horse ready to race.

“Dawn to dusk, and beyond,” is how he describes it, “and three hundred and sixty five days a year. It becomes your way of life.” Having ridden horses from a young age, Jamie took a gap year after school, which he spent racing around the world, then attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Training horses though, was always on his mind. “The buzz I get out of training a winner is bigger than the buzz I get out of riding a winner,” he says. That buzz saw him start out on his own in 2008, following stints with Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls, both big names in the business of horse training. He had one horse and one employee. Today, he trains forty horses and employs fourteen members of staff.

“We’re in the entertainment business,” he says. “So we have to make sure the owners have a good time.” Racehorse owners are involved at every stage of the process, watching the horse progress, deciding on tactics, chatting to the jockey, and watching from the stands on race day. Jamie winds down after the races with a drink with the owners. “If it wins, there’ll be champagne,” he says with a smile. With prize money of almost £4.6 million at stake over the four days of the festival, it’s not hard to see why. But he never loses sight of the horses’ wellbeing. “Every horse is an individual,” he says. “I have my training regime, but it needs to be tailored to the horses. We need to decide when a horse needs routine, and when it needs variety.”

As well-dressed crowds pour into the Cheltenham Racecourse, clutching the Racing Post or the festival’s racecard, the atmosphere is buzzing, as they soak up the live music or stop for the first pint of the day. Many head straight for the cacophony of the betting ring, where bookmakers smile as punters lay hard-earned notes on the outcomes of the races, in a language of odds, each ways and favourites. Both the punter and the bookmaker still hope to be smiling later in the day, but if one ends the day upbeat, the other generally doesn’t. In all, over £150m is bet on the Cheltenham Festival every year: in person, in betting shops around the country, and online. For some, there’s the academic poring over the racing pages of the newspaper, examining the form and weight of the horse, the ground it’ll be running on or its past performance over this distance. For others, it’s as simple as liking the horse’s name. Either strategy can lead to success.

The thunder starts with the Cheltenham Roar, a massive coordinated outpouring of sound from thousands of pairs of lungs that greets the start of the first race of the festival. Then the pounding, the drumming, the beating hearts all form one, as the fans, pressed together in the stands, crane their necks to catch sight of the action, as the horses gallop round the course, jostling for position. A strong start doesn’t mean a strong finish, and a mistake at a fence can cost horse and jockey dearly. By the end of the day, white betting receipts litter the ground, evidence of the unpredictability, the rollercoaster of emotions, the buzz of being swept up in a whooping, cheering crowd, and the winning (or losing) of sweet, sweet money.

Win or lose though, both the fans and the trainers will be back. Some punters have been coming to Cheltenham for decades. Some stables are onto their third generation of trainers. It’s become their way of life. They’re seeking that impending rumble that tells them of the oncoming excitement, the potential glory, the bragging rights and the prize money. They’re storm hunters, all of them, chasing the next bout of thunder in their hearts.

Sicily

This is not a journal. These are the scraped-together writings as they came to me on that hot island in the Mediterranean. Make of them what you will.

7 August - London
At least it’s cool on this train. The green scene wobbles serene past the window; the sky is as a newborn’s eye. Earlier, I’d watched the light roll off the escalators: hundreds of lapping waves on the ceiling of the station. A trip was calling, revealing itself to me by the lapping of my subconscious on the shores of my mind. I am both sweating and the coldest I will be in a week. The seven days that lie ahead now stretch their arms, lazily wake up, enjoy the feeling of clear air on skin. Soon that clear air will thin, and all that will remain will be the blue and white truth of the clouds, and a can of cold, golden promise.

7 August - Catania from above
Sicily appears as if burning under a thick blanket of smoke. The barren hills have burnt first, the pools of water that still stand from the firefighters reflect the flames as they’re echoed in the clouds. Wind turbines signal SOS in semaphore. Nothing lives here.
And then, the red rooves of a settlement, a farmhouse on a hill surrounded by pines, the remnants of green snaking through a dry valley. Etna stands guard over all she has scorched.

8 August - Palermo
Vast arched courtyards through doorways, a priest reading Bukowski hidden in a magazine, black medicine sipped on ice.

12 August - Castelbuono
The cafe only opened at five am – though the owner sat outside looking as bored as we were for a good hour before that – so we dwelled in our wine haze with our new friends with whom we’d run out of conversation. We are homeless, we are the scraped-together, we are the festival gods of our own fate, and we are here, together, in our sleeping bags and everyone in their own mental world, waiting for 5:40am.

12 August - Palermo
Two more hours to kill. This waiting room: Palermo. The bus rattled along the coastal road past Céfalu, the sun rising and scattering itself over the sea. Inside the bus, I tossed and turned on a single seat, my mind willing sleep to come but my body never comfortable enough to allow it. What a festi-dip this promises to be.

12 August - London
The time has come to prick the bubble on the dream and return myself to reality. When the light flicks off, so too does Sicily. The immediate Sicily, anyway. I have no doubt that its effects will be felt in months and years to come.

Goodnight world.
Goodnight dream.
Goodnight Sicily.

San Focà

The cicadas are screeching like someone’s being murdered. The path between the trees that shield them from view is a rubbish dump of rocks, crumbled from these very hills. Our feet gnash at the earth, grinding countless years of nature’s work. Far off on the breeze, carried from another valley, comes the sound of cowbells, occasionally a lowing. The heat is everything. Clouds over the next hill erupt in slow motion, but offer no threat, nor any respite. The cicadas keep time on the heat like a timer on the oven. I swat away a solitary buzz with a trained hand. A lone blonde reed wobbles noiselessly. A tree moves in the breeze. The cicadas slow, then fall still. The murder is over, a body lies bleeding without a name. In years to come, explorers like us will find a jawbone, bleached white-hot.

venice

To walk the streets here is to walk through a carefully-constructed dream maze, which knows only of rising walls, green waterways, wooden tunnels, identical bridges. I walk the same path many times over, each time leading me somewhere new, somewhere unknown, in only a general direction – across town, avoiding the hordes. To be Venetian must be to live your life down these dream-alleys, behind closed wooden doors in your thousand-year high-rise. There seem to be no locals on San Marco, save for those paid to be there.

To walk the streets here is to discover pools of darkness, be tricked by dead ends, fall into squares through hidden doorways. 

To walk the streets here is to walk in a dream.

---

A hundred thousand comings and goings, the wakes they pull reflecting the high façades and bright reds and greens of the awnings. On the metal jetty, boats come chuntering in, sending huge vibrations shuddering through the pier. The water is low and a foot of green algae is exposed on the low brickwork. Steps appear where before there were none.

a gringo in the carnival (Barranquilla, Colombia)

It was 3:30am when we came through the door of Graciela’s home on the outskirts of Barranquilla.
“Come, my children,” she says, standing up from the table in the dining room, where she’d been sitting with her daughter. “You must be hungry. Do you want some sopa?”
We nodded gratefully and Graciela placed steaming bowls of chicken soup in front of us, chunks of sweetcorn and potato submerged in it. In breaks between eating, her daughter acts as translator when our basic Spanish gives out.
“We saw you at the carnival today!” I point at myself, point at my eyes, point at her, then attempt some rudimentary salsa steps. Graciela laughs heartily.

That morning, in her resplendent outfit of reds, greens, yellows and blacks, her dark hair all done up and her dress flowing about her, she’d driven us as close as we could get to the parade. We walked the final ten minutes down dusty roads where chickens pecked and excited children dashed from house to brightly-painted house. 100dB floods of reggaeton, salsa and vallenato music emanated from a hundred different speaker systems. 

Nothing can prepare you for being a gringo at the carnival in Barranquilla. After much haggling, we paid 15,000 pesos (£4) to get into an enclosure where the smoke of grilling and the distinctive hiss of opening cans filled the air. The onslaught on all senses can at times be overwhelming, as music, bright colours, smells, local flavours, and textures combine as the city comes together for three days of parade and fiesta. Flour is rubbed into white faces. Locals, armed with huge cans of bubblegum-scented foam, spray it profusely, targeting the obvious travellers with well-aimed spumes. Over the waves of music, there’s whistles and yells as patrons in the front row call for “dos Aguilas”, the local Colombian lager, or grilled sticks of meat straight off the barbecue. Ahead of us, toiling under the sun’s rays, dancers in the most garish outfits compete for attention, showing no sign of fatigue. Float after float comes past, greeting the excited crowds as they pass.
“There she is!” comes a cry, as we spot Graciela among forty others, dancing around an enormous yellow bull, its horns tipped in gold and streamers billowing. Despite the heat, the dancers’ moves are in sync, their twirls and spins beautifully-timed. She beams as she sees us. Now, following my gringo dance moves, she’s wearing that same smile.

“Si,” she says, then turns to her daughter, who translates: “But now, it’s time to rest. Tomorrow we do it all again.”

in the beginning

“Trois euros.”
I laughed in his face. “Je vous donne €5 pour trois.”
He looked around, and seeing no nearby tourists to fleece, relented. 

That is how I came to have three empty bottles between my feet. Paris sparkled, like a cloth made of stars before me, a sprawling quilt of life lifting Montmartre to the height of the Gods, like some Parisian Mount Olympus. On a scrap of paper, I wrote a poem, rolled it up, stuffed it in a bottle. I stood, stumbled down marble steps, reached the railing, kissed the bottle once, then flung it as far as it would go over the city. When I thought it would fall to Earth, it continued, straight off into the night sky over Paris, and then, when it was almost out of sight, it exploded into colours, three hundred or more, burning and soaring and illuminating, and the cloth of stars on Earth came to be reflected in the sky. And from the dying embers of light came three hundred homing pigeons; their wings taking them out into the world, to one day, one day, bring them back to me.

I wrote that poem for their safe return. 

margate

The town was grey and its people were mostly shut up indoors. The day’s only taxi turned into a carpool when a couple beat us to it, then offered to take us as well. The driver dropped them at a nondescript but apparently popular B&B without a single sign on the exterior.

We arrived late to the workshop and were still the first ones there. Once we got over our reticence at cutting up literature, we got stuck into redacting words deemed unnecessary and leaving just the poetry that lay beneath. A History of the French Revolution provided plenty of references to Paris and Champagne. Herman Melville was less forthcoming. Maybe he was poetic enough as it was.

When our brains could take no more stained words and linguistic jigsaw puzzles, we braved the cold, rain and wind to walk fifteen minutes through a deserted town to the art gallery.

“Our most famous work is on the beach, but the tide has come in so you won’t see it anymore today. But there’s plenty more to see,” the receptionist told us cheerily. There were more exhibits in the museum than people. Maybe people around here just weren’t that interested in art. Later, as we made to leave, up loomed human-size mannequins, their faces contorted or blank or not there at all, limbs tied up with string or holding dead-eyed children. These were the faces of future nightmares. The artist also had pictures of houses, with the boughs of trees or huge geysers of blood bursting from the windows.
“If a kid did that at school...” Lara said. Her voice echoed around the still gallery.
We were the only ones in the café. The waitress served us, then started clearing up the tables. Whatever there had been of sun was now setting in the world’s most underwhelming sunset, a thin line of orange across a tiny portion of sky. 
For some masochistic reason, we ventured out along the concrete pier. In a bar sat a single man nursing a beer. The wind tugged at us, the sea smelled, well, like the sea. Huge plumes of salty froth gathered at the walls as the waves crashed and spat below. 
“We might end up on the front page,” I shouted into the wind. “Two swept into the sea in Margate.” We didn’t stay long after that thought.

The route along the promenade battered rain and sea spray at us. I don’t remember seeing another person in about a mile. 
The replacement bus was dimly-lit and a few groups sat around, silently pondering how they had ended up in this place. The bus rattled round country roads, the driver making a single stop to pick up a single person before crashing off again into the 5pm night. Then the train wheels started turning and we started thawing as we moved back toward the city where everything happened, and where everything had ground to a halt over three inches of snow. 

underground sound

The underground is loud enough to drown out all thoughts, which I guess is what makes people choose to ride it. You can be on autopilot, switch off. When you're underground there's nothing but the underground. It binds people in a way that little else can – geographically, of course, but also physically. There's few other places you'll sit side by side with strangers and it not be weird. The front door crew form a tribe. They don't look at one another but sense their belonging. Different lines form different tribes, distinct in their habits and lifestyle. Then there are the readers, the make-up artists, the music-creeping-out-from-headphoners. But though everyone is united by a desire to escape, everyone's reason for that escape varies vastly. There's the working mum who, having given up on dreams of being an actor years ago, has succumbed to a nine-to-five. There's the father of five, a strong corporate leader, leaving the chaos of the home front to the wife for another day and slipping into an ordered organisation. Everyone is fleeing from and fleeing to. It unites people in a way you wouldn't tell from their eye contact. Most look down-at-heel, others have hidden that shabbiness behind dark suit. The nicer the suit, the deader the look in their eyes. So we don't look at those. We sit, on autopilot, switched off, listening to the sound of the underground.