Personal
Swimming at the Elephant
I hadn’t swum for 20 years before joining the club a few months back. Now, I leave a brightly-lit council-run pool in Elephant and Castle each Wednesday night with a definite spring in my step.
ReadMiss Naysmith and her city
As London’s super-rich make the city their playground, pushing the rest of us further and further to its social – and physical – margins, I think it’s becoming more and more important to remember stories like Miss Naysmith’s. She’s an example of somebody who refused to be pushed out. She lived on nobody else’s terms but her own.
ReadWalking somewhere
I’d arrived in Trieste on a Friday evening, and, having dropped my backpack off, I needed to walk. So I set off, towards the sea.
ReadPeggy and Mihaela
Our evening flight had been delayed, and they’d finally given up for the night. We’d be on the first flight to Heathrow the next morning. An air traffic control failure in Brussels caused the original problem. Appropriately timed: it was June 24th, the night following the Brexit vote.
ReadThe Chinese plate
My mum’s finally finished clearing out my grandparents’ house, and she’s brought back a few boxes of things: books, pieces of jewellery, notes. Nothing valuable, just mementoes.
ReadBooks I read last year
I read less than I used to, and I forget most of what I read. A fact brought home to me last year when, bored at Christmas time, back at my parents’ house, I rifled through some shelves in my childhood bedroom, and pulled out a plain blue hardcover notebook.
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