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Apparition

Eugène Atget, Staircase, Hôtel de Brinvilliers, rue Charles V (Source: Getty Open Content Program) “I can say that I possess all of Old Paris.” Eugène Atget “They are not lonely, merely without mood; the city in these pictures looks cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant.” Walter Benjamin It is early morning when I cast myself adrift in these spaces where you walked,…

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#Cities #Eugene Atget #Paris #Photography #Place #Walking

Seven Stories of Bridges

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#Baltic Flour Mill #Bridges #Byker Bridge #Glasshouse Bridge #High Level Bridge #Memory #Metro Bridge #Millenium Bridge #Newcastle #Ouseburn Valley #Place writing #Quayside #River Tyne #Tyne Bridge

Perimeter Lines

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#Beaumont Park #Cities #Disused railway #La Petite Ceinture #Landscape #Memory #Paris #Place #Place writing #Railway lines #Ruins #Walking

Sleeping Lions

I miss the books and sometimes the way the fairy lights twinkled and how the room felt just as it was beginning to get dark. The way she would light a candle just as afternoon was fading, and its flame would fight off the daylight. Then we would turn on the lights one by one, and leave the curtainsopen to watch darkness falling. I sought answers in the impossible fading blue of the dusk, the…

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#Absence #Anonymity #Departure #Disappear #Docks #Imaginary places #Melancholy #Movement #Night thoughts #Place writing #Runaway #Shadows #Story

The Signalman's House

From some angles the viaduct seemed dwarfed by the trees surrounding it, but it was usually possible to see it from any point in the valley. A series of spans reaching across the higher ground. The arches built at intervals, impossibly high and frail from a distance, creating a sense of emptiness in the land below. It was the viaduct that framed the valley; its high sombre arches elevated into…

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#Imaginary places #Industrial landscape #Memory #Place And Landscape #Place writing #Railway #Viaduct

Tunnels

This is a piece of original writing I never quite found a place for, so I am publishing it here for the first time. In this piece I attempt a fragmented personal memoir about migration, and about movement, travel, and journeys, that is framed by a wider political context. The piece moves between 2005 when I was a volunteer visitor to an immigration detention centre in London, and the Syrian…

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#Borders #Camps #Detention #Europe #Landscape #London #Memoir #Memory #Migration #Movement #Place writing #Refugees #Tunnels

The Mirror Image

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#After Leaving Mr Mackenzie #Cities #Jean Rhys #Literature #Mirrors #Paris

Nina's Waltz

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#Circus #Jean Rhys.#Memory #Paris #Short stories #Temps Perdi #Tightrope #Trapeze #Writing

Moon Rock

Panorama: Journal of Travel, Place and Nature, Issue 8, Space, April 1, 2023 In this piece, I connect to the idea of space through an awareness of shared landscapes and deep time, and through an immersion in place. In search of a new perspective, a space to think and breathe, I begin exploring a local nature reserve, an abandoned quarry, just at the edge of roads and houses. I am surprised to…

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#Cambridge #Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits #Landscape #Movement #New nature writing #Panorama Journal #Place #Space #Walking

New writing published by Echtrai Journal

Untitled

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#Beaumont Park #Huddersfield #La Petite Ceinture #Memory #Paris #Place #Place And Landscape #Urban Walking #Walking

Passages: on the Rue des Thermopyles

Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, February 16, 2023 “It was a beautiful street. The street of homeless cats, she often thought. She never came into it without seeing several of them, prowling, thin vagabonds, furtive, aloof, but strangely proud. Sympathetic creatures, after all.” – Jean Rhys, Quartet In the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, starting from Metro Denfert-Rochereau. On the trail of…

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#Agnes Varda #City #Cityscape #History #Louise Michel #Memory #Paris #Passages #Place

The Singing and the Gold

There was a barrel organ playing at the corner of Torrington Square. It played Destiny and La Paloma and Le Rêve Passe, all tunes I liked, and the wind was warm and kind and not spiteful, which doesn’t happen often in London.Jean Rhys, Till September Petronella Petronella can be described as the archetypal Jean Rhys heroine. She navigates a position of uncertainty, living in a bedsit in…

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Winter Spell: A walk through Heptonstall

Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, 2 February, 2021 These grasses of lightWhich think they are alone in the worldThese stones of darknessWhich have a world to themselves– Ted Hughes In my hand a shard of ice. I trace the shape of its perimeter. A prism hastily frozen and troubled by wind and rain, trapping air and all the falling elements of the earth below. It has a solidity, a texture that hints…

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Gloomy Sunday/Sombre Dimanche

In her hotel room in Paris, Sasha lies awake. A sleepless night in which her mind works over the events of the previous evening. After dinner she goes for a drink in one of the cafés along the street. A habitual way to spend an evening, but on this occasion the woman at the next table starts talking to her. The song, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ begins to play, and somehow, she finds herself starting to cry.…

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Exemplary hotel woman

After she had parted from Mr Mackenzie, Julia Martin went to live in a cheap hotel on the Quai des Grands Augustine. Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is such a great title for a book and I am a great admirer of its first line and the exactitude in which it is framed. The first location of this book is the Quai des Grands Augustine, and the hotel in which Julia…

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#After Leaving Mr Mackenzie #Cities #Hotels #Jean Rhys #Left Bank #Paris #Quai des Grands Augustine #Writing

In the Rue Bleue

The hotel, which was called the Hôtel de Havane, was brand new. It smelt of paint and there were ladders and pails of whitewash on the staircase. […] Marya had often wandered about that part of Paris with Stephan when they lived in Montmartre, and she remembered the dingy streets […] Over the whole of the quarter the sinister and rakish atmosphere of the Faubourg Montmartre spread like some…

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#Hotels #Jean Rhys #Paris #Quartet #Walking

Prisons

The outside wall of the Sante frowns down on the Boulevard Arago. Three hundred blackened yards of it, sombre and hopeless. […] it seemed never-ending and there was no sign of an entrance. In Quartet Stephan is arrested suddenly and imprisoned, which forms the dramatic incident of the novel, and leads Marya to turn to the Heidlers for support. Marya’s visits to her husband in prison are…

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#Jean Rhys #Paris #Prisons #Quartet

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