Tripping Down Recollection Street

In London sometimes you walk amid the ghosts of past centuries, the grey and rain; in Edinburgh, the ghosts are alive and vital, and swarm among the Saturday crowds on the high street. In Edinburgh history isn’t like everywhere else, like used toilet paper; it’s the same room, lived in.

Getting Off For Home

It's one of those sad little stations that lie grey and listless by the side of the tracks, skulked about by a couple of skeletal trees. Two or three straggle off the train and you wonder who would choose to live here. Dull sparrows on the bleached fence, hawthorn spiny with berries like clotting blood. There's always an old sign by British Rail, touched with the fingertips of rust. This one says: Cam & Dursley.

Looking Out Under Eaves

On a level with long, kinked rooves that straggle away from me over idiosyncratic gardens. Apartment blocks squat oblongs, irregular under the clammy amber push of the sky. Lit and unlit windows semaphore untranslatable code, people wakeful and restless in the clutch of another dismal London night.