It’s funny how, when we are visiting it is presumed we are at home, and when we are at home it is frequently presumed that we are visiting. We belong in neither place do we. No, not really, and perhaps that suits us.

Afterwards I finished my beer and had a cigarette and showed Dale my books wanting things to be normal wanting very much for the day that had been and the general feeling of hope it had given rise to to return for the silver skirt to still be shimmering the books in my bag to still be vital and enticing.

And that was all there was to it me on the bed no texting no emailing no one knew where I was it wasn’t as if I told my parents or my housemates, perhaps I’d told Dale. Probably I had but quite often people didn’t know where you were what you were doing nor how you felt about it either. You just had to lie there oftentimes, that was all there was

When I read Quin I recognise her fidgeting forensic polyvocal style as a powerful and bona fide expression of an unbearably tense and disorienting paradox that underscores everyday life in a working-class environment – on the one hand it’s an abrasive and in-your-face world, yet, at the same time, much of it seems extrinsic and is perpetually

Her secret glimmered and shone obscurely and edgeless, like moonstone. She is never without it. The briefest love is also sometimes the longest love.

Once her fingers have become threads she cannot touch nor grasp a single thing. But what in any case is there for her to take hold of? There is nothing in her immediate environment to reach towards. There is absolutely nothing for her to strive for. The sight of her flailing around a dark sunken room is made doubly horrible by the fact that the

She no longer leapt in gleaming Blakean splendour, but was snared in the scored lines of a grim grisaille from a Marxist pamphlet that gravely expounds the dire consequences of having no stake at all in the means of production. For wasn’t it perfectly clear that the merging of the girl’s fingers with the tools she day in day out worked with showed

And because there was no dark, no real darkness to speak of, there was of course no light, no real incandescence to speak of, just a rapid dousing of a miserable thing, nothing glorious at all, merely a routine extinguishing, inevitable and unremarkable.

The image’s blaze lit through me, again and again, one and the same as the fervid blood that crackled beneath my pristine skin like wildfire.