Walking Home to 0Z

In 1900 a book called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published. Author L. Frank Baum stated that he intended to write ‘a series of of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with…horrible and bloodcurdling incidents’.

Despite this intention I found the film version terrifying in parts [...]

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Time-flood labyrinth: Eastbourne to Venice

This journey has taken nearly thirty years – from the time I met James Pyman at art school, to his wedding to fellow artist Penny McCarthy last weekend. Back in 1980, James lived in Eastbourne and we met up there a few times, exploring his vast collection of comics, little imagining that decades later we’d [...]

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The Way I Walk is Just the Way I Walk

“Again, like the Surrealists, anything you run across is actually beautiful; within a single city block, you find miraculous things. It’s a good planet — and good things can happen.”
- Lux Interior
I like this quote, not because it is a well-crafted aphorism, but because of its babbling exuberance – it conveys a rare kind of [...]

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New readers start here

Greetings, anyone stopping by for the first time. The local paper has run a story mentioning my whimsical exploration of ‘Argleton‘, the non-existent town created by Google as an alternative to ‘Aughton’, so it’s possible that some new readers are checking me out. If you’re looking for what I wrote about visiting Argleton , [...]

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Precise History of a Pebble: Journeys of Discovery at Othona

We spent a long weekend at Othona in West Dorset, participating in a ‘reading retreat’ with the title Journeys of Discovery, led by Mandy Addenbrooke. I’ll let Othona tell its own story, provide a few establishing slots from the first morning to show the kind of place it is, and say it is as [...]

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