Booze Breaking Intentions Due to a crackdown planned on the alcopops of Wales 37,000 youths were dispersed by underage minister, Coaker, and 1027 spirits called the police home-choke a success. Jail, though, regular gig, for the car-breaking junkie who took a cocaine solo on Thursday. Then Glastonbury Pete turned up on a horse. Enough to…

  HRM 2006   In the last lecture of the module On the world of work and employment Jonathan poses the question: ‘Who wins, who loses?’ His aims  are clear; his learning outcomes admirable.   He’s South African, emphatic. Steeples his hands between Fordism and Post-Fordism. Circles the air around ‘flexible- working’. Has an Hiroshima…

Unrecallable Now (after Roddy Lumsden)     Since you ask, this was how I stayed awake. I imagined a stand of trees growing tall, white trunks curling like ribbons up to the polished shell of our sky.   Better than that, I was a door in the sand opening into pipeworks of earth. Did I…

Equivocal I was going to say how this morning winter gobbed on the forsythia and how those little hopeful yellow faces sulked under wads of spit and report how the branches clicked and moaned; ask whether we’d blame them or the sun for pretending to have got it all sorted but, who was, in fact,…

Present Now that you’ve left desert sunlight   I’ll put you in front of the mouth of the mountain and explain   this is not about my seeing it’s about your seeing   that blue wall isn’t a wall neither are there stairs   you risk falling if you don’t let me lead you carefully…

The Japan Quiz will be this Friday. These web-pages are all you’ll have                                           remember the fixed                                                                  frame of the branches                                                                  the blossom’s revelry                                                                  the brush placed and stilled                                                                  deep coral                                                                           viridian the last days of the samurai the rise of the merchant-classes basic themes                                          remember the slight                                                                …

This Glamorous City The buildings wear silver head-dresses. Smoke from its chimneys is shell-green, silken. We aren’t scared of heights here. We don’t fear the dark. The world’s elevator cradles us past its tantalising storeys. In this city you can switch on a party by blinking; turn it off again by keeping your eyes closed….

Room Remember Rachel Whitread’s ‘House’? Concrete cast of an East London terrace. 193 Grove Road. Made in 1993, demolished 1994. Things turned strange in there: fireplaces bulged from the walls. Doorknobs exploded. I lived there once, winter of 1993. It was peaceful. No-body missed me. Nothing to look out at. No-one could look in. Before…

Spring now. Clock change. The air: lemony, powdery; the pulse quickening. A day to make offerings,not to a god, but to a spirit; benign, strokeable but not to be snapped between thumb and forefinger. Find, then, a fitting tall stone: a menhir, in an alignment. There will be fissures: cracks down which you can trickle…