C.A.E. they call it here – Council of Adult Education – though you don’t have to be an adult I guess, everything from macrame to blues harmonica to entry level English. It used to be in one pokey building but over the years it has spider-webbed out to consume the other buildings around it, in [...]

I make my way up the half landing like a mole through the half dark, the lower hall light throws indistinct shadows on the walls. The brass rickety knob of the bathroom door squeaks as I turn it and the guillotine lock turns up just enough to open the door. It slices down into its [...]

She knew she had to act fast, a whip crack in her mind snapped as clearly as the fingers of a fifties rocker in front of a bulbous microphone. She rode to the supermarket on a melody of need. Cream. That was the lyric running through her head with those finger clicking fifties melodies , [...]

A book as thick as a brick containing heiroglyphs of mathematical language, propped up on the table made of brown woodgrain laminate, the ends angled so they can be put end to end. Room 301 The windows arranged in long lattices of light and an occasional vision of freedom courtesy of a skinny branch of [...]

The clacker on the front door echoes along the hall and up to the bedroom. Immediate thought is – “what are they selling”. Who knocks on the door at midday anyway? Expecting Jehova’s Witnesses or something similar I am surprised by a man in Fedex Outfit. A white rectangular package in one hand and a [...]

Lawn mower man – stuck inside a main frame room ‘access denied’ ‘access denied’ trying to escape down a telephone line somewhere to continue his mayhem. Russell Crowe ‘virtuosity’, a self made man in his own image, virtual. Sci fi novels, too many of them with crumbly yellowing pages read as the digits tick past [...]

It stands alone, like an obelisk. like the Washington Monument straight and strong, unwavering, it’s purpose clear. It knows what it must be and become, where it’s come from. The blood of a thousands reeks in its nose, the ideals of generations float in its memory like pages torn from a book that float free [...]

BANOOL words sitting in three Dimensional abomination out of a perfectly smooth surface of the manicured hedge. BANOOL I never did find what it meant, but every inch of that hedge was clipped so the word just hung in space in the same way you can get into a word on your PC and ‘add [...]

It was on the last day it really became apparent. At the top of the valley with a 1500 foot descent the insides of my feet were so painful it was as if there were thumb tacks pinned to the insides of my shoes, or a bed of nails that someone put there just for [...]

Monday Morning sometime 1974, Springvale Primary school, hundreds of youngsters standing on a sea of black asphalt, standing on the cracks, standing on the lines that define the basketball court, looking toward the headmaster speaking about something or other. Alraedy the day is hot , the sky is an unbroken blue diamond – unbreakable, it [...]