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French Life Leisure International...

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1. He started the day with a missed dose and the nervous system’s theatre. Venlafaxine down at 37.5 for weeks, then a slip — and the night turned cinematic: paralysis, spiked in a dark club, the body unable to stir while the mind wrote a reason. He woke with that thin feeling people get after REM has been loud — as if reality is only half-latched. So he did what he always does when the mind runs off: he opened the back patio. Cool air. Blackbird. Strong Lebanese coffee. Not a diagnosis, not a drama — just the world being the world. He thought about taking his blood pressure, then knew better: don’t measure adrenaline and call it truth. Walk Lola first. Let the body settle on its own. Later, sat with his mum, he watched Small Prophets. He enjoyed it, then felt the ending wobble — the show promising alchemy and delivering Erinsborough, humour that landed for him but not for her. His mum didn’t catch the sight gags; she just found it strange. He could feel that quiet loneliness of liking ...
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around the time my mum broke her hip

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It will be three weeks this Thursday (20th February) since I was under the scalpel (or laser) of Adam Budgen at the Nuffield Hospital to remove what's been stopping my previous life (other than alcoholism) since COVID: a Morton's Neuroma. It's gone. I can't feel it anymore. The area around the operation is tender, etc., but I can't feel the alien body I could previously (at least since I struggled to Segovia in December 2022 having to walk through excruciating pain for 10 kilometres before any 'civilisation' was reached). Nothing nearly so obviously painful was stopping me walking over twenty kilometres in the morning and ten in the afternoon since I got used to blisters, knee swellings, leg pain or shoulder soreness (back in 2013) which really was helping me see clearly and happily within this structure I fail otherwise to inhabit. I've just realised I can see through the gap between to the two toes where the operation has been. All the swelling has gon...
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Saint David's Day

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He woke before the light had chosen a side. At 5:20 the room felt whole but he did not. The old tide stirred — not loud, not catastrophic — just that familiar inward pull that said alter this. He named it. He did not obey it. He opened the window. Cold entered without ceremony. Beans reheated. Rice finished. Coffee poured. Nothing mystical occurred. He observed that nothing was missing and did not trust it fully, but he stayed. At 7:15 he left the flat. North Street accepted him without applause. Sunday debris. Cleansing crews. Vinyl apologies for inconvenience. He moved south into Um and did not belong to it, nor reject it. He walked. Workhouse posts stood where discipline once ruled. Beggar’s Hill rose. He climbed it. The cemetery widened his vision. Elland Road sat below like a secular altar. The city did not instruct him; it merely existed. The flick of a switch occurred without sound. Cross Flatts opened. “Stronger Together” written in municipal hope. He felt less singular. He con...
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Ode to the Fact of the Bloom

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A rose rotten may bloom? But my future tending Will only lead to ruin. Sharp it bled, From a corpse risen, While tending. A refuge from rumination, Facing hands, inclining, Striking upon the hour. I The rose in Rouen does not bloom for the pilgrim. It is a sharp fact in the dirt, rotten at the root, indifferent to the eye. There is no miracle in its arrival, only the persistence of the soil. The future-tending is not a path to a better self; it is the labor of hands that have stopped asking for a destination. It leads to ruin. Not the ruin of tragedy, but the ruin of a system— the point where the scaffolding of "why" finally collapses under the weight of the present. II Rumination is the noise of a car that matches its driver. All signal, no substance. A performance of meaning. The refuge is found when the air thins. It is found in the contact with the thorn, where the wounding is not a metaphor for pain but a sharp reminder of location. "Sharp it bled." The blood i...
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Friday 16th January. am

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He woke before the house did. The hour sat lightly on the rooms, the sort of hour that doesn’t announce itself. His mother slept. The Airbnb guest slept. The dog was not yet with him. He stood at the bay window and let the day arrive without interpretation. Roofs, a rinsed sky, the far-off hum of the motorway—movement everywhere, but not here. He noticed the difference. How motion could happen without arrival. How people could be in a place and not be there at all. Earlier in the week he’d watched men in lycra bolt uphill, talking as if tethered to an invisible machine. Healthy, yes—but absent. The body doing, the mind elsewhere. He felt the faint grief of it, not judgement, just the ache of contact missed. The hum of traffic before six came back to him. All that early movement to shift things from one container to another so other things could be had. He felt the sadness of it—the endless doing that keeps the machine upright and fear fed. He prayed quietly that peace would be allowed ...
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A Trousseau

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I am mending. Slowly, without ceremony. The work isn’t loud or heroic; it’s a bath running, clothes drying on the rack, the small sound of order returning. Life doesn’t need to announce itself; it just starts breathing again through these ordinary acts. It’s sufficient. Outside, the morning gathers. School run, buses, the bolt of nine o’clock. I step into the flow and let it pass through me. The Umbra pulls its fractions together, the world tightening for another day. I keep walking. The scent of camphor drifts from an old coat on the bus — mothballs, the perfume of another age. It’s not unpleasant, just misplaced, a trousseau loosened into the present. The smell takes me back to  One Hundred Years of Solitude  — that same mingling of decay and grace, as if time itself had a fragrance. Márquez knew: everything returns, even the air. My father served, like his father before him. The empire’s long tail — Osnabrück, Malaya, Benghazi. He spoke little of it, only once about a crash...
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Greatness, Goodness, and the Tragic Body Politic

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(with Shakespeare’s ghost looking on) Greatness is not goodness. This ought to be obvious, and once stated plainly it usually is — yet modern politics repeatedly collapses the two, either moralising power or shrinking it into harmlessness. Tragedy never made this mistake. Shakespeare, in particular, understood that greatness is a matter of scale and consequence, not virtue, and that the body — frail, foolish, mortal — always waits beneath the robes. Tragedy asks a simple, brutal question: What happens when a human flaw is given enormous reach? In King Lear, Lear begins convinced that authority entitles him to love. He stages a performance of affection and mistakes words for truth. Power, here, destroys perception before it destroys anything else. The Fool — the only figure permitted to speak honestly — tells him bluntly: > “See better, Lear.” It is the play’s moral command. Lear cannot see while power cushions him. Only when stripped of crown, shelter, and dignity does knowledge arr...
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