Swift, delicate and pearly white With eyes as dark as night

Silky voiced Fleet of foot

Silently wandering over Creeking wood

Old houses Steep stairwells Covered in egg shells

Is today the day that she’s nice, Or am I skating on thin ice

My grandmother always told me

Grate the sweet potato

Never blend it

Befriend its texture through toil

Or the pudding will spoil

Sticky and blocky, not sweet and fluffy

Lovely and yummy and orange

And glazed

You must grate it, not blend it

For hours unfazed

Then mix it, bake it and leave it to cool

You must grate it, not blend it

You’ll end up a fool

So grate it, shake it, mix it and bake it

An hour, remove it

Then leave it to cool

Cut it, pack it and take it to school

Share with your friends

Hand it out to your teachers

Watch looks of love

Spread over their features

As they lick their lips for the last bit of taste

Do what granny said

And see naught go to waste

The Cathedral loomed like a giant’s tomb, its towering spire clawing at the storm-laden sky. Inside, Walter sat on the cold, splintering pew, his head bowed in mock piety. Around him, a sea of peasants huddled, their breath fogging the frigid air. From the pulpit, Father Anselm’s voice droned in harsh, alien Latin: “Dominus dixit: servite dominis vestris sicut me.” Serve your lords as you would serve God.

Walter understood none of it. Nor did anyone else. The words rumbled like a distant storm, incomprehensible and absolute. But their meaning was clear. Obey. Kneel. Toil. Die.

The priest’s voice echoed off the soaring stone arches, trapping them like cattle within the cathedral’s cavernous belly. Walter’s calloused fingers gripped his cap as he glanced at his son, William, thin and pale with hunger. Beside him, his wife Margaret clutched baby Agnes, her face shadowed by exhaustion. This wasn’t life. It was a slow drowning, a cycle of servitude handed down through generations, as eternal as the cathedral’s cold walls.

As the congregation shuffled out, Walter’s stomach twisted. The Church was not saving them; it was strangling them. The Bible, locked in Latin, was a weapon wielded by priests. Truth was hidden, words distorted, their ignorance chained to their backs like a yoke. Walter looked at the cathedral’s high, unbroken windows and felt a creeping rage. Those windows weren’t for people like him—they were for God, and for the men who claimed to speak for Him.

That night, in the flickering light of their hearth, Walter stared at the damp walls of their cottage. Smoke choked the air, mingling with the faint cries of Agnes. Margaret sat across from him, silent as she spun wool. The fire’s glow deepened the lines of weariness carved into her face.

“We can’t stay here,” Walter said, breaking the silence. His voice was low, rough. “This life—there’s nothing for us. Not for us. Not for the children.”

Margaret looked up sharply. “What are you saying?”

“There’s a place,” he said, his words slow and heavy. “Across the sea. A place where no lord owns the land. Where we could be free.”

Margaret’s eyes narrowed with fear. “And how do we get there? We’ve nothing, Walter. Less than nothing.”

He leaned forward, the firelight catching the deep shadows beneath his eyes. “I’ll find a way. But we have to go, Margaret. Before we’re swallowed whole.”

Two weeks later, Walter sat in the dark corner of a smoke-choked tavern, listening to the rasping voice of a sailor named Hugh. The man’s eyes gleamed like flint, his breath sour with ale.

“A ship’s leaving from Bristol,” Hugh said, leaning in close. “She’s bound for the New World. Dangerous, though. Many don’t make it. The sea doesn’t care if you live or die.”

“I’ll take the risk,” Walter said. He slid a small bundle of coins across the table, the last remnants of their meager savings. Hugh’s hand darted out like a snake and snatched the money.

“Bring your family to the docks before dawn,” he said. “And keep quiet. If anyone finds out you’re fleeing, you’ll be strung up like a thief.”

The journey to Bristol was a waking nightmare. They traveled by night, sleeping in ditches and under hedgerows, the children shivering with cold. Walter sold Margaret’s spinning wheel for a few scraps of bread, watching her face twist with pain as the merchant walked away with the last thing she owned. Hunger gnawed at them like rats, but they pressed on, driven by the promise of freedom—or the fear of being caught.

When they finally reached the port, the smell of brine and rotting fish hung heavy in the air. The ship loomed before them, a hulking shadow against the dawn. Its masts were skeletal, the hull blackened and scarred from storms. Hugh was waiting at the dock, his face grim.

“You’ll work your passage,” he said. “And pray the sea doesn’t take you.”

Walter helped Margaret and the children onto the ship, his heart a knot of dread. As the vessel creaked and groaned, the city vanished into the mist. He felt no sorrow leaving it behind. Only a heavy, uncertain hope.

The crossing was hell. Waves slammed against the ship, their icy spray soaking Walter to the bone as he hauled ropes and scrubbed the decks under the cruel eyes of the crew. Below, Margaret and the children huddled in the suffocating hold, the air thick with the stench of sweat and sickness. William’s cough grew worse by the day, his thin chest rattling like a broken bellows.

One night, as the ship pitched violently in a storm, Walter climbed down to the hold and found Margaret cradling Agnes, her face pale as death. “She’s burning,” Margaret whispered, her voice cracking. Walter touched the baby’s forehead and recoiled. The fever had taken hold. He pressed his forehead to hers, closing his eyes. He didn’t pray. What god would hear him now?

The next morning, the storm passed, but Agnes was gone. They buried her at sea, the crew casting her tiny, shrouded body into the endless grey waves. Margaret made no sound as the water swallowed their daughter, her grief etched into her hollow eyes. Walter’s hands clenched the rail until his knuckles turned white. Freedom, he thought bitterly. This is the price.

Months later, when the coastline of the New World finally rose on the horizon, Walter stood on the deck, staring at the faint outline of land. His clothes hung loose on his wasted frame, his face hollowed by hunger and loss. Behind him, Margaret clutched William, who was no longer coughing but had grown gaunt and silent.

The ship groaned as it docked, the crew shouting orders as they tied it to the rough-hewn pier. Walter helped Margaret and William onto the soil of the New World, the earth dry and cracked beneath their feet. The air was heavy with the scent of pine and salt. It was a hard land, wild and raw, but it was theirs now.

Walter turned to Margaret, his voice hoarse. “We’ll make it. Somehow.”

She looked at him, her face unreadable, then nodded. Behind them, the ship was already preparing to leave, its crew shouting and cursing. Walter didn’t look back. There was nothing to see.

Ahead lay only uncertainty—but it was a life they could claim for themselves. The chains of the cathedral, of the land, of the lord—they had been broken. What remained was freedom, raw and unyielding as the sea they had crossed.

‘That’s Tony’s son, I know it!’. This, surprisingly wasn’t the first time it’d happened at some big family or diaspora event. One of grandad’s old friends or acquaintances recognised me.

My face, was simply my dad’s face, which he in turn had inherited from grandad. A little clone, prone to defensiveness and with a knack for making complexed things. Or pulling everything in the house apart to the chargrain of his mother.

I only wanted to see how things worked.

Grandad had worked on the production line at the old Ford cars factory in Dagenham, dad had gotten himself an education and gone to Rolls Royce in Birmingham to build aircraft engines before going into engineering consultancy and moving the family back to London.

My story was no different really. I went to Imperial College and studied Chemical Engineering with a few years abroad for both study and work. So far, so similar, and while history doesn’t repeat, it certainly does rhyme.

Grandad made cars, dad made airplane engines and I grow semiconductor crystals to give computers Silicon brains and Indium sensors.

Each of us a man of his time, but the same man repeated. Carbon copies. Combustion, carbon fibre, silicon carbide would be a good way to put it as an analogy to the nascent materials we worked with.

——————

Enough about work. What of life, afterall we should only work to live.

Back in university, in the time before Brexit when Britain left the EU, I had lived in Brussels to do a year abroad at the ULB French speaking university. I also took an internship at the Audi factory that closed back in 2025 after being open for 77 years.

I loved my time in Belgium and stayed for a few more years. There was something so relaxed and so different about it, the trams, the huge excess of parks and a giant forest that was one third the size of the city.

It was so liveable. Especially when you had other young people around from all over Europe, just starting their lives and coming from every corner of the continent.

My favourites were the Italians because of their intensity and love of great food. At my first student intern house there were 14 of us from nine different countries and we’d have these monthly international dinners in one of the kitchens.

It was a huge house, with a kitchen, bathroom and four bedrooms on each floor. At the top of the house there were only two bedrooms and a huge kitchen were we’d have most of our dinners with views over the city, and of the back gardens of our neighbours.

So many wonderful experiences, people, parties and places. So much to get lost in. It wasn’t until the following year though that things really changed in completely unexpected ways.

—————

I became wrapped up in a Belgian girl. This was strange to me because there had been girls from other places over the course of my life and especially in the preceding year. Women from places that you don’t just pass through or overlook as you do with Belgium.

Women from big countries, and well known cities with whom I’d had small flirtations and more involved romances. A Parisian by the name of Persephone who’d I’d met at university in London. She was my lab partner and we still spoke often.

German Marie who I’d enjoyed many a good walk with in Forest park near the Audi factory. Museum days with her at the weekends and then dinner and drinks with the house. Perfect.

Finnish Sarah. We also walked a lot! In the huge park next to the university and Solvay where the famous quantum conference had happened back in 1927. Einstein, Curie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, the lot of them were in attendance.

There was one night me and Sarah had walked home from a party by Centenary park, around the inner ring road, through a few as yet undiscovered neighbourhoods.

We went down a hill through St Petersplein and back up another hill as the tram had stopped running by that late hour. I didn’t know it at the time but we’d walked past the house at number 42 where I’d end up living with the Belgian girl in just under two year’s time.

—————

It was a hot summer and I was on a date next to Buckingham palace with a psychology student who had a summer job there. My phone went and it was a video call through Facebook Messenger. I excused myself and walked out into the sunshine, more than a little tipsy.

I’d applied for a house share back in Brussels while spending the summer at home in London and it was my potential housemates calling to see what I was like. At this moment I was loud, on a date and on my way to being drunk next to the queen’s house. Not the best first impression, depending on who’s asking.

I also couldn’t move in for a few months but I’d start paying rent immediately. They chose me.

That was in August and I didn’t meet them until November when I went to get my keys a month before moving in. It would be two guys and a girl that I’d live with, all Belgians which was pretty weird given that the Belgians kept to themselves whilst hosting people from all over the continent and the world here.

In the big international house we’d lived with a rare Belgian from the tiny German speaking region near the Netherlands and Luxembourg. There were only 77,000 of them.

Now I was about to move in with two French speaking Belgian guys and a Dutch speaking Belgian girl from Flanders. When I looked on their Facebook profiles the boys had full profiles, but the girl didn’t have any photos close or clear enough to see how she looked. I was too drunk at the time to remember any of their faces from the summer call.

I was just hoping she wasn’t beautiful. Living with attractive girls was my Achilles heel. However it was mitigated when there were large mixed houses and groups. Adulthood would bring smaller houses, smaller groups and the probability of more intense relationships. Both good and bad.

—————

I got the Eurostar high speed train, making my way back to this familiar city I loved and had already loved in. Getting off at south station.

I remember getting to the house, talking with my new housemates and eating burgers. It was a pretty good evening all round and nothing of note happened. I didn’t find the girl especially attractive, she wasn’t my type. Very pale with a pretty face, she resembled Audrey Hepburn, a Dutch woman.

I came to find out she was half Dutch and half Belgian so it figures. The only thing that was different about her was the pitch of her voice, it was like music to me. I could have listened to her talk all night. But she went to bed early and one of the guys dropped me back to the train station for a very late train back to London.

The one thing that struck me is that when she’d retired for the night, she’d come down to say goodbye in her dark blue dressing gown. Blue as the dark deep ocean.

I was lying back on the big leather sofa in a food coma from the giant burger I’d eaten and staring up into the high ceiling of this fancy duplex. A former chocolate factory split into 20 huge living spaces.

She walked up the metal stairs to bed and as she got halfway up she stared down at me. That moment was odd… she had very dark brown eyes that were almost opaque. Strange given that she was so white. When she looked down at me it was as if her gaze was burning into my soul.

We found eachother. A carbon copy of some unknown Central European farmers, a copy of some famous Anglo Dutch woman on the surface level. Human faces drawn from a finite pool of genetic code and an infinite cosmic ocean of souls.

The following years would be everything glimpsed in that brief moment. High, lows, love, hate, joy, passion, tears and almost tragedy.

True love is an intimacy that’s as primal as fighting. My favourite fighter once said ‘I take people into deep waters and they discover themselves’.

So it was with us.

Flora took a deep breath. Deep enough that she could feel her nostrils flair into the little stiff, inviting roundels Alex found so cute. They were currently rather pink, going on red rimmed in the depths of winter.

She’d just gotten to Leopold cafe on Avenue De Tervueren, or is it Tervuerenlaan? Flora sat in a plywood corner stuffed with oversized cushions. Trendy, cozy, Gezellig. Agréable she thought.

Trilingualism never allows for a tidy way of thinking, or saying things, until it does, allowing for definitions as sharp as a pinprick and straight as an arrow. Clarité….helderheid? No, that’s not quite right, she thought.

Flora took another deep breath. Baking bread from the ovens at the rear of the store wafted into her nose on a light wave of fresh espresso vapour, steaming up from her tiny ceramic mug.

She was beginning to relax. To really feel relaxed as she pulled out her laptop, setting it behind her espresso cup. She looked at her phone for notifications before dropping it into her bag.

Yielding to the large cushions beneath her and putting her elegant, dainty thumb and index finger through the handle, the cup balanced on the top of her middle and newly decorated ring finger.

She took a sip and sank into the cushions.

Perfect, and getting better by the day.

That’s the only way I can describe my life. It goes through these periods of sustained calm, steadily growing toward the ‘good’.

It hadn’t started so easily. The early years were far from a suburban dream, they were grass filled but urban. We came up in the intermittent chaos of a very large city.

Tumultuous, exciting and always things going on. Cultures swirling together and yet separate.

There are more ways to describe it than I have words. It was everything, and my heart and soul were filled, even if the fridge was sometimes empty. That went for many kids in the neighbourhood and yet we were all healthy and happy.

Laughter echoed from the shared bedrooms and packed homes. Extended families that hadn’t yet given way to the atomisation and so called abundance afforded to the well to do, the ‘lucky’ few.

‘Look at how far you’ve come’ are words I hear too often. It has a double meaning because I’m 200 miles from the place that made me, the place of effortless happiness and familiar street names. Squares. I miss Squares having swapped them for Places and Pleins at various different stages.

All of life’s a stage, isn’t it.

Now, I act the part here some Place else. Flagey is where it started here. Now I play the family man down south near Waterloo. Ironic because home is down south near Waterloo, just in a slightly different context connecting this loose association of names that reflect places which couldn’t be more different. For me at least.

I wake up from my recently disturbed nightmares in a huge bed that little me couldn’t even dream of. The extreme comfort of a perfect mattress and my struggling psychology is perfectly juxtaposed with my childhood.

I open my eyes as the weekend sun starts to light the room. Turn to my right and see a woman sleeping calmly. Peacefully. She is so beautiful at this moment and seeing her this calm fills my soul. She is so different when she’s awake, like two completely different people I get to know and love.

She’s beautiful.

Like this bed, little me could never have dreamed of her. Her! Thank you god for her and what she has given me.

I lean over her and draw a deep breath over her familiar scent before kissing her too lightly to disturb her slumber. The subconscious calm version of her knows she’s home and knows it’s me.

I step lightly from luxury onto the thickness of our new carpets over the underfloor heating. I slink into the hallway and see the morning sun over our lush green garden.

It’s all so fucking beautiful. So wonderful.

It’s thanks to meeting her and to having a great therapist for those first years away from home where the loneliness had set it. This time it would be different.

I knew how to ward it off after the terrible first experiences of being away from home at university and subsequently travelling to and living in different places. ‘It’ being the impulse to self sabotage leading to a spectacular implosion so that I could go home and recover. Ground hog days, months and years.

I’m glad it never worked out the previous times as I look about me now thinking how perfect this all is, and how it will continue to be so. Previously when things got good I’d think…no, I’d know and act out the destructive impulse whirring through my mind. Stirred by the loneliness and alienation bubbling in my homesick soul.

The only answer is arson.

But not this time.

Yet we love

Despite rain, famine fire and flood

Distances over terrain

Space, time

Blood

From the time the flower buds

To when it sets its pollen free

Which settles in an ovary

That it may grow another tree

Plant, flower, fruit or seed

Love and life is all we need

Whispering willows.

Trees full of corvids imitating human voices.

Cooing, talking spirits.

Ghosts made of shiny feathered mischief makers. Invisible under the purple sky.

I lay silently on the grass, fearless. Careless.

Because I know these little critters.

They come to me for bread and seeds in the mornings and say the same things as they do in the night.

I do not fear these flighty ghosts. Floating on the murderous air between large groups of crows.

A conspiracy whispered on the breath of ravens.

Whooshing wind and rustling leaves carry the voices of arguing trees.

END

—————-

Note - Animal group names: A Murder of crows A Conspiracy of ravens

I hadn’t been home for years

Memories were all retained

All my tissues had had time to turnover

The bones that were made here at ‘home’

Had been reforged from foreign materials

As had my hair, skin and arterial tissues

Deep down I may have had the same old issues

Or new ones living atop the fossilised foundations of who I am. Was

Because afterall

You still fit in, and you get it, but do you?

Who’s who in the social hierarchy nowadays

Who cares. Who dares wins and other sayings

You hear people say things

Just for the sake of it

Useless unless you know the rules

You think, oh poor localised fools

You know and choose not to participate

Feeling detached, a smug superiority as it plays on your mind

The key I’ve been given still fits the lock

But this house, this city, this land no longer feels like home

If you were to somehow get close enough you’d see your face in the water droplet resting against the shiny black backdrop. A perfectly polished shoe.

Tens. Perhaps in the low hundreds of droplets formed slowly, growing round in the whispy rain.

Glass beads, slowly filling, until the surface tension breaks, causing them to roll in a thin glazed film down the patent black surface of a perfectly polished shoe.

Like a screen reflecting the moonlit night back at itself. The liquid dreams of a starry sky.

A single strand of fur falls and pierces a few droplets. Heavy enough to break the tension, but as it rests in a transparent bead, it seems untouched. Perhaps untouchable.

By its nature nothing sticks. Or at least water runs off effortlessly. Natural wax, doing the same job as the wax which protects a perfectly polished shoe.