‘Please, I beg you. If I do not buy lederhosen now, I will never buy lederhosen.’
‘Mother dumped my father,’ a friend of my wife was saying one day, ‘all because of a pair of shorts.’
I had to ask. ‘A pair of shorts?’
‘I know it sounds strange,’ she said, ‘because it is a strange story.’
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
‘That was the setup for the review I wrote about this imaginary record.’ Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
‘What I’m talking about is a different sea, and different mountains.’ Haruki Murakami walks to his hometown after the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995.
‘I looked up at the sky. A few grey cotton chunks of cloud hung there, motionless.’
‘Everything had gone well for her until her father died of cancer. Everything—without exception.’
A short story by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin.
‘Each time I’m in her country, my translator / lends me the phone of her dead husband.’
A poem by Krystyna Dąbrowska, translated from the Polish by Karen Kovacik.
‘I had lost my native country, now I was going to lose a continent.’
