‘He played it as loud as he could, as though he hoped the music would remind the hay in the barn above of green grass and blue cornflowers.’
Will you play at my wedding? Philippe the cheese-maker asked him. Philippe was thirty-four. People had been saying he would never get married.
When is it?
Saturday next.
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‘The flirtations of insects and plants are furtive, hidden and often so brief that if you literally blink you might miss what exactly is going on.’
Dino J. Martins on moths and orchids, from Granta 153: Second Nature.
‘The origin of the dysfunctional family: spores. / Friend or foe? True fern or ally?’
Poems by Sylvia Legris, author of Garden Physic.
‘And the trees were safely tucked in. Their roots were rallying in the soil, in this coil. Would the woman also take a turn for the better in her last decade?’
Three stories by Diane Williams.
‘walking alone down a country road – / distracted by the slightly annoying and toxic / first green of spring, eyes overflowing’
A poem by Emily Skillings.
‘Whatever the aftermath, you won’t see the city again except through the agency of absence, recalling this semi-emptiness, this viral uncertainty.’
From 2020: China Miéville on the UK government’s response to coronavirus.
‘To create is to let take over something which did not exist before and is therefore new.’
‘Use these photos as means of transport. Ride on them. No passes needed. Go close. Imprudently close. They leave every minute.’
‘The image impressed me when I set eyes upon it for the first time. It was as if it were already familiar, as if, as a child, I had already seen the same man framed in a doorway.’
‘If I'm not transferred to the mines, I'll hold out, and you must go on thinking of me as dead: you will be closer, my heart, to the reality.’
‘I was overcome by a feeling that took root then and has never left me, the feeling that in this land that was someone else’s country, I did not have a place to stand.’
