They lived in London at the end of the nineteen eighties. His wife was twenty-four. He was twenty-six. In her job, she earned eleven thousand pounds a year, and he earned thirteen thousand pounds a year.
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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.
‘I liked his humourless intelligence, so redundant and so excessive in an MP.’
‘Something slightly odd united us at times: a form of cruelty.’
Fiction by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson.
‘you dreamt of the CUNY / Graduate Center library / on fire, you dove in to save Stalin’s / copy of Capital’
Poetry by Kay Gabriel.
‘I won’t say that the mood of a scene doesn’t affect me, but I’m not the translating equivalent of a Method actor.’
