Lethal Text on Substack, X

This is still my main site, where I publish new work, but I’m archiving selected pieces on Substack (including that memory-holed piece). Seems sensible to diversify a little, and try to expose my rather diverse lockdown writings. In the winter of 2019 I was melting my boots in brushfires in Isan, and writing about climate. […]

THAT FACEHUGGER MASK

PARIJAH DIARIES 16 https://nerdist.com/article/leather-alien-facehugger-mask/ I’ll never forget the first time I saw Riddley Scott’s Alien. In 1979 I was in London, studying for a PGCE at a college in Richmond, and having a free afternoon I took a train into the centre to watch a movie. I’d been attracted by those posters featuring that weird […]

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR LOVELOCK

OR, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love CO2 James Ephraim Lovelock was the much honoured British scientist famous for a beautiful and irresistible idea known as the Gaia hypothesis. Dr Lovelock was a self-made man in the best tradition of scientists of a previous age. His parents were poor, and he financed his […]

THE QUANTUM EVASION

PARIJAH DIARIES 15 It’s not surprising, I suppose. To look squarely at what is happening in the world at this time is extremely disturbing, and people have quickly evolved reasons for not doing so — even in my unvaccinated circles. At least a couple of people — one vaccinated, one not — have asked me, […]

A VACCINE VIETNAM

PARIJAH DIARIES 14 And let us not speak falsely now, for the hour is getting late. –Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower In the garden at Bohemia there’s a brick circle laid into the gravel, and some months ago a young man called Theo fashioned a perfect yinyang inside it, using pale brown pebbles and […]

VACCINE MY ASS

PARIJAH DIARIES 10 Chiney has friends, if you know what I mean, and he can get away with some things, to a degree. He would never boast about it, and knows the wisdom of making yourself seem smaller than you are. He had to close during the draconian lockdowns of 2020, and was forced to […]

BUT THEN AGAIN, WHAT DOES?

PARIJAH DIARIES 8 My life is a dream. That’s what it feels like, more and more. Has done for a while; the last few years, at least. Paradoxically, I think that’s how life should feel; how reality feels if you are actually in it. It’s a measure: the more you live in reality, the more […]

THE LOTTERY

PARIJAH DIARIES 5 That gruesome quiet got inside me too, eventually. I have to shake it off. I had a friend who worked in theatre, and between jobs he used to drive trucks, and sometimes he had to drive a truck-load of cattle to the abbatoir. Most of the journey was on the motorway, but […]