iotacism 2025

I spent a few weeks in Quatre Fours about five years ago after my father died. I’d already had enough of the dusty converted farmhouse where he’d lived with his third wife for a decade. She was a generous maternal…

Where the crossroads at the Star Inn bends left at Mombassastrasse, the green and gold confections of the St Riel proper turn grey with the dust of diesel fumes, and the old weed-infested railway tracks run lonely twenty miles along…

Where an eyebrow of cloud shaded the Isle of Sheppey from the white indifference of the sky, halfway between the grey oblong of estuary and the twin lines of the railway, we were caught by silly gusts of wet wind…

It all started like so many nights: Buying a ticket from a tout outside the tramshed at the top end of Mombassastrasse, realising that he’d sold me a kid’s four zone pass, catching up with the fucker as he fast-walked…

“How much longer have I got, Doc?” Soma Jones said, putting his shirt back on over his spare and awkward frame. “Well, as far as I can tell, Mr Jones, there’s nothing much wrong with you. At worst I’d give…

it was not without difficulty that i travelled back from folkstone to the big city. train services had been crippled by a top heavy management structure and repeated de- and re-nationalizations by several london patriarchs. above and beyond this were the barely…

Soma Jones strode purposefully across the leaf-littered late September of his patched and pasted always. It was another early afternoon and a cooling breeze rattled the branches, filtering a pomegranate dying sun on his cloth capped head. He sighed with…

I’m afraid that I choked on my wine when one of the exchange students asked: “Are we going to fight the reds, Monsieur Tossio?” Jean-Pierre was a fresh faced youth who was looking forward to his bac’ in the summer.…