Category: Fiction

The weather is congenial with the sun blazing. Now she leans onto the railing, stretches her back forward, lifts her head towards the brightest part of the translucent blue sky.

I’m drawn to places where lines blur between the natural and the man-made: a smoking slagheap transformed into a green hill, a brick alleyway into a garden, an eco-roundhouse with flowers growing on its roof

Have you, like me, ever been stopped in your tracks by something or someone beautiful? If it’s a person, I’ll steal a second or third glance at him or her, amazed that this specimen of our species can be so arresting, can so impact on me just because of their bone structure, their stance.

Fine-grained urbanism doesn’t hijack your attention; it invites you in. You don’t view it, you live it – calling to mind Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum about architecture being an art whose reception “is consummated […] in a state of distraction.” We often think of beauty as something to be contemplated at a remove. Like life, though, beauty can be something that simply happens while you’re busy making other plans.

Derek McMillan The Stranger We don’t get many strangers in our village. Truth to tell I don’t...