On nights when the moon was covered by cloud, foxes would rip through the colony killing every bird in their path. In the morning Bob would sift through the destruction with his dissection kit, picking out the shell-less eggs from the oviducts of dead gulls. He’d boil them up for his two friends and they’d eat breakfast in a caravan parked on the beach. They each lived in their own tent, pitched on the sandbanks near Sellafield. For months at a time, over a period of three years, Bob lived here collecting findings for his thesis ‘The functional significance of epigamic colouration in Larus ridibundus’ or why black headed gulls have black heads.
13 May 2012
Damian met his wife at 19, they were married a few years later and in the same year their daughter Zeyna was born. There were the usual excitements, heightened by this being their only child, of her first steps, her first words and the loss of her first milk tooth. Zeyna was very deliberate, even at aged four, in giving the tooth to her father. This was for him and no-one else was to have it. The marriage had faltered and a year later it ended. Zeyna is 11 now, Damian only sees her once a week but her tooth is always with him, hanging from the rear view mirror of his cab.
06 May 2012
Laura is a shopgirl, she lives in a shop. The frontage is long gone and the betting slips and the shouting, the smell of bread too, it was a bakery before it became a betting shop in the 60s. When Laura was at college, home was another old shop, an off license on the Brighton sea front. The vast shop floor was used for parties, bands set up on the ground floor and DJs played in the basement. Living in the old offy made her more conscious of shops, in particular of their signage, the painted drop shadows and the ‘open’ signs with back to front letters scratched onto paper. She’s had her own sign made in neon. Like the handwritten ones she loved, tacked to various doors, this one has a back to front N. It hangs in her home waiting for the day she opens her very own shop.
29 Apr 2012
Reg’s grandmother Lily was one of 14. The girls slept inside a caravan and the boys slept outside between the axles. Their mum and dad bedded down in a tent. Lily married young, her new husband was a fighter. He fought 15 matches a day, each of 3 rounds, their travelling boxing ring provided income to the young family. Their son Reg grew up in the ring and began fighting at age 6. When war broke out petrol rationing forced gypsy families into a sedentary existence. Reg’s family settled in Bristol. They soon attracted the attention of the local education officer. Reg would have to go to school. His dad insisted that if he was to have a formal education it had to be the best. Bristol Cathedral School was prohibitively expensive but the headmaster said Reg could have a place if he could beat the school’s best boxer. At aged 13 Reg knocked out the school’s 19 year old champion. Years later Reg and Peggy had a son, Reg (Junior). The tiny boxing gloves were a present from father to newborn son. To this day Reg has never raised a fist.
22 Apr 2012
Tiggy’s childhood was characterised by a lot of not much. Her dad’s garage repaired more tractors than cars. Tiggy would note down the number plates of any cars that did pass through their small village but they were always the same few vehicles. The stable cost of petrol in the 50s meant that the signwriter rarely visited to re-paint the price on the pumps and when a glowing National Benzol sign was installed, showing the helmeted head of Mercury, a neighbour called to report seeing a fire across the flat Norfolk fields. To keep his three girls occupied Tiggy’s father would instruct them to find a stone with a hole on the gravelled forecourt. These stones were lucky. As children they never found a lucky stone but Tiggy has continued the search into adulthood, this is her collection.
15 Apr 2012
Caroline assumed ‘Delia’ was a friend of her mother-in-laws given how often she entered conversation, by contrast her own mother and grandmother were both doctors and food at the end of a working day was simply fuel. When Caroline moved to London in 2000 her curiosity and greed had her crossing the city to buy ingredients, travelling was less about sight-seeing and more about seeking out the most interesting places and things to eat. She discovered a ‘beautifully ugly’ cake, the antithesis of the cloying prettiness of a cup cake. It looked like it was made of squashed flies but tasted of creamy butter and delicately sweet spice. Caroline still makes the special trip to buy Eccles cakes and they still take her back to the excitement of when she first moved to the city.
08 Apr 2012
Subscribe to RSS
Follow us on Twitter
