Alistair Elliot

Here hedges used to move off thoughtfully, at an angle, like green sheep in single file, or seemed to. Now they really have, taking the grass as well, leaving the land stripped to the buff.

What we see is pure substrate, the abstract thing plants grow on, the start-line of a calculation. I think it is a dusty mat someone has spread on the slow ocean of rock. Is this my planet?

The wind is...

Everyone calls it Arthuritis. He has lost the power of bending, the old king father of gods and men, and sits on a low throne by the window, apparently meditating in profile, a memorial coin of sadness as we come carrying our seats.

To me he has never before been Arthur: I saw him through his unused name, so fitting for a father born in a Scottish Eden: Adam. Caught in the unfamiliar foetal...

There are some small shops left. The name over the door was half a physics textbook. A little bell announced me. I began by showing that my watch, or time itself, had worn away its strap, the animal skin that holds the disc of Chronos where I see it.

The man was older than me, and grey where I am reddish, the pommettes not ripened by glances of the sun: a prisoner of commerce in his twilit...

Late afternoon on the prairie. We were looking for birds. My old friend Michael was amazed at what we said we saw: such far-off dots, how could we pick them out? still less remark, ‘eastern and western kingbirds.’ We all three wore specs. ‘You must have great peripheral vision,’ he finally pronounced – as if we scanned the field like radar with a...

You switch it on, pour out a cup of tea, drink it, and finally sounds of outer space clearing its throat blow from the vizored face; pause; then the swelling voice of history refills our kitchen from the BBC.

I daren’t retune it: set before the war on Home, it doesn’t know it’s Radio Four. It never knew the Third, or Radio Three. It had the Light, but mostly what has stained the...