Matthew Sweeney

Why does the horse stand there staring at the horizon? Is it waiting on some rider arriving by car from the airport? Isn’t its grass enough for it and the freedom of the field?

Oblivious to midges and nightfall it snorts and hoofs the ground, tail tossing like a fly swat, but those big sad eyes still focus on that bend in the road.

Perhaps it dreams of galloping all the way to the...

St Francis didn’t speak German to the robins he fed, nor did Scott as he trudged through the snow, but I did as I crossed the border to Alsace-Lorraine all that winter of ‘77, to dine on choucroute, stock up on wine – bootfuls of it – and bring back ripe munster to stink out the shared fridge on that final 13th floor of the Studenten Wohnheim, from whose...

I’m going back to the ice hotel, this time under a false name as I need to stay there again.

I’ll stand in the entrance hall, marvelling at this year’s design, loving the way it can’t be the same

because ice melts and all here is ice – the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the seats in the lobby, the bed.

Not that I lay on naked ice, but on the skins of reindeers,...

For the umpteenth time I looked out at the sea but there was nothing to catch my eye, just a man wheeling a barrow up the beach. I looked again, frisking the whole expanse for a ship, a boat, any floating debris but all I saw was a cat in the marram grass slinking towards three rabbits playing. The waves were apologetic on the shingle, after the excesses of the previous night, and the sun had...

For Tom Lynch

Let’s go back to Mullett Lake in March and have a picnic on the ice. Let’s wrap up like Inuits, and meet three miles north of Indian River, where the jetty stands in summer front of 577 Grandview Beach. We’ll cram in Lynch’s vintage hearse and motor slowly out onto the ice, where I’ll spread my blue tablecloth and as it darkens...