Two Ballinas I have in mind though they are separately pronounced — the Irish one is “Balli-na”. We drove straight through it unannounced. The place was cold with Sunday cars all parked and no one on the streets. I thought about the one back home, flowering in its liquid heat. Geoff Page

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Switzerland’s a courtyard garden; Germany’s an old estate; Switzerland runs right on time; German trains are sometimes late. Switzerland’s a living postcard; Germany does not quite care, its beauty almost accidental, rejoicing in some disrepair. Geoff Page

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This is luxury I’ve never knownoutside certain books I’ve read. Beautiful girls take my clothes off And then take me to my bed. A paradise for a lazy man Who likes a woman’s touch. Perhaps I’ll read something later. Now, I’m doing nothing much. A Regal time. For such a reward I must have been […]

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Visiting her Kentish cousins, partner’s only, not my own, I feel the stories ramify, an unsought gift I have on loan: stories of their vanished parents— and ten steps even further back I share some DNA in Bromley just three stations up the track. Geoff Page

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How is it that the French keyboard requires two key strokes per full stop? You’re waiting in a cheap hotel for the other shoe to drop. French sentences habitually are prone to languidly extend until, with ennui, one wonders how just two strokes could make them end. Geoff Page

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I coveted the pretty ornament. Like a child I wanted the sweet colours, the crimps, the curls. I wanted it for no reason, or for no good reason. I was walking among the detritus when the market closed. The coathangers were driftwood, the defeated, lonely shoe stranded by the tide, billowing newspapers yards of airy […]

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Suddenly I’ve been persuaded to buy myself a “codger cap”— or that is how I think of it. It makes me feel a different chap, the way its says so clearly “English” but of what class I’m not quite sure. Worker down the pub in Sheffield? Gentry shooting on the moor? Geoff Page

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It’s strange how often all through Europe names don’t quite mean what they should; towns say something else in English— the locals think that Bad is good. Zutphen is a case in point. It ought to mean a little bird that flies low over marshes fast. As just a town it is absurd. Geoff Page

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“And what will these boys do when we close our eyes for good and they’ll have to fetch for themselves?” My mother used to say it to no one in particular, at home, in the shop, wherever she stepped. Not to me, who am still here, and have seen lots of wars and disasters, sickness, […]

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Do the names of English towns deliver what they seem to mean? A century of economics is summarised in Milton Keynes. And Leighton Buzzard, not far off, is somehow waiting to be fed. One sees a sky fill up with shadows waiting for the freshly dead. Geoff Page

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