Alone that following morning I had my breakfast, got picked up and whisked away in The Chancellors car to The Cedar Court Hotel in Wakefield where I spent the day and evening writing an article for a future book on performance poetry. It's all rock and roll eh. Twenty four hours alone in an hotel writing an article called Lost In Action can have an effect. Read more [...]

After each visit from Margaret which took place in the sports hall I was strip searched. I was a child that had been in care for seventeen years is all. It was a harrowing institution. We had to walk the corridors in size order. Read more [...]

I take the five hour hour journey from one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world to Lilliput. I have two matchsticks holding my eyes open. The moment the car moves skirts off the motorway it is as if I have moved into my past. Memories are everywhere, on every street corner of leigh, this angry little town. It’s the kind of place that people in the cities are barely aware of. But it’s towns like this one that Thatcher was determined to break in the eighties – the mill town and pit towns. My towns. Read more [...]

I’d met a few, but circumstances of childhood meant that I didn’t really know a black person until I was seventeen. I was known throughout the Lilliputian mill and pit towns of Leigh Atherton and Tyldsley as Chalky White. This became shortened to Chalky. And apparently I had a “lovely smile”. I was reminded daily that with a smile like mine you could “see me in the dark”. Read more [...]