I recently performed a monologue, a ‘verbatim piece’ made up of extracts of the last written words of people who had taken their own lives. I was grateful to the surviving family members for allowing me such intimate access to such a painful and personal artefact.

It is Remembrance Sunday, 1030am and we stop, my family and I; two kids, two dogs no excuses, prompted by a display of parochial magnificence, poppies, flags and a sign reads “hot squash” these two words mashed together

For Jade March 27th, 2009 When my Mum first got cancer I must’ve been around the age Jade’s eldest son is now. Too young, in fact, to properly comprehend what was happening, only old enough to...

The foreward I wrote for Martino Sclavi’s book: It is eerily joyful to write a foreword to Martino Sclavi’s book The Finch in My Brain, because five years ago I accepted that he was going

“It’s coming home” has become a summertime idiom, replacing “Hello” as my standard greeting, the “Under His Eye” of this heliocentric inversion of the Hand Maid’s hell in which we are all now...

Well I wasn’t expecting that, were you? The mad and sudden flux of adrenaline, the gush, the knackering rush. Together alone men took their tops off and Love Island was fucked off for Gareth...

We have no meaningful wars now. Economic to the last drone-spilled drop. No principle, no patriotism in slinking off to some resource-rich-ragged land and maiming their children. Perhaps there...

When you were a kid, did you, in an appealing re-imagining of the four times table, work out your age at projected future World Cups? In Mexico ’86, when I first became ‘World Cup aware’,

Bloody hell, Love Island! What a show, what a thrill, what a seething crucible of sex and power all jammed into a hot, fake-tanned, half hour on ITV2. Forgive the zeal of the newly converted but

The NHS, it does so much and yet it means much more. When our churches just provide sets for weddings and politics provides, well, you know, where are we to project some sense of worthy...

Sometimes there is a news story that has a power that reaches beyond the material facts, even if those facts are in themselves potent.

The possibility of voting for a politician that offers change seems oddly exotic. Jeremy Corbyn has somehow been in politics for decades with his integrity perfectly preserved like his much-derided beard has functioned as hairy formaldehyde for his principles.

The fierce and insular insanity of the perpetrator. I am baffled by the scope of our human capacity to feel or not feel. To love or not love. To kill.

It is eerie and gruesome that advances in home video technology facilitated the mundane chronicling of lives that had yet to become remarkable.

The conservatives are such cinematic villains, the Etonian gits with their Freudian slips; the “West Villa United” supporting, “career-defining”, Darth Vader toffs. If you’re auditioning for heads on spikes “come the great day”, there’s no competition.

On first viewing the jarring retro-metro-racism seems like a good reason to condemn the denizens of Stamford Bridge.

This violence now though has the eerie familiarity and bilious dread of a recurring nightmare and can be pieced together with weary glances at airport lounge TVs, foreign newspapers and despairing texts from troubled friends.