nighttime

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Sometimes at night I like to talk to myself in the dark, on the way home, on my bike and then Berlin you drive me crazy with desire for you, the trees which flicker over my back like beetles’ wings, going light and dark, light and heavy, all three at once

Last night was an event called The Long Night of the Design Studios in which studios threw their doors open and invited people to come look. Cheeses were carved on raw plywood platters and I saw a girl in a filmy white dress carving chunks off an entire pig’s leg. The night before, DMY design […]

Long night ride home between the trees, the trees, the trees. They are dark and tall and reach down into the night, yearning away wild from the centre of the earth its boiling core. They are reaching the night down for us on earth, in whispers, like kindly adults explaining something magical to children. My […]

Berlin by night. Candles in the windows of quiet roadside bars. Soundless cyclists ignoring the lights. Puddles from the rain glinting under the trees, on the path alongside the canal. Pizza restaurant which has set out a yard full of benches and long trestle tables since I was here last, which was the end of […]

Things you can do in silence, in the dark. Cycling alone under trees, flicker, flicker. Watching petals fall in flakes of tiny silver alight on the black liquid wind. Swinging on a swing someone’s fixed to a low bough overhanging the water, the wind rushing gently and softly as cat’s paws past your ears.  

It’s 11pm. Went for a bedtime walk around the road with my friend and host. Most of the houses are dark and in one or two windows are lights. Don’t other people’s houses entice when it is late and one longs for one’s bed. A tree along the highway has burst into bloom. “I like […]

Well, I’m never leaving here. Restaurant down some tiny steps with a hand-lettered menu in the window and a tiny castle built out of corks. On ordering sardines what you get is a plate piled with whole grilled fish and a small mound of potatoes, boiled then tossed in butter. Everything perfectly simple. We ordered […]

Cycling home under a high full moon through a dark city so cold it’s as though the streets stand motionless under water. Northern Europe, cradle of so many things, including me. The buildings stand serene on street corners, unafraid of waiting. Traffic sporadic, roads wide and smooth, trees utterly leafless with branches standing separate and […]

Went out to a bar with a new friend who is musical, Tuesday nights is quiet night in Berlin so we walked and walked, trampling snow that had reached that pearly soiled colour that is not grey nor is it brown… so beautiful, it’s my new favourite colour, most of the restaurants were closed and […]

I’m in Copenhagen. It’s so beautiful. Went out walking in the albert-full moon and feel I am finally in Europe. Everything built is fine & old, and all of the landscape is sculpted. The soil is dark and seems fine & light, beautiful Country in a solemn, calm, minimalist sense, more dry South Australia than […]

Tonight I saw the moon for the first time in ages and my heart caught fire from its coldness. Only a more-or-less moon, more than a morsel and less than a round, most of its pearl face unhidden by us. Severely it rode the dark blackwater sky. All about me everything was frozen.