I haven’t had a thought since May, apparently. Time moves differently in Athens. At the start of June, a giant invisible hand in the sky pours superheated molasses over the entire city, arresting all plans and visions and individual acts of creative expression until October comes along with a hammer and chisel to free the population and blow a soothing wind through our minds.
Seriously, when I swapped Berlin’s freezing winters for the Mediterranean, I didn’t reckon with the fact that Greek summers would prove to be so punishing. When it is 38 to 45 degrees outside for weeks on end, there is simply no way to remain productive. Even writing 500 words a day becomes an impossible dream; that is, unless you wait until the dead hours to do it. And as the weeks slide by and you find yourself up and down throughout the night anyway - whether to fumble desperately for the air conditioning because you’ve sweated through your mattress topper and you can’t breathe or to grope for the OFF switch because you set the system to 16 degrees when you went to bed and now you’re freezing - you do indeed start to write in that solitary darkness. A paragraph here, a few lines there. Anything to make sure you don’t quit entirely. At the end of summer you look back over your text and see you’ve managed just 8,000 words in three months and your heart sinks. You vow that next year you’ll do as the locals do and decamp to an island where it is 10 degrees cooler and you no longer exist in a concrete sauna.
Anyway, enough of that. It isn’t all bad. At least I’ve had plenty of time to collect ideas and sketch out future projects. And from now until April, I can write freely again. Without sweat, without mosquitos, without havintg to take a break every five minutes to glug water or close my laptop down because it is at risk of melting.
And so to news: I mentioned in May that I’d had four poems accepted for a publication called hatred is a bitter fruit that was funded by the Arts Council England. Well, it turns out the project was a full book and the book is beautiful. Available in an edition of 1,000 copies in two jacket covers (black and white), it was edited by writer, installation artist, poet, curator and photographer Jacqueline Ennis Cole. I have four copies, and I was delighted with the finished product. I’m willing to give two copies away (one black, one white), so if anyone would like one, get in touch and I’ll forward it on.
In other news, the SIILK art residency in Crete went fantastically well. We had the following contributions:
The first public listening of the new album by electronic artist Blue Loop (including the video of the first single, The Knife). I believe the full album is out this month, but here’s my favourite song, Cycles.
A reading in English and Greek of several poems from the collection Tenderness and Other Ferocities by Panagiota Mitiou.
A screening of the film The Trap by John Maloney.
The first public listening of the debut album by singer-songwriter Julius Claussen (release date TBA, but here’s his most-played track from his previous long-term project)
A showing of the photography project ‘Paths’ by photographer and image editor Julia Johanning (formerly of Der Spiegel), which has since been exhibited in Berlin
The unveiling of the residency’s official artwork, which was developed by illustrator Ania Wachnik over the two weeks.
I also read excerpts from my latest manuscript, which I swear I’ll come back to once I’m done with the screenplay that Searchlight Pictures asked for back in March and that they’ve almost certainly forgotten about. All in all, it was a fantastic experience, and a second edition is slowly taking shape for 2026.
Book of the month: The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy. Christ, this book is frustrating. On the one hand you have classic Cormac: a Gary Cooper strong, silent, hypermasculine deep sea diver who knows all about quantum mechanics, drives around, says little and seems to be five steps ahead of everyone else, and on the other you have a Pynchonesque, near-stream-of-consciousness narrative about a dead girl’s schizophrenic hallucinations. In my opinion it doesn’t work, but I suppose it’s commendable that the old man was willing to push the limits of his craft well into his eighties.
Album of the month: Through the Wall by Rochelle Jordan. Maybe slightly superior to Play With the Changes? A slinky latex bodysuit of an album, best enjoyed with a cigarette and a glass of ouzo with ice.
Film of the month: The Loveless, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery. It marked the debuts of both Bigelow and Willem Dafoe, and it is fascinatingly dull. Literally nothing happens: a biker gang blazes into a nothing town because one of their party needs to repair his bike, and then…we sit and watch as his bike gets repaired and the rest of them drink and mildly harrass the locals because they’re bored. Then at the end someone gets shot. I truly have no idea how a producer read the script and thought “Yep, that’s celluloid gold right there”. Don’t get me wrong: the cinematography and choice of shots are fantastic, and Willem Dafoe is just as magnetic in his first big screen outing as he would turn out to be all through his career, but it is bizarre to watch a film where thirty minutes of the slender runtime is given to the bikers having breakfast in a diner and not saying much.
See you next month in March 2027!
For the October Wide Awake Club:
