Sample I: Editorial Musings
Congratulations, all! We’ve made it thus far, and the world has not ended. Considering all the fuss (in inexplicably good cheer, for the most part!), don’t be too hard on yourself if you cringed inwardly when the 21st dawned. The folks in the XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXX are not the sort to leave things to chance, and we got worried enough to assemble this special ‘mini’ edition of our online publication; ready for release upon the slightest hint of Earth-clobbering ruin. For how could we allow the world to end without sharing as many new literary pieces as possible? In this we have only you, our readers, to thank. Your presence and your submissions make XXXXXX possible.
Speaking of the end of days, it is no secret that much of life’s value derives from its very transience. The apocalyptic notion therefore stands to induce macabre but mawkishly beautiful contemplation. Certainly it gives us pause and turns our attention upon such things in life as we find truly valuable. In the face of routine existence even a moment of such pondering can work wonders to remind us of who we are, why we do what we do, and whether things would best be changed. Of course it can also cast you into a pit of despair… but that is merely the other extreme.
Now, one of my guiltily trite indulgences – something I’d rather like to invite everyone to consider – is the question of where one would most rather be two days before it all ends. I propose two days because most of us would probably dedicate the last one wholly to friends and family… which isn’t particularly good for being in a place one would most rather be, because no two individuals share quite the same opinion on the matter (if you see what I mean).
Anyhow, where would you rather be? Sometimes this takes a jot of imagination. Though our partialities change throughout our lives I suppose that I, for the moment at least, wish to be in the night sky gliding behind a bird. Does this sound absurd? Perhaps you’re wondering if I wouldn’t go plummeting into oblivion, but with the end of the world approaching let us give verisimilitude the rest it deserves.
As to the bird, I don’t rightly know what manner of avian he is – pelican, stork, or albatross – but it won’t do to look too much into it. It is enough to note that he is eight feet from wingtip to wingtip, that his plumage glints sleek and silver-white in the depths of night. I can see him suspended effortlessly above a calm, flat, moonlit sea. Not a feather upon his noble frame stirs: vulgar flapping is for the pigeons and the crows.
Well this deity of the skies soars on amid his shimmering curtains of stars, his titanic mansions of cloud, and I am more than content to tag along. One cannot know how old he is, how many times he’s circled the globe and how many things he’s seen. He is a brave one, this creature… but he is as lonely as he is brave. At any rate he must not ever look back. We seek a tiny island now, lost out there beneath that great blue moon; the night is young, and it is to be the first of many stops on our voyage. Upon that isle there is just room enough for a tree, and when I finally tire I will set myself to rest in the pastel shade of its fine, softly rustling leaves; spread my limbs in sweet exhaustion upon grass that grows between its roots as if a thick, cool rug. A hint of mist will curl at my toes, and as I gaze out across the sea I fancy I’ll be able see every ripple that caresses its immense, silent expanse.
…thank you for bearing with me. Places like these live within us all, and no two of them are the same. This, of course, can only testify to the incredible richness and variety of the human experience. All the more discomfiting, then, to remember just how little we seem to matter amid the untold vastness of the cosmos. Human egomania and centeredness are forces to reckon with, and it is easy to forget that doomsday for us need not be doomsday for anything remotely significant to the universe. As we are nothing to the Earth, so is the Earth nothing to the solar system; and so is the solar system, in turn, nothing to the Milky Way (and the Milky Way nothing to galactic clusters and the universe as a whole). As Ian Malcolm would assert, even the Earth lives and breathes on a much vaster scale than we do, chronologically or otherwise. It has survived environmental calamities far worse than what we credit ourselves with, and it will certainly not miss us when we are gone. Nor will the galaxy miss the Earth, should any trivial cosmic accident dispatch it tomorrow. Not when you’d need a million Earths to fill a space the size of the sun, and somewhere in the region of seven billion suns to do likewise for the largest known star.
In short, then: humanity is incredibly small, incredibly transient, incredibly vulnerable, and perhaps just as objectively unremarkable. The world is really so much more than our everyday perspectives. We are but another frail narrative thread in the grand scheme of things, and on an island as small as Singapore, in a region as provincial as Southeast Asia, on a planet as modest as Earth, in a neighbourhood as ordinary as the solar system… this can be a challenge to see.
So what, you ask, is my point? Is it to belittle said human experience, and in doing so dismiss literature – our collective record of it?
Well, all I really hope to support is a dash of enlightening, liberating humility… as well as the understanding that the very fragility of our race makes everything we achieve just that more precious. If life were forever, we would not treasure it; if humanity were everything, we would not matter. For better or worse, this is how things are appraised. I daresay we are valuable because our kind is unique, and can be lost all too easily. Our egomania often leads us to such intellectual barriers as the SETI-dogging carbon chauvinism (the parochial conviction that life anywhere else has to stem from that element and, by extension, require such Earthly things as liquid water and temperatures on the lower half of the Celsius scale). It also obliges us to impose any number of unabashedly human physical and emotional traits on hypothetical aliens in our journals and fiction. This is all very well, but it does not change how overwhelmingly likely it is that our demise would take with it every trace of what would pass today as human.
…except, of course, the things we leave behind. Sweeping, decaying cityscapes swiftly assimilating into the landscape. Dark, silent satellites with steadily deteriorating orbits… fields of space trash. Maybe the odd ‘unbreakable’ smartphone case.
How would extra-terrestrial archaeologists judge the primitive technology they’d supposedly unearth? Technical accomplishment is ever-so-important, but there is no copyright for it. It can really only go forwards (or backwards, come to that). It is good or bad, archaic or relevant. It is a means to an end, and any alien civilisation may seek and surpass it.
Not so, with art. Human art cleaves to a unique, one-off mould that shall never be replicated. So no, if the world were to end I will not mourn for the devices that haven’t been invented. I will mourn for the stories that haven’t been told, the symphonies that haven’t been written, the paintings that’ll never see light, the plays and musicals that will never hear applause.
This is why the aesthetics are precious.
Every motif composed, every stanza penned, every tribal mask painted, every cathedral carved and pieced stone-by-stone over decades… these comprise our heritage. They, as with our emotions, help make each one of us much more than a fellowship of molecules working in sentient concert for the fleeting span of a human life. And I am proud of that heritage; we all are, after our own fashion. It heartens me that those at the forefront of SETI are realising this, that they are incorporating music and artwork into radio messages beamed across the galaxy. Yes, the likes of Beethoven, Vivaldi, Gershwin, sundry cultural songs, the Beatles – they are playing in the darkness of interstellar space. They may take tens of thousands of years to get anywhere, though. Truth be told, they look set to outlive us all. The same goes for the ‘Golden Records’: phonograph music and images enshrined in the forlorn, aptly-named Voyager probes. Let us hope any audience they might conceivably reach bears no resemblance to the Independence Day variety.
“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”
US President Jimmy Carter, of the Golden Records
Allow us the honour, then, of introducing a handful of new pieces that contribute (however subtly, and in whichever way their authors intended) to that aforementioned human heritage. The smallest collection of prose and poetry can speak volumes and go places. We are fortunate to be able to share one with you.
Justin Tan
Executive Editor
24th December, 2012
Personal work from Finding Calais, 2019
Sample II: On Malendar
Travel writer Munse Egbert wrote, ‘The prow of a mighty, steep-sided plateau rose from a gently curling sea of cloud. It spread like a Fakhlan rug before a noble crag that stood between it and the glowering banks of brume that threatened to brim and wash down over it all. But covering the rug itself, another carpet: a gleaming one of construction, bristling with proud spires. From this distance one already sees how each was tall and stately as it was massive. Each met the sun in warm hues of bronze, copper, and gold, from immersed feet to tapering tips — a half-mile high, the greater ones were, yet none made more than a trifling contribution to the scale of the Gilded City. The skyscrapers of Malendar had always reached up, up out of the welter of brick, limestone and glass, reached to outdo their neighbours for a greater share of the sun’s grandeur. And around that shimmer of countless buildings – from the shoaling, darting specks that were planes to the quiet drifting leviathans that were unmistakeably the great dirigibles – aircraft, scores of aircraft once you looked close enough, the planes jostling and diving into the mass of construction, the airships – some trailing vivid billboards that would’ve covered a city block – lounging among the spires, circling lazily in clear skies, clustering to mast wherever city dropped off into cloud.
That plateau – properly a ‘mesa’ to the thriving geographical societies operating from it – that was Calenbar. Upon it, Malendar: capital of Federate Iara. When the sun slants into golden hour on a clear day, Malendar resembles a sheer-sided isle of jewels in the heavens. Sunlight, sparing nothing from the splendour of its touch, glances not only off the city, but in shades of brilliant ochre off the exposed plateau walls.
Other times the cloudsea rises to engulf the city, and all its souls with it. For full days at end one might be shrouded in wet, gray, chill murk too thick to drive a cart in. There will be little colour to speak of. No plane will fly, and such airships as can will have to grab and be dragged around dim urban fissures by straining locomotives. Malendar’s legion foglights will be roused to do battle with the murk, and in the white veil that follows, pilferers and misfits will in some districts outnumber the regular publick. One must be doughty to walk the streets then; most will quite sensibly prefer not to descend at all, but to strike for as many sky bridges as one needs to board the nearest el…’
So much has been and can yet be written of the gilded city; Egbert’s is but one account. This seemingly impossible place has grown over the centuries around foundations that have had to be reworked and strengthened with each generation passed. The plateau Calenbar’s largely rocky interior, in places brittle and porous, is now a fifth steel and concrete by volume, an amount which must surely increase until less than half of the original substrate remains. Five elevators the size of ocean liners shuttle goods and sundry to and from docks a mile and a half below; there steamers ply a maze of rivers and lakes lapping wanly through the gorges and caverns that radiate wildly across and under otherwise dry, barren tracts of land. A trip on an elevator is quite the experience. You leave the chill draughts and (often enough, at least) dazzling clarity of Malendar, plunge into the mile-thick, shifting innards of beleaguering clouds, and emerge in the span of a few minutes into a dusty, yellowed, stifling warm underworld. Few people care to live or work here; it is called ‘Wastes’ or ‘Lifeless Plains’ for good reason, and is littered with dead factories, dead towns, derelict engines, and the occassional shanty. Anyhow, one cannot go very far on the waters that snake furtively about this land. Excepting the one tributary that manages only just to reach the next state Eadar, they serve only the far towns of the metropolitan region before vanishing underground.
No, Malendar’s panCarigian interests are better served by rail and, better yet, by air…
Sample III: Patreon Extract. April 8th, 2020
Hi Society,
Here's me flitting back to my other project, Pastel Skycubes, for a while. I'm getting the project up to full steam this year, but (apart from event cancellation woes) there's so much to do! In a nutshell, skycubes is 'retro-oriental nostalgia from a windswept, watery far future'. Alot of the work for skycubes is my way of acknowledging the now-vanishing world that was Singapore (and, by extension, the far east in general) back when it began to seriously gain confidence and optimism in its future. In Singapore at least, the brutalist architectural style was prevalent at that time — a VERY controversial style with the critics, and one frequently hailed as objectively ugly by people I would otherwise readily agree with on matters of aesthetic philosophy. Brutalism can perhaps be characterised as 'imposing functionality' and was, despite itself, still classically informed and disciplined with its application of theory. The mighty, regular, slate gray edifices it spawned were emphatically not like the self-indulgent frivolity that has given us today's explosion of formless, twisting, anti-Vitruvian skyscrapers. 'Beauty', however, was something the brutalists wanted no part in, and a fair bit of why I enjoy working on Skycubes is that no matter how much architects of the time professed to shun it, beauty crept in nonetheless. Drawing a 20th-century cityscape is an exercise in finding the beautiful amid pragmatism and the huffy eschewal of ornament.
But I get ahead of myself :) In the instagram post of this piece, I asked if anyone familiar with the Singaporean cityscape knew which building had informed it. Between you and me, the answer is Turf City (now known as 'The Grandstand'). Here's a link to a google streetview shot of it.
Turf City is (I would argue) definitive brutalism. It is a monumental, imposing statement of spartan practicality, but informed by the spirit of wonder. The child who looks upon it yearns to explore it; knows there are secrets to discover. I was that child when I was 13, when my school bussed us there for the cross-country races (no not horses: boys). I wasn't in the cross-country team, and the lowering skies and intermittent drizzle sent teachers and staff into disarray... which meant I swiftly disappeared with two to three other boys into the dim, hulking wilderness of concrete. Not one of the hundreds of corners we stumbled on was the same. Steam, roaring ventilators, splashes of garish neon, seafood restaurants and bubbling aquaria; canvas awnings, dim stairwells, whole abandoned floors, echoing concourses and galleries, emporiums and markets and malls thronged with people.. a modern, air-conditioned supermarket people ducked into from the rain. It seemed that every door, every passage, opened into a space wholly different from the last, and at the top of the pile: a sweeping view over miles of track country, and dark jungle beyond, replete with feral cries and the hollow boom of skin drums (okay, the cries and the drums were from the seniors, cheering the runners on).
I realise now that the effect of the place on my child's curious, was almost certainly intentional. In those days, achieving an absorbing variety in one's experience of a site was a prime concern of architects of commercial and public spaces. Landmark developments like People's Park Complex, Golden Mile Complex, and Bukit Timah Mall were designed to provide a certain labyrinthine complexity radiating from relaxingly open central atria. There was rental space allotted for businesses of all sizes, types, and degrees of permanence, ranging from department stores and floor-wide travel agencies, through to kiosks so small vendors could not sit inside of them.
As with Finding Calais, one of the messages that comes with Pastel Skycubes is that the past provides an absolute treasure trove of things we've already learnt, that we can put to good use for the future. In our quest for better, we don't have to constantly discard and dismiss things we've done before. The lived environment affects us profoundly, and there is a lot of room to apply old lessons while keeping the spirit of invention very much alive.
~ Alright, ramble over :) 'Til next time, friends; take care.
_____________________
PUBLIC DESCRIPTION:
Store’s open on the way home in my other world #pastelskycubes. You’re tempted to procure a drink and linger for the sunset, before squeezing into an APM car for the rest of your journey. (~ Those familiar with Singapore’s urban landscape: can you guess which building this piece was inspired by?
Sample IV: Patreon Extract. February 25th, 2020
Hello friends. I've closed the piece; here's the full resolution version. To be frank, this painting was a little bumpy to refine. The brush I used for it is wonderful for sculpting sketchy detail, but leaves practically no hard edges behind to latch on. I had to spend much more time chiseling and tinkering than I anticipated!
The design of the Octan Palace's more than a shade bizarre, I know — I did have a more 'proper', clean baroque aesthetic in mind at the start, but my mind kept turning to the garden grotto. Grottos have a rich, at times hallowed place in the classical imagination. In the barest of terms they put one in mind of a mythic, watery underworld. The grotto of the baroque garden is, at its most elaborate, a barnacling wilderness of sculpture, tile, and ornament. I stumbled upon a captivating example while backpacking in Munich a long, long time ago. The decorations of the Grottenhof courtyard in the Munich Residenz were so dense and so intricate that it put one in mind of rough rock - a reef, actually, which was the point! There was something fantastical, ancient, and unnerving about it. A feeling that I would like to achieve somewhere under the veneer of Calais. It is, after all, a place with a very long and (on occasion) very colorful history. Relics of past ages lie all over the great basin. They don't always add up with what the annals tell.
PUBLIC DESCRIPTION:
'The eight domes of the Octan Palace cluster over the cold waters of its eponymous vale. There are notes of salt in the air, mist from the fountains, the echoing of footsteps in halls curtained from sight. To our sensibilities the impossibly complex facades before us seem to flit, with each subtle change of the light, constantly between the beautiful and the macabre. O, the wild, exuberant extent of their ornament! Great fronts of cloud are passing overhead, and when they blot the sun the gloom under the glittering eaves appears to writhe with dark life. But of course the complex must serve, in a fashion, to intimidate. We are told that it houses a martial pipe organ of respectable size; that, when its most genial ranks thrum subtly to life each evening, it is firm cue for promenaders to leave. When the Morgaff concert has thundered its last, the lullabies of Calais will begin to call gently and sweetly from the municipal stops, and the palace will become a refuge for the sleepless. The library (replete with shelters that resist the worst of the martial infrasound) never closes. Its warm lights shine bravely against the hours of night.’
.
The Octan Palace straddles the last run of the Tixia cascades. Principal architect Erin Bold (a student of the famously controversial L. Rowe Fleury) was inspired by the filterfeeding crustacean stygofauna that regularly swarm in the pools at its feet. There the cold waters from the cascades meet warm, mineral-heavy jets from vents and geysers, leading to explosions of planktonic life.
Sample V: Thought Pile, Retrospective
CGH-SGH STAY, xx-xxxxxxx 2016
I thought often enough to myself during that little sojourn from reality (which I might not, unfortunately, have transitioned back from half as well as I could’ve) that I would’ve jabbed quite a number of things into my laptop’s word processor, had I access to it. Well now I do, and of course I need at least occasionally to give them gears that could once’ve seen me to the station of a decent writer a consolatory crank, for even now I know that I am a (lousy, albeit) writer, and that I hope to be one of palatable savvy, because the things that remain wedged ethereal in my mind depend perhaps a third on language for their liberation from mine exceedingly mortal self.
So… just a crude thought pile.
Hospital beds. Now, independent of their setting they are a wonderful thing. I have told my visiting aunts and uncle how delightful it would be to cart one home, and I actually wasn’t joking. You do not get a finer day bed. Of course the two models I encountered this time were immensely ugly to my tastes but — considering what happy little modifications a trip to Spotlight or Beach Road would afford — their capabilities might well make up for it. Thirty-five to fifty-five degrees — between them any insomniac can drift in and out of sleep all day. I surprized myself too. To enhance this there is a saccharine field of calm enveloping many a hospital ward, at least if you are a convalescent patient and visiting relatives from nearby beds are of the sedate, thin-lipped variety.
The transition from CGH to SGH turned out to be welcome, as I will explain; but I couldn’t have suspected that because life in the former exceeded my expectations. Sure, I know that my lung was indelibly messed up, goodness knows if I could avoid talc surgery, ditch the chest tube, wash my derned hair… but I wasn’t ever entirely bedbound, and I had a berth by the window. After the first night no patient in sight or hearing was dying (bless their souls and / or memories), and — when I’d calmed from the sinking devastation that copious Hiroshima-magnitude X-rays had been seared into my vitals — I happied myself knowing that I was consuming half my usual calories and not feeling hungry about it.
Also there were student nurses to look at. They were mostly kinda endearing (my assessment of course; nothing to do with anyone’s performance or intent), they were enrolled in an ITE and possessed loads more refinement in speech and bearing than I’d been conditioned to expect. They could’ve stood for FASS students, no problem. Anyone who’s conversed with me on the subject knows I’m fiercely opposed to elitism of any sort relative to ‘educational’ background, but they seemed remarkable nonetheless. The rudeness of a person — one’s boorish crudity and / or ostensible inability to even contemplate the likes of introspection, pensive beauty, and the impossible wideness of the world — really has only a trifling association with the sort of schools one has been to. But I probably have a good deal to mull about this in another passage. There is a lot in my assessments of people that has to be interrogated, that I might be sure they square with my mores. Certainly one doesn’t hold individuals markedly different from themselves in disdain; of that at least I am always clear. I, at any rate, hold myself in decidedly low esteem. These things said, there is at least one trait — machismo — that I have come steadily to loathe with as much blackness as is available to me. Any close association with one who exudes machismo will necessarily be love-hate, but at least never overwhelmingly hate, for I’ve honestly never despised anyone. It is traits I despise, and I hope always to leash that so I react always to people, not their traits. As it is (and as it will be), I already have very few of them to react to.
Wow, what an angst-steeped tangent.
There was a student nurse, a xxxxx xxxxxx-xxxxxx, whom I believe to be the apotheosical xxxxx looker. She was strong, fair of face and disarmingly pretty, with a flash in her eyes bright and smart and fierce. She was a princess, a warrior; you’d follow her to battle.
There was a xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx I took to; of the strict, straight-talking, bespectacled archetype you’d imagine sending primary school students outside for botching their penmanship. But she was on trial by her supervisors right under my nose — I saw her about as nervous as she would ever be caught in public — and apologetic about how (very!) cold her hands were. I feel I’d trust her with my life, even if I’d probably die (sound familiar?). Well, I wanted so much to say something useful to her, to the effect that she was doing OK and to keep with it — but being myself I didn’t know what best to say ere the moment had long passed.
There was… a xxxxx xxxxx with a warm smile; you knew within the minute that she was a fine friend with a hart of gold. There was a tallish dude who could’ve been churlishly delinquent in a different setting but was studiously soft-spoken and attentive… There was a quirky, enthusiastic, chubby chap with a slight speech impediment any hikikomoring SAD-case could talk to without a jot of reserve. All of them had a little watch-face of their own fastened to their chest pockets, which they would consult for various drills about two million times a shift. I think what struck me most about them was how essentially well-meaning, how void of the merest suggestion of bellicosity or swagger they all were. Sure, they were nursing students after all, but I’ve spent enough time in hospitals and clinics to recognise that I’d seen something warmly and fuzzily special. The ward and level I was holed up in had colours bright and cheery for a hospital; the shades were thrown wide open to an eleventh-floor view of what I fancy the Gate to Simei — the busy, uncelebrated opening to my hometown’s main street. I was in hospital again and very blue… but I was home. I love Simei with all my heart, though every years’ worth of ‘upgrading’, refacing, and fresh construction brings it another painful leap away from the halcyon neighbourhood that shimmers occassionally into my immediate conscious. Excerpts or improvisations from James Horner’s childhood-defining score to The Land Before Time would play in my mind then, and my eyes would threaten to mist. Those two benches and that tiny square of field with its knee-high fence… they looked once across undulating grass and a basketball court to my grandparents’ block. They are, of course, no longer there. I hate the town councils sometimes.
The move to SGH was alarming on its own — I lay on my back for fifteen kilometres of expressway as my lung wobbled in hearty syncopation with the ambulance glorified van’s suspension. A tube of putrefying blood was crossed over my legs; it began an inch from my heart, and I was too much of a pushover to insist that it go under them instead for fear of the swill surging back into me like fish shit back into the tank.
The ward at SGH was… old, the airs sepia. The bed was jet-cabin plastic and looked a decade older than I was. Colours were pastel but subdued, viewed always through that sepia filter; the little air conditioners sat on an improvised mount in the window. To someone fresh from Changi it was stifling and dismally drab.
Over the course of the next day I grew to ‘get’ and admire the place. I am an old, old soul, and I appreciate references to the fading past. Most of SGH’s buildings are 1981 vintage; precisely that of Changi Airport. I oriented myself gingerly (probably looked right dreadful with oversized hospital garb, hair slicked with four days of scalp grease, a bloody tube depending from an indeterminate spot in my thorax and shoebox-sized chest pump in hand) and saw immediate similarities. Changi airport in elder days — think the panelled, functionalist canyon that is the T1-T2 skytrain route — Comcentre at Somerset, the old DBS Centre (a.k.a. SOGO Building) in Tampines… places like these stand together in my book, and smack of a halcyon, optimistic, quietly monumental age that the generation attending school this moment will never get to experience. It is a world they only just missed, and I count myself fortunate enough to have lived the tail end of it. Visit one of these places now and it will be like the Tsar’s palace after the revolution. Steel and concrete may stand largely as they used to, but everything, everything else is off.
Ho-hum. Anything else both noteworthy and expoundable?
~ Hospitals do things like warn you off sodium and then slip you a sachet of soy sauce along with your porridge.
~ Hospitals also do things like use your food tray lining to proselytise the boons of eating every conceivable colour of fruit… and then leave you with nothing but red watermelon from dawn to dusk to dawn again. How’s that for reinforcement.
~ ‘X-rays and Coffee’ — two mutual exclusives. They could make for a good blog heading.
~ You can slip SGH’s radiation watch (a.k.a. location transmitter) off your wrist. They’ll never be able to find ya.
~ Even MBTI 100% introverts will grudgingly allow that levels of comfort may be drawn from residing in shoulder-width proximity to other carbon-based bipeds. Curtains still welcome.
~ When you think about it, there is death stamped on everything.
~ Lovely to see a C, an M, an I, and a Bangla foreigner take spirited turns with each others’ favoured tongues. This particular C-gaffer has baked bread all his life, has made it the classic way. Eight grandchildren, cheery disport, day tours, talks too much and admits it. He does every major dialect, can hold his own in Malay, can follow a little Tamil. ‘You pick it up when it happens you have to talk to someone who talks it [sic]’ — what a trader.
Phenomena set to slip quietly away with the generation that built this place.
~ And No Justin, there is nothing wrong in living with your mom. You may never have that house, that hearth, that prata walk of your own. Right, then. Just go home while you still can. Ain’t nothing like home and the voices you’ve been hearing since before you could walk.
That’s all for now. I hope no-one has made it this far.
JT: This is an unlinked page featuring writing samples pulled from some of my past endeavours. Thank you for your interest.