Brook-bathed pebbles
What a simple idea, your thoughts like pebbles being washed by a brook. As an inveterate pebble pusher, this humble...
Firsthtly…
The chef is a Rabelasian character oozing excess, and none too likeable. The birth of Titus, 77th Earl of Gormenghast,...
Smell as a carrier of memory
For better or worse, few things can as quickly transport you to another place, time, or experience as a smell. ...
A shire-sized dust-sheet
The tearing of a dust-sheet isn’t an obvious sound to describe the dis-scabbarding of a Greek sword, and then Logue...
Rich with rust
An unusual simile for rust, though of course, once seen, it seems natural. A beech hedge in winter has an...
Six ways to get lost
This is from The Little Clay Cart, a Sanskrit play probably composed around the 2nd century BC, and commonly attributed to a...
Glittering as though sugared
Ah yes, that's how it looks when you have those dancing sparkles on the sea's surface. I like the extension...
The desert of Idemea
Lovely likening of the heat-haze quivering of a desert to the rippling pattern-dappled back of a leopard.
'To the south,...
The loss of a journal
How many notebooks, journals or letters have been swept away by circumstance, carrying the minutiae of memory with them? Leigh...
Images of war
Again, reducing human carnage to an image of barbecue leftovers.
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As expressionless as …
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy is packed with original metaphor and simile. In Titus Groan, the first book, I noted two...
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