Popshot Magazine November 2018

ISSUE 22 — NOSTALGIA WINTER 2018 Absence makes the heart grow fonder, yet so does distance. The further we are from important life events, both physically and chronologically, the more they can crystallise into something meaningful and significant. Our first steps, our first words, our first loves, our first homes; the songs, books and adventures that first opened our minds and our hearts. They stay with us, rest somewhere deep within, and become the building blocks with which we define ourselves; the stories that we share with other people in order to prove that we existed before now. Nostalgia then is a potent force. And we’re talking proper nostalgia here – those internal reveries of the past in which we can briefly escape real life, not some forced regurgitation of…

It survived, hurray, we all rejoice,that clackety old structure of speed,slight by today’s standards, but stillchain lift, compact twister, wooden,G-force 3.75 (is that bad?)stood up to the hurricane blowingright through the old switchback’s upsand downs that have churned many a gut,brought a stream of smiles and tearsto the public – I mean us. We are they,the ones that ride, the ones that watchits little train hug the rail. It has nearlybeen a goner before, out of date,out of luck, kids moved on to other dares,but saved by the people of New Yorkwho know a good thing when theysee it. I only wish I could say I’d ridden it.…

That he worked here, at the ESA? Justo asks andI say yes, because even if I never knew the letters forThose sun-soaked buildings under Spanish skiesI remember the photos of newly-built rocketsAll those strange machines igniting andThe time we gathered around a too-small screenTo watch the parachute land in a desert that was not oursNo Sahara or Egyptian plane, no dunes or sands whose grains we knewBut the jasper mist of Titan – and my father told usHe did that Now Justo leads us round the foyer and shows meThat yes is an answer I should not give without knowingWhat words like Huygens and Cassini meantThat every piece of a rocket is made by someone newThat years of my grandad lay between those groovesWhere he sat at the desk by…

The first sign was when he rang at five o’clock on Monday morning, hiccupping whilst explaining that the turning came out of nowhere, that he couldn’t call the police because he’d been out for a drink. I found him snoring in the autumn leaves on the side of the road. The second sign for me to leave were my clothes pirouetting out of the bedroom window when I was dropped home by a male colleague, my dented car parked on our drive. I should have left when he called me Lola and I told him to stop, but he carried on, telling me that he loved me. It was later that night, when I woke up from the bedsheets getting warm and wet, when I tried to shake him awake,…

Over the Thames on Gabriel’s Pier, a man thinks about love. It’s too hot to think about love; it’s too hot to think. It’s as hot as the summer which drove him mad – but that was another him and that was another river. A river abroad, clear as a mirror and fish that went straight for his toes. Love was there because love had walked with him. Love fed him fruit in a garden and love laid him down in the grass. Love pinched his arms first pink, then sunspot-brown, the undersides white as if bleached. ‘Napolitaine!’ Love laughed. Surprised to find his eyes are shut, he opens them and sees the Thames. It’s the colour of muddied milk. Over the Thames on Gabriel’s Pier, a man thinks about…

Around four in the afternoon, if the sun is shining, a shadow falls across that part of the square where a woman sits on a park bench, waiting. She brings with her a flask of tea and two enamel mugs which she takes from her bag and places on the bench beside her. It’s late September now and leaves are beginning to fall from the trees that surround the park. When they last met here, in this London square, it was June and he was on leave. They sat on the same bench that she sits on now and drank tea from a flask. She will recall these moments, even years from now, as the best she’s ever known. The happiest of times. He promised that as soon as the…