Essays
Longer pieces about cities, cloth, class and history, and about how I learned to look at things.
The boat at night
I went looking for new shoes and ended up back in a small sailing boat at night, among the Sea Scout years that settled what I still expect my clothes to let me do.
Colour after the fire
Rotterdam's post-war art came out of a burned city, a department store, a flour mill and a painter Amsterdam had wallpapered over. My mother dragged me round it as a teenager, and it never left.
Company without an appointment
What does London have instead of a piazza? A bench near Elephant & Castle, a day off for the weather along Regent's Canal and a standing dinner supply part of the answer; the place where strangers become regulars is still missing.
Speed-running taste
My mother's museums and CoBrA gave me an eye and no wardrobe, so I learned cloth on purpose: three shrunk shirts, Ivy as rebellion, and a rule about who makes my clothes that my favourite shirts break.
From Winnie-the-Pooh to CoBrA
This site's look started with Shepard's Pooh drawings and Penguin paperbacks, kept turning into what the models paint by default, and ended in Rotterdam, with my mother's museums and CoBrA.
Britain's usable war
A Dutchman living in London on why Britain's war story sits badly with him, what that reaction owes to a myth from his own home town, and whether the British can see how much the story still does.
Who England's past works for
A friend's remark that England lives in the past sent me after the aristocracy. The argument ended somewhere less comfortable, with private schools, housing and the millions of ordinary owners whom scarcity pays.