Brittle Sounds

I wasn’t supposed to be here. Not really. Not with those grades. October, 1979.Brinsford Lodge, Wolverhampton Polytechnic. B.Sc in Combined Studies—which sounded less like a qualification, more like a confession. Computer Science and Economics: the sensible face I put on something more tangled. If I’m honest, I’d sabotaged myself just enough to make staying seem reasonable. After my mum’s death th...

Flashback Friday began as a way to revisit older work—not to tidy up the past, but to reexamine the stories that shaped me. Some essays ask to be reworked. Others ask to be re-seen. Thirteen years ago, I wrote Life in a Northern Town . It was part family history, part personal reckoning—a tribute to the grit and pain woven into the coal-stained fabric of my lineage. I was tracing the path from min...

Welcome back to Holding On . Last week , we stepped into the green room. The nerves. The lights. The impossible weight of a story almost too personal to speak aloud. This week, we go back—back to where the story truly begins. Not with cameras, but with a silence thick enough to stretch across years. A hospital room. Two beds. A love story flickering gently in its final chapter. This novel continue...

The Rec had the best slide. We’d sit on waxed bread wrappers to pick up speed, launching ourselves off the end toward a patch of grass, and just beyond that, a roundabout. Our goal wasn’t to stop—it was to fly. Not land—launch. We never stopped to consider how that might hurt. At the top, we had rituals: gripping the side rails, bouncing our knees, breath held like we were waiting for the shot—the...

By the time June came up the drive, I knew I couldn’t let her in. We weren’t really dating—just paired off by mutual friends who thought shared faith was enough. We were all church kids—Methodist by label, Evangelical by tone. Singing solos in borrowed pews one week, speaking in tongues the next. It was meant to feel like belonging. Sometimes, it did. Helen was older, louder, and drove like she wa...

Some memories show up like clockwork. Others arrive mid-sentence. If you’ve read Step Away from the Synths , you’ll know I once got banned from Woolies for pretending to be The Human League. That wasn’t the first time. This was. No synths. No Woody. Just music, Woolies, and the kind of glorious nonsense that only makes sense years later. Additionally Banned It was the summer of ’79, and I was work...

The floor was too clean. No prints, no scuff, no trace. The docent, voice dry as ice,leads us through halls cooledby preservation, not grief. Here:a sealed metal box — expired, unopened —still marked For Use in Emergencies. Beside it,a photo of a woman with two jobsand one warm coatshe gave away in April. A child’s drawing:stick figures, orange suns,a cake with no center. No name. Just a smudgeben...

There’s always a third. Sometimes it’s a person. Sometimes a ghost. Sometimes just the version of yourself you’re still trying to save. Triangulation isn’t geometry. It’s choreography—a dance of avoidance mistaken for connection. One person reaching, one retreating, one pretending the pattern is fate. You learn how to lean just far enough to be touchedwithout risking collapse. You tell yourself lo...

The sod was still damp when I pressed it to the wall behind his desk. Not the floor. That would’ve been too ordinary—too expected. A prank. A protest. A gesture that could be explained away. But I wasn’t looking for legibility. I was looking for somewhere to put the ache. So I started building a wall of turf. Behind his desk. In his sanctum. Mr. Sunderland—Roker to us, after the football ground—ra...

BREAKING: Shells Commit Felony on American Beach In an unprecedented breach of national security, a group of seashells reportedly organized themselves into a terroristic numeral formation earlier this week. Eyewitnesses say the shells appeared “calm” and “innocent” at first—typical behavior for marine debris. But after close examination (read: zooming in 400% on Instagram), several high-ranking in...

Thirteen years ago, I wrote a piece called ‘ Losing and Finding Myself ’—a linear account of grief, rage, and reinvention in the wake of my mother’s death. At the time, I wrote with a burning sense of injustice: toward my school, which mishandled her passing; toward the silence that followed; and—though I didn’t quite admit it—toward her, for dying too early and leaving so much unsaid. But somethi...

Melvin didn’t buy a ticket. Not from disinterest—never that. From loyalty. The band—early punk pioneers, now mostly grey at the temples and part titanium at the knees—had announced a reunion tour. But the original singer, the one with the gravel rasp and eyeliner from ’78 still smudged into legend, said he wouldn’t be part of it. Called it a betrayal. Said punk didn’t do nostalgia. Melvin believed...

Eli wasn’t trying to impress anyone when he raised his arm that day—just to be seen differently. The school playground buzzed with the low, familiar static of boys showing off. Near the cracked tarmac, Colin leaned against the fence, his anorak zipped halfway, sleeves bunched tight at the wrists. Simon mimed a bodybuilder’s flex, grunting theatrically. Adrian snorted into the sleeve of his jumper....

it’s not a wallit’s the shape of staying not a door closingbut a way of choosingwhat gets to come inand what doesn’t it’s the pausebefore I say yesbecause I want to—not because I’m afraidof what happens if I don’t it’s menot shrinkingnot twistingnot performingjustmeno longer leaving myselfto stay close to someone elsejust less willingto go missingin the name of connection it’s how I protect the pa...

Phase I: The Briefing The Derbyshire Times arrived every Thursday evening—slipped under Mrs. B’s arm, along with an oversized bloomer and a block of strong cheddar that she still hoped to taste, if we didn’t get to it first. She and Mr. B both worked in Alfreton, so we’d be waiting—hovering near the kettle—when they came through the door. While she put the groceries away, we were already reaching...

About a year after my mum died, Dad and I moved to a smaller house in Old Tupton. It was closer to my school, closer to Chengsville, and to the friends I was starting to spend more and more time with. That part felt good. But it also meant leaving the only home I’d ever known. Pete — or Puzzle, as we all called him — lived just down the way, in a small bungalow with his mum. He played rhythm guita...

We sat on the sofa, letting easy TV soften the edges of a day too full. No words needed—just the quiet recognition that not everything can be solved, not tonight. What mattered was being beside each other in the uncertainty. This is what love feels like, sometimes—less like a decision, more like a quiet return. The biggest lessons in partnership rarely show up when things are easy. They arrive whe...

It was the summer of 1979, a few months after my mum died. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to college, and I definitely wasn’t sure I wanted to leave my dad on his own. I was spending more and more time at Chengsville—a rambling former Quaker house with a burial ground in the garden and a curious surplus of doors stacked in corners and leaning against walls. I was hanging around with my friends, and...

It started with a video. Trump and Terry Moran, circling each other—one insisting that a deported man had “MS-13” tattooed on his knuckles, the other gently, then not-so-gently, pointing out the image was fake. Trump wouldn’t let it go. Wouldn’t move on to Ukraine. Wouldn’t entertain the possibility that a Photoshopped hand had helped justify a deportation. I watched it more than once—not because...

The idea for A Fire Born of Staying came from a comment I made on a poem I read on Substack about vulnerability. It made me think about how, in the past, mothers would intentionally bring their children together to catch childhood diseases like chickenpox — not to make them sick, but to help them build immunity early. What if we could do the same with bravery? What if we could gather to “catch” co...

Some memories knock gently. Others kick the door in wearing Cuban-heeled winkle-pickers. In this episode of my series Needle Drops , we head back to Leeds, 1980 — to the beer-soaked, bass-blasted mess of the Futurama 2 Festival. It’s a story of stolen vans, stolen sleep, and the moment our scrappy invincibility first cracked. Join me as I piece together a half-remembered weekend of echoing warehou...

A narrated version of my piece, “Open.” It’s a poem I wrote not long after moving to Saint Petersburg—before I fully understood just how much I needed a new beginning. Let me correct that: I knew I needed a new beginning. I just wasn’t ready to let go of the life I’d built…and I was going through the motions of a new beginning, while part of me was still waiting for the old story to change its end...

After finishing two stories— Folded Small and Where the Colour Lives —I found myself asking a question I hadn’t expected: Am I writing about the same boy? They didn’t seem connected at first. Different settings. Different lives. But something about them stayed with me—boys who noticed more than they said. Who shrank at the edges. Who felt the wrongness of things without knowing how to name it. The...

A narrated version of my piece, “Where the Colour Lives.” It’s a quiet story told in fragments—part poem, part memory. A boy. A fridge door. A sun with a face. It’s about what we give when we don’t have words for it. About presence, hope, and small gestures that mean more than they say. You can read the full text here: https://www.brittleviews.com/p/where-the-colour-lives This is a public episode....

If you’ve read Last Birthday , you already know it’s not a performance. It’s a memory held gently. A goodbye spoken in gestures, in silence, in sunlit garden paths. Yesterday evening, I recorded this podcast version—a quiet retelling of that final birthday with my dad. It’s tender, raw in places. Not for drama. Just to honor what that day meant—and still means. If you find resonance in the spoken...