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Tracey Thorn is a musician and writer, best known as one half of Everything but the Girl. She writes the fortnightly “Off the Record” column for the New Statesman. Her books include Naked at the Albert Hall, Bedsit Disco Queen and, most recently, Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia
This record is the sound of a man whose whole being has been altered, possessed even, by what has happened.
How is it possible that I still keep forgetting, this many years after her death, that I can’t call her with news?
It’s just a shame the place is so far away from London.
This time it’ll be easy – I know what to do, what to expect, have already had two kids “leave home” to go to university, as if that’s really leaving home at all.
As I wave him off I am smiling and telling him I hope he has fun, while duplicitously screaming inside, I HOPE IT WILL SOON BE CANCELLED AND YOU COME HOME SAFELY.
I’m purely on holiday, and the same one as usual – a rented villa with family and friends
Out of the corner of my eye, the power station looks like a full moon rising. Around me, the colour palette runs the full spectrum of all the greys, like a paint chart – cloud, sea, shingle, concrete and steel.
The salt air from the sea rusts and weathers everything so the place never quite looks new
The end of school feels like an acknowledgement that from here on, they’re in the same part of the world as us, the adult world, for good and bad.
When I see a bee now my immediate reaction is not, “Oh no I might get stung!” but more, “What can I do to help?”
