JungleLand

I love the colour yellow. My favourite is pink, but I think yellow has an invitational quality to it that other colours don't. The colour of single yellow lines on the road; a bunch of beautiful Dutch tulips or English roses; and Emily Dickinson's poem 'Nature Rarer Uses Yellow.' "Yellow she [nature] affords, Only scantily and selectly, Like a lover's words." The alleged absence of yellow in nature is something that I noticed from a very young age. I always filled my primary school art and geography books with pictures of tall sunflowers and bees, attempting to correct this natural absence with my best human effort. My teachers and parents saw it merely as an attention to detail that sometimes starts to develop in young children. Though like nature, I saw these drawings of yellow fauna and flora as an invitation to look deeper into my worldview (and other infantile writings about rocks and stuff we write in Year One). I couldn't communicate these...

I recently listened to a podcast on my football team, Manchester City. In it, Dr Gary James, the well-respected historian of football, claimed that Aguero's injury time winner didn't win City the league [in the 2011/12 Premier League season]; the league was won as a culmination of the rest of the season. That's a really interesting philosophical perspective. I'd love to pick apart his extended philosophical outlook. Do we, humans, and all other organic life forms, exist, or are we simply the latest iteration of cosmic matter, bound to reform at the whim of the universe, and time, along a continuum that approaches infinity? Do 'moments', as such, exist? And do they-- "Excuse me, mate." The train of thought whistling through my mind comes to a screeching halt. Was that a question? "Excuse me." I put down the tray of salads I'd been decanting. If a tray is put down on the floor, it should align perfectly with the outer edge of the ...

Prescript: In this post, a lot of different and remarkable human beings will be generalised into "people", or "the public". Please do not take this as an attack on your senses of self. Rather, allow it to give you an insight into my thoughts at certain moments, during certain moments of my every-day experience. Thank you, stay safe and please keep well. --- I have a special place to read in my garden. It's a wooden arbor, flanked by two small jasmine trees and a couple of large, granite chess ornaments. Its beautiful. A real and tangible sense of place can be achieved by the simple layout. Pressed in by the jasmine trees, your peripheral vision is occupied by tones of pink, white, green and granite. You feel secure, affxed. Cosy, calm. Perhaps even important. For you are the subject. Its easily something you can envisage in an Emily Dickinson poem. Something to symbolically counter the ugliness, disorder and perturbation of human consciousness and, in he...

I think about the Russian Army quite a lot. Up until 2013, they weren't issued socks with military dress. From Peter Alexeyevich's Battle of  Systerbäck in 1703 to  the Russian Army's march into Georgia, Russian soldiers have worn portyanki , a footwrap made from squares of cloth in the summer and flannel in the winter. Elaborate methods of wrapping the foot meant that portyanki could often offer more in the way of ameliorating sore, blistered feet than fitted socks ever could. Soldiers could also stuff excess material from the wrap into spaces in standard issue boots that prevented the constant reopening of blisters, or to fill out the boot if their feet didn't quite do the job. It is easy, perhaps even somewhat romantic, to think of the Russian soldier mastering the tundras of Siberia, or the rugged and mountainous Caucasian region, or even the first Russian troops landing on the sparsely-populated Sakhalin Island to Russia's farthest east. Their feet wrapped,...

In 2013, my beloved Manchester City signed Fernandinho from the champions of Ukraine, Shakhtar Donetsk. Given the percentage of Mancunians that support Manchester City, never mind the whole of these rugged and precipitous isles, I doubt this moment in history proved to be epochal for anybody. Anybody but me. For I long held suspicions that I was, for want of a better phrase, "on the spectrum". My secondary school social life was fairly turbulent and I really struggled through college (though I concede, the laser-white fringe probably didn't help). My limited social and emotional intelligence affected my ability to recognise who were my actual friends, or whether or not my then-girlfriend really liked me. But when Fernandinho signed for City, my mental consitution collapsed. I became obsessed with his name. Its origin, its etymology and its pronunciation. Fer-nan-dee-knee-oh. My mind would reverberate his interesting moniker around, up and down and out of my body. I...