London eclipsed everywhere. The fall of the Berlin wall only temporarily wrenched Inga’s attention from her adopted city. Steffi Graf and Boris Becker had just won Wimbledon and Germany was riding high but Inga was a student at St Martins. The very same college where a brown-clad Jarvis Cocker sat nursing milky brown cappuccinos in the student canteen. To Inga, this was the crucible of Cool Britannia. But as the 90s came to an end, Berlin became the new apogee of cool and in 2000 Inga moved east. Fifteen years later she still lives in Berlin, even as another city is determined the moniker for hipdom, Inga is staying put. This collection of old postcards of Berlin celebrate Inga feeling at home. They celebrate her real love for her city and her being part of it. They celebrate her being wrong when, as 17 year old exchange student in the US, she wrote an essay ‘Why the two Germanys will never re-unite’.
15 Dec 2015
As a kid, holidaying in Mallorca, Thomas’s parents had refused to let him take home a dog that he’d befriended. 30 years later, on a trip to Greece, a puppy was again circling his ankles. He locked his eyes on the sky until they stung in an effort to avoid meeting its gaze. It was tourist season so the fountains were on – the puppy had a ready supply of water. Predictably, with some unnecessary encouragement from Thomas’s old friend Torsten, the puppy finagled its way into their plans. They named her Ida. They took her to the beach. She tagged along on hikes. They fed her, she refused any dog food until Thomas had heated and salted it – her palette refined by a diet of scraps begged from the tourists crowding Ios’s restaurants. Ida was happy but Thomas and Torsten were increasingly uneasy about leaving her, in two days they were due to fly home. Sitting in their regular cafe, an immaculately dressed woman approached their table, clearly touched by the bond between them, she asked if it was their dog. Thomas explained. The woman left but after ten minutes she’d returned. ‘This is my gift, not to you but to her’, she handed Thomas a collar, a lead and a tin of dog food. She was an angel. Thomas fully expected that under her grey, cropped hair was a head of magic, blue curls to match her Chanel suit. The woman insisted that they take Ida, that she’d bring them ‘luck, health and happiness’. Their return flight was booked for September 13th. It was two days after 9.11 and in the wake of the attacks, security staff were too busy to notice a puppy travelling without documentation.
06 Sep 2015
Taro was a summer baby. His birth one hot July day in north London meant that he would always be young for his class. He’d left his nursery, with its familiar smells of paint and plastic chairs, left friends and the gentleness of just three days of classes. It was now September and he was moving to the big school with the big kids. Friendships were already tight between children who’d not moved schools but were simply shifting from the affiliated nursery to its primary school. On Taro’s first day he refused to let his mum leave, so Kazuko locked her small frame into a kid’s chair and sat quietly in the corner of the classroom. Taro spent the day absorbed in making a paper plane, this complete involvement was deliberate – he never once looked up to engage with the other kids. The objects and drawings he made were always figurative, so it was strange when, in his first two weeks of school, he began drawing an abstract scatter of circles. Sitting in his bedroom he directed his mum to copy him, she drew one small circle at a time, then a speckle of dots. Their pens then stained the tiny fibres of the sugar paper with a series of lines linking each circle to the next. The symbolism was clear to Kazuko. It’s two years since Taro moved schools and made this drawing, in that time he has made lots of friends.
07 Jul 2015
The studio was vast and Nora was making tiny, matchbox-sized sculptures. Life felt faintly ridiculous. There was a certain wrongness with everything. This malaise deepened each time she looked out of the window at people striding down the street. She imagined lives full of purpose, of meetings, of worthy causes fought and objectives met. She did not imagine these people hating their work or feeling lost or that they were grieving. Her days melted one into another. She woke, she dressed, she drove to work, she parked the car. And again Nora found she was parking the car. But this time, inspite of being an accomplished reverse parker – less so a driver, she struggled to get close to the curb. She got out of the car. Trapped under the wheels was a shopping basket. It was flattened to the point of looking more like a drawing of a basket. Her immediate thought was ‘I’ll never make anything that beautiful’ but this was quickly tempered by knowing her mother would also have seen beauty in the malformed metal. The day was May 16th, 1993, a year since her mother had died.
21 Jun 2015
‘It was love!’. No matter that their hometowns were thousands of miles apart, a quiet street in Macomer, Sardinia and a suburban city just north of Chicago. No matter that decades later they were still thousands of miles apart. And no matter that Tiziana had fallen in love through the smudge of thousands of cathode ray pixels with a man on MTV. That was in 1992. 8 years later she travelled from Florence to Milan for Pearl Jam’s Binaural show. Just days later they were playing in Roskilde, Denmark, when nine fans were crushed. And for a period the European tours stopped. Last year the band returned to Milan and Tiziana met up with a group of friends. It was a long set with no guests. In their post-gig glow they missed the last bus back to the city and the cab they’d called failed to turn up. At 3am, as the roadies were dismantling the stage, an SUV with tinted windows pulled up. The door opened and Eddie Vedder walked towards them. He greeted Tiziana and her friends with hugs and kisses. Despite the bodyguard’s protests Eddie posed for a photograph. He apologised that he didn’t have mementos for everyone and as he turned to leave, he thrust a single plectrum into Tiziana’s hand.
14 Jun 2015
Joan and Stanley were not speaking. They’d not spoken for months and Joan was now engaged to Sandford. She earnestly threw herself into the relationship, calculated – perhaps, to bring it to Stan’s attention or perhaps in an effort to convince herself that she was over him. At the end of the week she left work, brushed away the flour that had collected in her peep toes and walked through the mill’s gates. Sandford and Stanley were waiting for her on opposite sides of the street. She crossed the road and never saw Sandford again. By the time Stanley returned to the army, as a physical training instructor, Joan was pregnant. As the war escalated, air raids sounded across Dover, friends and neighbours took shelter in the cliffs. Joan, with her growing bump, bunkered down in the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden. She watched as German bombers shot down the barrage balloons, like schools of fat fish deflating above the city. The following day another thirty had been erected. Fifty years on, this ration book was stored in a cabinet in her living room, a ‘treasure trove’ of props for the stories she told her grandchildren, Sophie, Sam and Lucy.
04 May 2015
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