The cover of this issue is a painting by Tom Hammick. She was French. I’ve been away for a while. I left Fife and went to live in Glasgow when I was eighteen. The court settled for damages. In the middle of this the course of our life, I stopped and everybody got out of their car. Could you tell us about the race that’s documented in the photos? In the spring, about two weeks into the coronavirus lockdown, I found myself thinking about cholera. In Sri Lanka – this was 2017 – between a golden temple and a shop selling car seats, we found a steel-roofed shack, with, strung across the entrance and the makeshift walls, countless laminated photographs of missing people. Just at the time of the ceasefire between Iraq and Iran in 1988, an infantry platoon discovered that they were in a minefield. On 4th January 2020, a few days after the New Year celebrations, I returned from a trip around Sicily to my girlfriend’s parents’ home in Pizzighettone, sixty kilometres or so south east of Milan. Beside the rainy hog shed, the county food bank forklifts pallets of old bread, blue with deep mold and tints of February. In the first of Gus Palmer’s photographs of the morgue at the Greenwich Islamic Centre I can’t find the horizontal. In the wood I hear the beautiful call of a bird I do not know. When my father died, his sister Mary – his twin – sent me an email. I paid him no heed at all.
This found work was produced by taking the first line from each piece in Granta 154, and finishing it with the last line in the last piece. The image is a cropped photograph of Tom Hammick’s painting from the front cover.
SANDERLINGS 