I nearly look at you as I describe the fault lines beneath my skin — pale and stretched tightly like gauze. I’m still unsure of what I’m saying, like I’m speaking with a thick felt tip pen. A sip of water and ‘I don’t know’ excuses me from the conversation…

“It’s the end of life as we know it!” declare the village criers, throwing tarot cards into the air over a feverish crowd. “The invisible killer!” writes the spin doctor with the persistent cough. I bask in the balmy comfort of my youth — the round plumpness of my white…

The end of summer. A prescient chill in the midday air, A tight forehead and a skull thick like iron wool. Laugh lines that don’t fade with passing hilarity. There are no nuances in single digit white wine, nor fructose nor glucose for sun-drunk bees. Plastic wool sliding over cold…

Disclaimer: This review may contain spoilers In 2017, reports of a brutal anti-gay purge in Chechnya made headlines. In response to the accusations, Alvi Karimov, a spokesperson for the Chechnyan leader, claimed that the reports can’t be true as ‘gay people do not exist in Chechnya’. These chilling facts are…

Directed by Stephen Gallacher, Unexpected Item is the tender tale of a boy building up the courage to talk to a girl — with the help of a self-service checkout. Against the poster paint backdrop of Any Suburban Sainsburys, in a mere five minutes, the film takes you on a…

At the tender age of 19 I went to university. Acutely aware of the upcoming challenge of building a new, adult identity, I purged my wardrobe of any clothing that could belie my previous life as a badly dressed teenager. The stakes were high: at Cambridge University I could no…

On Sundays, Hannah and I would walk into the edges of the jungle and catch butterflies. It was a comfortable routine for both of us. She would knock on my door at around 5 o’clock, when the heat began to soften, wearing cream trousers and a boxy white blouse, holding…

Besides the black wardrobe, mild substance addiction and ever-present mental voice that implores you to ‘just be more open-minded’ as you lock eyes with someone sipping an apfelschorle while they get a blowjob in a club bathroom, the ultimate Berlin accessory is the Berlin Boyfriend™. If you’re reading this, you’ve…

In life, our contemplation of mortality doesn’t come gradually, it hits us quickly, in moments of painful, frightening and sobering clarity. The first time I considered mortality was when I realised that my parents were mortal. I was suddenly old enough to realise that they were not superhuman — the…