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Thought it might be a good idea to share a little bit about what brought this novel writing on and of course, my girl, Nash has great interview skills! Give it a listen before the next post goes live next week! And thank you for all the encouraging words to push me forward on this little (but slightly big) endeavor!

• Gabby

Video courtesy of @samyoukilis

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I have always had time for stories about Home, from Home.

These are words that I wrote in April of 2018 and found again pouring over this one big google doc I added to periodically buried deep in 3 folders I call very creatively (!) Anthology.

But in truth whenever I read over my writing there are maybe three or four big themes that criss cross through my words and one is undeniably home. I tried to bring some order to my work when I first started writing more seriously around the edges of the day and filed words about Home under the title Shadow Series.

This is a piece I’ve been revisiting from Shadow Series, from 2018, although it feels perhaps even more relevant today than it did then.

Watching the destruction in the US these past years, and seeing homegrown echoes of it in the UK — a decade into a Tory government, five into Brexit, and immeasurable returns towards less open times, a wise woman from the internet said “In 2020 we’re really giving up on the government, from no justice for Grenfell, to Windrush papers being destroyed, right through to clapping for the NHS, but not giving them a pay rise” (Bella Andrewartha).

So, this is a letter to London, from Shadow Series.

I’ve been gone for a while and your voice has changed a little, hardened.
More distant.
More aloof.
I guess some would say that mine has, too. Lilting a little too far west of the Atlantic. Annoying little upticks from Friends’ punchlines of the 90s, or mum’s slightly scratched videos of A Different World. That different world that we saw through a screen but never thought real. Maybe I’ve been behind the screen for too long now. Outside looking in.
or inside looking out
because we speak past each other oftentimes. Loudly. I’m trying to tell you that I don’t like who you’re becoming, that you’ve forgotten who you are, deeply. That the ugliness I saw there (here), I now see in you. That you’re spending too much time with the wrong ones,
and now I’m worried about those spending too much time, with you. But maybe I’ve spent too much time
outside looking in
and now we speak at each other, glass thicker than ever, without knowing which of us is enclosed, and who is visiting the other.

It’s a short small piece about a country being broken economically but also the fabric of my city, London, being unravelled, intentionally.

(and some Kano & Ghostpoet joy from the early 2010s for you, just because)

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Well here we are…

Welcome to puddlework!

If you haven’t heard what we are all about, give a listen and let us know what you think! Starting next week, we will be sharing more (from each of us and together)!

xo

Nash & Gabby

Images from our puddlework Pinterest board that we created.

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