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Larger-than-life characters and daily life as a journalist in the surreal world of Kabul, Afghanistan.
The Jobcentre can be an ugly place. Steven Bradbury follows up his experience of trying to get on the dole in austerity Britain with the second instalment of ‘Dole Life’.
Skint but with the mouth-watering prospect of working as a potwash in the local pub, famous for its aroma of old farts, Holly Watson reluctantly goes to a job interview.
Don’t you hate the corporate drivel? They give you an award for all the time you have spent earning very little while making the company so much richer. When they take your time and your dignity to boot, then it’s time for Brian Brehmer.
What you have to do for £50 a week in Britain. This is British life on the dole. Steven Bradbury gives Talking Soup the inside scoop on a life of Job Seeker’s Allowance.
Wet, half-sober, tired and bored. The meaninglessness of Saturday night for a disillusioned thirty-something.
As the first part of our ‘Spotlight’ series we focus on individuals trying to make a name for themselves in the creative industries. Sarah A. Wessendorf is a German actress and artist currently based in Berlin. She has caught all the right eyes with her talents ranging from painting to dance and acting. Sarah sat down with us to talk about her career in acting and her latest project the film “When kingfisher catch fire“.
I knew I was an excellent candidate, as they cheerfully say in medical circles, for sudden death. Most everyone on both sides of the generation before mine had suddenly dropped dead before the age of 60. Some had lingered due to repetitive strokes. Fortunately, I had passed the age threshold, but I wondered how much longer I could defy the odds.
God doesn’t mind if we lie, as long as our lies glorify Him. Women need to be quiet in church and cede control of their minds and bodies to men, who always know best. God is sad when we say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas.
We stood on the terrace, a paltry sprinkling of crowd awaiting a corner. Those whom we had come to see stood at arms’ length, the accentuated shouts, the frenetic panting and the smell of turf and bloke as vivid in my mind now as it was a solid 20 years ago.
It’s a typical Saturday night at the Java Jive. The bar is a Tacoma institution, a one-time home to two pet monkeys appropriately named Java and Jive. The monkeys are dead now, and so is your marriage. You’re singing karaoke because you’re trying to forget everything. You’re a lonely 41-year old single mom with two kids and a decaying house on the north end of town, and you know what it feels like to have your thrills vanish. So you’re singing your lungs out, and some guy bites your foot.
I have killed her in my head more times than I can count. I have attended her funeral. I have wept on her grave. I have cried alone in a room littered with pill bottles and years of filth because I wasn’t there to save her. Every unknown number from Connecticut is her final plea for forgiveness before she swallows the pills or slices the blade across pale blue-veined wrists. I am a bad son. I let her do this. It is all my fault.
Cheap cotton tank top stuck under my armpits, the summer heat was making us light extra candles and pray for extra $5 donations. I was cheap and stuck at Saint Joseph Oratory under Mary’s smile and she gazed at her feet and I felt her son didn’t really save me. You had sad eyes and your hair was the best thing in the heat.
I bit my lip and concentrated as hard as I could at the grainy image on the TV screen. The brief vignette of femme désnudé from the 11 o’clock freeview on the tarot channel. Trying hard to neither concentrate on the phone number nor the colloquially lewd offers at the side of the tiny image, I worked my wrist into overdrive and finally came, it had taken over twenty minutes, fuck sake.
Beyond Work documents humans at work using words and reportage photography, with no judgement or glorification. It’s an attempt at unearthing the social, cultural and functional world of work that’s invisible in everyday life. In this series, Curtis James interviews John Prior, a man who dresses up as Santa Claus at Churchill Shopping Centre in Brighton, UK.
The affair happened more than ten years ago. We worked together on a project with four other colleagues. She was married and had two small children. During the holidays, she texted me several times saying that she was thinking about me. The first two or three messages, I ignored. I erased them. I seriously thought she was a no-go. The fourth time, I wrote back: “You’re married.” I thought that would end it….
From 90s suburban Coventry, Holly Watson recalls stories from her childhood. This time she looks at a relationship between her Aunty Mandy and her husband SImon, a man so boring as to drive you to tears.
It used to be a very simple task to purchase a light bulb. Check the wattage on the dead bulb at home, go to the store and pick a similar one from the display shelf, take it home, remove the burned-out bulb from its socket, replace it with the new one, wrap the old bulb in some newspaper, and toss it in the trash.
Beyond Work documents humans at work using words and reportage photography, with no judgement or glorification. It’s an attempt at unearthing the social, cultural and functional world of work that’s invisible in everyday life. In this series, Curtis James interviews Norman Macaulay, a man who has been working as a refuse collector for the past 27 years.
It might sound strange for a non-native speaker, especially for an English one, that in addition to the common classifications we all use to distinguish substantives such as singular/plural or concrete/abstract, the Spanish language has one particularly problematic noun class that involves genre.
Britain is a nation of real diversity, tolerance and multicultural vibrancy. But for those who have suffered hate crime, it can be an alienating and terrifying place. We dressed visibly as Muslims for one month to try and understand Islamophobia in Britain today.
Unprotected sex, booze, a swimming pool and and forthright businesswomen all face Laurence in a down-at-the-heel Mexican hotel.
One of the stringent facets of Mexican life surrounds the imbibing of the local tap…
Recovering from schizoaffective disorder was a moment to moment battle that I fought every day. There were many losses and also a number of victories as I struggled through the trauma, social dysfunction, OCD, mania, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia symptoms, and everything else that was hampering me.
