Painting behind bars

The pool

Fiction I CATCH THE school bus home most days, kids kangarooing from seat to seat. Hard for a little bloke like me to get a...

Non-fictionIn 2001 I read an article in The Guardian newspaper about a man who fell from the sky, landing in a superstore car park not far from where I live in London. The article, by journalists Esther Addley and Rory McCarthy, detailed how the Metropolitan Police discovered the dead man’s identity through a combination of luck, Interpol and British-Pakistani community workers. Muhammad Ayaz had managed to slip through security at Bahrain airport, run across the tarmac and, according to witnesses on the plane, disappear beneath the wing of the British Airways Boeing 777. The article quotes a spokesman from the International Air Transport Association: a myth circulates that there is a ‘secret hatch from the wheel bay into the cargo bay, and then into the passenger cabin, as if it were a castle with a dungeon and a series of secret passageways’. No such passageway exists and Muhammad would have found himself trapped in the wheel bay with no oxygen, no heating and no air pressure as well as no way out. If he wasn’t crushed or burned by the retracting wheels, he may have frozen to death once the flight reached 30,000 feet, finally falling out hours later when the plane lowered its landing gear as it prepared to touch down at Heathrow.

Blackheath mating rituals

Poetry Clouds ripple, sunshine splashes, a white dove tests its wings. Bella and Houdini are hanging clothes on the line of the landlord when flirtation greets them: the...