April | 2016 | Under a Grey Sky

On the 15th April 1989 I was nine, and I can remember playing a game with my younger brother Sean. We were in the bedroom of our house in Burscough, messing around on the bunk beds. At some point we wandered downstairs, to get a drink or a ‘Toronto Snack’ – a fruit salad like the ones I used to get at nursery in Canada when Dad was teaching there for a year and Sean was just a baby. In my memory we came into the living room to find him watching the television.

“Something’s happened at the match,” is what I remember him saying. I remember the green of the pitch and the blue of the sky and the people milling around on the grass. People running as they carried others on makeshift stretchers. A line of police. As the afternoon progressed we learned of the deaths. 10, 20, 30… until it got to 95. Mum and Dad never hid the truth of the world from us, and so we knew what had happened but of course, at nine years old, I don’t know if I could really comprehend it. That night and over the next days Dad met many of the survivors as they returned from Sheffield. He knew, we knew, the truth from the beginning, whatever that newspaper wrote. A week after the disaster we went with Mum and Dad to Anfield, to pay our respects and to leave scarves on the pitch in front of the Kop. At 3.06pm we were in Stanley Park and held the line of scarves that linked Liverpool and Everton. It was the start of a bond between the two clubs, between the two sets of fans – between the people of Liverpool – that remains to this day.

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As always I started the year resolving to write a little more here on Under a Grey Sky, and for the first couple of months of the year it seemed to work out okay. And then came March. We began the month with a journey south as part of what has become an annual tradition around Katrin’s birthday to find a place to explore somewhere between Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden in order to bring her together with her closest friends and their families. This year we ended up in sleepy Torgau… the picture above is the main market square on a Saturday afternoon. Torgau is famous as being the place where the American and Soviet troops first met at the end of the Second World War, and infamous for its history as a place of detention both before the war, during the Soviet occupation, and throughout the history of the GDR. So part of Katrin’s lighthearted birthday stroll was spent exploring an exhibition entitled Traces of Injustice… this also appears to be part of a tradition as two years ago we were wandering around Colditz castle.

But a day trip to the banks of the Elbe river was not the main reason for Under a Grey Sky radio silence. In fact there were two. Firstly, this happened:

That is us launching the third edition of our magazine Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. We had chats on stage with contributors, drank some beer and gave some readings and the whole evening was a lovely celebration of another six months of hard work and (we think) great writing and illustration about places around the world. If you haven’t yet had the chance to get your hands on a copy, all three editions are available – take a look at our online shop if you are interested.

The second main reason for a lack of posts in this neck of the woods was that we spent the second half of the month away in Rhoscolyn, perhaps my favourite place in the world and that I will finally be writing about in the next issue of Elsewhere, published in September. We did some walking along the coast and in the mountains in glorious weather, some catching up with family, and some sitting in a caravan in the rain (all part of the experience). We collected plenty of inspiration for these pages and beyond, which I hope to get online soon. We returned not only with those stories but Katrin took hundreds of photographs and we brought home a new mug for our collection. So as I sit in Berlin and eat my breakfast, I can imagine I am in that bustling cafe in Llanberis, just down from the hills…