Issue One

Tim Smith-Laing

Omiyage: a souvenir

I Ikimasenka, watashitachi? when the evening is spread out against the sky, can we visit the temples together, ishoni? They light them up each night, and I would like to see the golden and the silve… Read article

Anne Obituarist

Rituals of an Obituarist

There is a smell that comes with them now, with writing. Five months ago an e-mail was sent around my Cambridge college seeking people willing to write obituaries for deceased alumni. Help was requir… Read article

Peter Scott

Nights at the Opera

In the first 28 years of my life, I went to the opera, oh, six or seven times. In the year or so since, I’ve been to 15 different productions. My knowledge of the music is not deep. I can tell a Wa… Read article

James Purdon

Covert Culture

We may assume we are in the presence of covert culture when we note a recurrent pattern of inconsistent or seemingly illogical behavior. When most people in a given society or sub-society adhere to in… Read article

Susanna Hislop

Picking the Lock

It is September. It is a Monday. But it feels nothing like a Monday morning at all. My mother is driving us down a Dorset lane as narrow, winding and nostalgic as the neurological pathways hotwiring m… Read article

Charlotte Faircloth

Positioning

It puts me in a difficult position – emotionally, professionally, sometimes physically – when a friend asks for my advice about breastfeeding. This is largely because any knowledge I have on the … Read article

Arthur House

Lethe’s Children

Die Nacht ist vorbeiEin neuer Tag beginntAlles strömtStadtkindBerlin, du gibst mir die KraftBin ‘n Teil von dirStadtkind (more…)… Read article

Carrie Plitt

‘The Wall’, or, What I Talk About When I Talk About the 400 Metres

The first time I vomited from running was the first time I ran the 400 metres. It was my freshman year of high school, at an indoor track meet against our rivals, Ipswich. Like most high school sports… Read article

Frank Lumbar

On Killing Squirrels

For the last few years, I’ve worked with an Air Arms S200 pre-charged pneumatic air rifle propped against my desk. It began as a precaution against mice, who’d taken advantage of the decreasing fa… Read article

Thomas Marks

On Knowing the Words

I have started learning poems by heart again. The first time round, I was six and under orders from Mrs Russell, a primary-school teacher who sometimes said ‘bugger’ loudly in the classroom and wh… Read article

Editor’s Note

‘a souvenir’: that is the subtitle of Tim Smith-Laing’s strange and lingering Omiyage, a poem we are delighted to publish in the first quarterly issue of The Junket. It has good reasons to assume this unusual generic marker: it carries things back from Japan and holds tight to the memory of another poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The undeniable Frenchiness of the word perfectly catches the frustrated pretensions of a Prufrock, at home or abroad.

Souvenirs often seem slight but can take on rich personal significance as they begin to act as little gateways into people’s private histories. Several of the articles we publish here share that quality of resonant surprise, insofar as they work apparently anecdotal material into something unexpected and carefully-shaped. In ‘Picking the Lock’, Susanna Hislop achieves a tone at once wry and moving as she recalls her battles with computer passwords and combination locks. Carrie Plitt’s piece on running the 400 metres reprises one race as it makes its pithy, incisive commentary on her ambivalent relationship with the sport.

But souvenirs also seem designed to stave off forgetting: Arthur House’s rich, elegiac memories of lost months in Berlin discover, in the city’s vibrant techno scene, a metropolis steeped in the waters of Lethe. ‘Rituals of an Obituarist’ provides a lyrical meditation on what it means to edit people’s lives after their deaths: hauntingly, the identity of even its author seems to come and go as she frets at the death duties she owes others. (In a very different context, urban huntsman Frank Lumbar has honed the art of disappearing from view, leaving the reader uncertain as to whether his backyard antics are a kind of After London fantasy or something far more disturbing.)

Knowledge is at stake in many of these articles, from both amateur and expert perspectives. No specialist in the subject, Peter Scott launches a sprightly, edifying defence of opera from his song-drenched crow’s nest at Covent Garden. Charlotte Faircloth’s astute, polemical sketch on the politics of breastfeeding puts the anthropologist in the position of midwife, as she tries to reconcile conflicting responsibilities to friendship and academic research. ‘The separation of rational understanding from daily practice’ is also the focus of James Purdon’s illuminating piece on the ‘Covert Culture’ of the late 1950s, of the bizarre normality of life beneath the constant threat of nuclear apocalypse. How could that terrific fear be called to mind and forgotten, both at once?

Thomas Marks

List of Contributors

Charlotte Faircloth

Charlotte Faircloth is an academic who lives in London. She is the author of Militant Lactivism? Attachment parenting and intensive motherhood in the UK and France (Berghahn Books, 2013) and co-author of Parenting Culture Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Issue One

Contents

Editor’s Note

List of Contributors