Issue Eight brings the second year of The Junket to a close, and a number of the pieces published here are appropriately concerned with beginnings and endings. These essays, stories, and poems return to birth and death, to the scenes of our ushering-in and our passing away.

Several of them deal with the work of commemoration. In Lulah Ellender’s ‘Reading Between the Lines’, for instance, the writer’s grandmother finds a way to manage mourning for a dead relative in the making of lists. Lists become ‘a bridge between the moment of feeling and the moment of doing’, bringing the living and the dead into closer contact and giving us insight into the inner lives of our predecessors by way of the things they thought worth recording.

Equally interested in the nature of that contact, Peter Scott’s ‘Graven Names’ comes at the subject by way of three walks, or pilgrimages, through cemeteries — one English, one Scottish, one Italian. ‘The stones tell stories,’ he writes, ‘but sometimes they’re difficult to read.’ Arthur House encounters a similar feeling in the parks of Moscow, where statues of dissidents jostle uncomfortably with monuments to Soviet heroes.

These latter-day ruins have come to seem ancient, even as the ideological conflict they represent has been reconfigured into new and potent forms. In Berlin, Henry Krempels investigates another Cold War relic with contemporary resonance, an NSA listening station built on Second World War rubble and now precariously colonised by artists. ‘Over the Wires’ uncovers a fascinating ongoing performance of simulated security that responds at some deeper level to the site’s historical function. Such liminal zones, accessible yet restricted, speak to a common desire for revitalising adventure — as they do in Susanna Hislop’s story ‘The Quarry’ — or just for the experience of something at an angle to daily life.

Graham Riach’s ‘Rust and Crystal’ both evokes this kind of experience and raises questions about how it might be preserved. Here the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi occasions a meditation on how ‘desolate transience’ can nonetheless hold ‘latent beauty’. How, Riach asks, can we continue to see the beauty of things that are aged and worn in a society that prizes constant refreshment and convenient expendability above all else?

Other pieces point the way to some possible answers. The powerful rhythms of Damian Le Bas’s poems constitute an inheritance and a renewal of their own, drawing Romani language and legend into verses that move in the mind long after a first encounter. They make poetry out of making do. In a different vein, ‘Seabirth’ — a story by Dan Stevens — sends up modern faddishness with a satirical take on the maternity industry in a bizarre yet strangely familiar alternate America.

Anna Fewster’s ink-smeared ‘Letterpress’, meanwhile, describes the process of printing the book Yellow Cab Quartet in collaboration with another Junket contributor, the writer Olivia Laing. Fewster’s essay aptly captures the labour that a hand-made book demands as she seeks to reclaim ‘the enduring and material from the disposable and the digital.’ And Thomas Marks’s ‘On Sandwiches’ offers an alternative view of quick refreshment: a lunch-hour cultural history that ranges from Dickens to the delicatessen to show how a throwaway object can become meaningful in the face of its own disposability. 

James Purdon