There are some things we can’t put down. There are things that we return to, that we trace our fingers back over again and again: embossed text on the cover of a book; a crack in the wall where the paint is peeling; the raised stuff of a blemish, a spot, or a scar. This issue of The Junket is distracted, it’s beset: it’s got things on its mind that it can’t seem to shake.

We tend to fixate on that which we cannot quite grasp: obsession breeds in gaps and silences. In ‘Silent Motorcade’, a meditation on the footage of JFK’s assassination, Nathan Dunne prises those silences apart, exposing our ongoing fascination with conspiracy and obliqueness in the process. Meanwhile, Joanne O’Leary’s ‘Lines and Lacks’ considers the things that families and nations focus on forgetting. She draws on the history of the Etch A Sketch to leave us with the uncomfortable notion that the slate of memory can never really be wiped clean, no matter how hard we try.

That persistent feeling – a powerful pull of fragments and ruins – pervades Alex Niven’s haunting ‘Two Ballads, North’, and absorbs Damian Le Bas in his ‘Stopping Places’. Niven’s poems make old forms new; Le Bas, too, takes the past as his starting point. This essay charts his attempts to find the scattered dwelling spots of Gypsy forebears and satisfy an uncanny nostalgia for places he has never seen. Lucy Barnes also plumbs the depths of the past. In ‘Shelving’ she traces the origins of the library and its ancient connections with memory to ask what modern variations on this system of sorting might say about our collective imagination now. Against time and change, she finds, the library persists.

Indeed, there are some tics, twitches, spasms that we simply can’t get rid of, let alone control. Eley Williams’s ‘Positive Feedback: A Game’ plays with a physical response that feels hard-wired into our biological composition and which, under the right circumstances, is bound to recur regardless of time or place. While her game reflects on the curious ways we sympathise unwittingly and automatically with the world around us, Katrina Zaat’s ‘Domesticated’ finds its sticking point in a kind of sympathy that the author finds herself unable fully to articulate. Here, an observance of the letting agent’s rites and rituals leads to a troubled confrontation between the selves we are expected to perform and the values we strive to live by.

The nature of ritual, so oft repeated, is such that it can be easy to forget how wrapped up we are in its ins-and-outs, its quirks and strangenesses. Compelled by the weirdness of the hen-do, Francesca Wade’s ‘The Rites of Women’ unravels the threads that bind women together on the eve of a wedding, and unpicks the age-old behaviours into which so many of us enter with such abandon; those behaviours we take for granted. But then, to be seized by our obsessions can be euphoric; it can be exhilarating. Tim Smith-Laing’s ‘Where the Rot Set In’ follows the fortunes of The Monkees’ eccentric career, revelling in the bizarre world of fandom and the habit hype has of transforming the unremarkable into the sensational. Monkee mania, like any obsession, delights in the sheer pleasure of knowledge meticulously gathered, arranged, possessed.

There are some things we can’t put down. We hope this issue of The Junket will be one of them.

Jon Day & Kristen Treen