I was the last to leave the dorm, as far as I knew. I turned off the blinking lights on the little Christmas tree; I’d felt that I disliked the other people in the dorm until I came back from the day’s classes and saw that tree there and then I’d felt a bit sorry. There was a bus stop just outside the halls, though I usually went down to the station to take the quicker bus home it was an icy day and I had been afraid of ice ever since slipping badly on my way into school when

In three billion years the sun will expend its hydrogen and eight minutes later all life on Earth, such as it may be, will end forever. The sun will go through other transformations, first grinding the Earth into dust before expanding and swallowing the debris. Eventually shrinking and collapsing entirely taking all trace of what was once the Earth with it who knows where. From the birth of the sun this will have taken about fifteen billion years, of which four and a half bil

Now their forty years are spent at last the rotten tower blocks are being torn down, they leave squared off ditches and pits and the fields lie fallow for years till they’re built on again or instead just lie empty forever. Leaving the town and heading down the ancient defile to the little village, the road leads to identical traces, the ruins of the Roman wall that marked the edge of the Imperium. It ran from one end of the country to the other and was manned for only nine y

During the 1960s, in a fit of madness that has only been displayed by the most detached dictators the soviet of Glasgow city council decided that they would destroy every building in Glasgow and replace them with an entire city of functionally identical tower blocks (fig 1). Thankfully they were largely frustrated though a great tract of the inner city was replaced with a busy motorway and many thousands of stone built tenements were replaced with functionally worthless housi

Along the canal, three miles from town and three miles from the house grows the oldest and largest oak tree that can be found anywhere amongst the fields or forests for a long way around. If you sit amongst the roots on the south west side you have found the only place I know of in all the river’s valley that one can both look out as far as the eye can see and see nothing shaped by human hands for two hundred years. The canal was laid out then and the little fields were alrea

Up among the earthworks my breath grew ragged. I stumbled amongst the dry straw tussocks growing over the dolmens, heaped stones overgrown with grass; more years beneath them than green shoots over them. The sea air came hard into my lungs strewn with the scents of the machair’s wildflowers, purple and blue nod-nodding in the warm gentle wind. At this time of year and in this place the sky never got fully dark, though the sun had all the appearance of setting across the arc o

In the spring and autumn, all across the country, there are inexplicable and horrific outbursts of horse mutilation. It is rare that anyone is caught or observed committing the acts, the attacks often follow a pattern, and the pattern has been observed for a very long time, in fact through all of recorded history and even before. Despite this it remains a largely overlooked crime that elicits brief bursts of shock if it is reported before it is forgotten again. I became aware