Jutting from the streets of Bolivia’s highest and youngest city El Alto, playful facades of cholets bear witness to—and anticipate—a new modernity. The cholet, a play on “chalet,” is a novel type of mixed-use building in Bolivia, iconic for its elaborate interior and exterior decoration. Rendering western sci-fi heroes in hand-molded polystyrene against plasticized glass, these aesthetically plastic buildings manifest an abundant future.

Cholets are social hubs for, and monuments to, an emerging indigenous urbanite bourgeoise: Aymara and Quechua traders made wealthy in recent decades by importing consumer goods, mainly from China. The abundant future they anticipate is neither westernized nor strictly indigenous, and not an emulsion of the two—but rather one straddling their contradictions. El Alto’s commerce and fiestas are also abundant, utilizing synthetic materials’ high quantity and low cost to out-maneuver socioeconomic exclusions born from a colonial history of discrimination.

This abundance has a shadow. Plastic is dispersed everywhere in the world but especially concentrated in the Global South, where international wastelanding frameworks enact colonialism by another name: pollution. Mounting evidence of the havoc this capricious material is causing to ecosystems is met by indecision at the highest levels, attested by recent failures at the United Nations to produce a Global Plastics Treaty.

Understanding the entwined unfolding of Bolivia’s rising middle class, global plastics, and the neocolonial processes that entangle them means embracing contradiction. Theorizing Bolivian modernity, indigenous scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui introduces ch’ixi: an Aymara word denoting a composite color, like granite, which appears grey from a distance but is really myriad distinct black and white dots. For Cusicanqui, ch’ixi points to the irreducibility at the base of intertwined things—particularly different contemporary cultures. Much like ch’ixi, the aspirations of people practicing neoliberalism from below coexist and conflict with hegemonic visions of the future. Their experiences reveal many contrasting answers to the question of living well in an increasingly plasticky world.

Read the rest at AES Online.

Subscribe now

Religion has been made invisible in the study of politics, yet it shapes the global political economy in important and often obscured ways. Specifically, Christianity’s shrouded influence is central to the reproduction of the modern, “secularised” world and particularly the global drug prohibition regime. This dissertation addresses the research gap by introducing four Christian metanarratives with which it analyses the regime, a nexus of structural power that upholds serious injustices and inequities. These metanarratives are found to significantly influence how the regime sustains itself through policing acceptable and unacceptable identities across the narco-carceral complex, pharma-medical industry, and the media. The findings illuminate the necessity of introducing a spiritual dimension to the study of politics. This dissertation also presents a novel approach for problematising structurally violent and unequal paradigms, laying necessary groundwork for structural changes towards a more egalitarian society.

Read more

In 2023 I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the often-invisible religious underpinnings of Prohibition, the global system of punitive drug policies that has wrought destruction on people, communities and ecosystems the world over for centuries. I titled it THE HIDDEN CRUSADE, getting ambitiously into the weeds of what I felt at the time to be a somewhat abstract argument that Prohibition, despite the magnitude of its self-evident failure, retains its inertia thanks to a set of secret esoteric principles grounded in the “secularised” nature of modern Christendom. In other words, we in the West don’t readily acknowledge the undercurrents of religiosity that still shape our “secular” reality. It was precisely this invisibility, I argued, that gives Prohibition its staying power: in institutions like UNODC and WHO; in documents like the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs; in the bloodshed that floods the unseen margins of the licit world order.

Except that now, as the Trump administration and Pete Hegseth’s newly rebranded Department of War are ramping up a revitalised War on Drugs – drone-striking small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific; conducting covert and overt military operations against Venezuela including the capture of its president Nicolás Maduro – these religious “metanarratives” are no longer so hidden.

Subscribe now

On 1 September 2025, the US military’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) began conducting drone strikes on small boats that the administration suspects of trafficking drugs. This operation has killed more than 110 people as of 1 January 2026, including the egregious “double-tap” killing that initiated (and set the ruthless tone of) the campaign.[1] This series of murders – and legal experts at the UN and Amnesty International are clear that these killings are murders[2] – now carries the operational name ‘Southern Spear’.

The smoking gun that motivated this essay is the above promotional image posted briefly to SOUTHCOM’s social media, featuring a Marine wearing the Jerusalem cross patch on their helmet. Also known as the crusader cross, it is an archaic symbol from Crusades in the 11^th century. In the modern day it appears exclusively as an appropriation by far-right movements for its attachment to a ‘nostalgia for a medieval Christendom.’[3]

Although hardly the first time that references to the Crusades have been deployed by units within the US military, this particular dog-whistle seems to penetrate deeper now than during GWOT thanks to the ‘Christian nationalist regime change’ that has swept the US with Trump’s second term. Project 2025, the infamous Heritage Foundation blueprint shaping this revolution in power and process, is designed specifically to embed fundamentalist theo-political ideology irreversibly and durably into governance – instituting ‘God’s infallible law’ for decades or centuries to come.[4]

But this of course is nothing new.

The long American history of Christian nationalism and its drug problem

The USA’s identity has been, from its earliest coagulations, enmeshed in the racialised interplay of Christianity and politics. Political scientist David Campbell unfolds these origins in Writing Security, showing how Europe’s first encounter with the New World ‘shattered’ the accepted biblical narrative of how the world worked.[5] America’s subsequent colonisation involved both ideational and territorial battle: the “civilised” European-Christian self now severely shaken by, and antagonistic toward, the “barbaric” indigenous other.

English puritanical settlers in particular were gripped by paranoia; terrified more than anything else of degenerating to barbarity, they pursued extermination of indigenous American peoples and sought to purge perceived enemies within. Salem and other famous witchcraft trials demonstrate the fear and ruthlessness towards wrong-think and wrong-practice that deviated from Christian principles.[6]

Drugs are central to this struggle. The Americas, described by historian David Courtwright as a ‘psychedelic Eden,’ have abundant power plants and millennia-old associated practices which captivated and intimidated European settlers.[7] The New World was merely the latest frontier of Christendom’s search for, and impulse to control, the Paradise on Earth whose sublime state drugs could tap into. The word “drug” in the early modern period referred to other experientially exotic substances such as cinnamon, ginger, clove, nutmeg and saffron in addition to the drugs we know (opium, hashish, coffee, sugar, chocolate and tobacco, for example) – and Euro-Christian colonial empires were deeply invested in ‘dominion over the imagination and the body’ through controlling the production, supply and use of these substances. The spiritual element of this task, controlling the imagination, was the proviso of the Inquisition.[8]

Following any drug from there to here will reveal this persistent religious fight for dominion over the psyche via control of the psychoactive.[9] More than half a century before the US-strongarmed 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the only UN document to use the word ‘evil’ – and whose limited NGO presence included the International Conference of Catholic Charities – American missionaries were already returning from Asia with grave warnings about the perils of opium. Opium was a useful scapegoat for their failures to Christianise their would-be congregations, and the sense of narcotics as a racially foreign danger played into domestic US moral panics about young white Christian women ‘liable to be ensnared by men, especially men of [colour], and to fall into a life of degeneracy.’[10]

By the 1920s and 1930s, a comprehensive antidrug rhetorical framework had been developed by self-proclaimed “temperance crusaders” that exploited fears of subversion embedded in the US cultural imagination – which, let’s remind ourselves, has evolved from the premise of protecting the fragile purity of the self from a corrosive externality that wants to enter and destroy it from within. This framework survives to this day. Its prevailing theme of a global, anti-Christian conspiracy to subvert civilisation itself[11] has obvious parallels with the Trump administration’s narrative line that the flow of illicit drugs into the US is a form of terrorism. ‘When you flood American streets with drugs,’ said the US representative at a recent UN Security Council briefing on Venezuela, ‘you are terrorizing America… [your] actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.’[12]

Add in the apocalyptic theming of a holy war, and the mission to vanquish the “evil” of drugs towards (white, Christian) mankind becomes a potent justification for any deployment of violence. I’m reminded of the ‘Jesus loves nukes’ presentation that featured in USAF’s nuclear missile launch officer training for decades until it was halted in 2011. It ‘used passages from the Bible and religious imagery to demonstrate the moral justification for atomic warfare.’[13] But Christian fundamentalism’s obsession with spectacular bloodletting and the end timesgoes much further than set dressing for doomsday scenarios.

There is a growing takeover of the US military by violent Christian nationalist ideologues, which has intensified with Trump’s appointment of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of War. Since 2020, Hegseth has adorned his body with alt-right symbols, including a prominent crusader cross, and written books that elucidate his beliefs – notably one titled “American Crusade” with the militancy against internal and external enemies one would predict.[14] Hegseth’s timing is not coincidental. He reflects the radicalising force of the Trump admin, bridging together the mainstreaming of the online far-right with weaponised Christianity and the US military.[15] Around a third of military personnel, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) estimates, now ascribe to this radical and militarised form of Christian nationalism which MRFF identifies as “dominionist”.[16]

Military action against Venezuela lays bare the logics of Prohibition in a sign of things to come

Trump’s War on Narcoterror echoes a lot of the racialised War on Drugs rhetoric, but it’s also a fusion and development of the zealotry of the War on Terror. The charges levied against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, ostensibly rationale for his capture, are narco-terrorism conspiracy and cocaine importation conspiracy.[17] These are due to his alleged connections with the Sinaloa cartel and Tren de Aragua, two powerful transnational organised crime syndicates that specialise in drug-trafficking and have reputations for being ultra-violent. The first photo taken of Maduro in custody following the 3 January raid, and subsequent photos, have emphasised Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) personnel to keep the drugs connection front-and-centre.

Drug policy reform advocates are quick to point out, however, that Prohibition is almost never really about reducing the flow of drugs. Responding to Maduro’s capture, Clemmie James, who co-leads the International Coalition for Drug Policy Reform and Climate Change, puts it succinctly:

“Fighting the war on drugs” has for decades been a useful narrative distraction for territorial violence, natural resource extraction of fossil fuels, timber and minerals the world over. Global drug policy was never about curbing drug use. Drug prohibition has enabled the drugs trade to boom and become one of the most lucrative and sophisticated trades in the world… [Prohibition] undermines democracy and provides unregulated financial investment for these predatory industries - and States.[18]

The uncertain fate of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, which Trump announced would fall into the hands of US oil companies,[19] has many pointing fingers that Maduro’s drug-entanglements are smokescreen for a naked imperialist resources grab. It follows the playbook of Prohibition engendering and shielding extractivist practices, for example the rampant illegal gold mining and agribusiness that thrive in the Amazon Basin thanks to laundered drug profits.[20] In the Venezuela-US case, the extractivism is state-sanctioned rather than criminal – a distinction that rests formally on US-led global Prohibition, which ‘offers a legal and political framework through which sovereignty is redefined and coercive action gains international legitimacy,’[21] but in reality is largely determined by the magnitude of the US monopoly on force.

However, to minimise narcotics as no more than a useful scapegoat (as some in the drug policy space have asserted) misses the crucial and deep connection between drugs and Christian dominion I have outlined in this essay; consequently, there’s a risk of being blindsided by the ideological pattern that has driven US antidrug actions throughout its history and is now in a supercharged position to direct an acceleratingly violent future.

Tellingly, in February 2025, the US Department of State elevated Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa cartel and other Latin American, drug-involved crime syndicates to the status of Foreign Terrorist Organisations (FTOs).[22] The FTO designation expands the powers and mandate of the state to take punitive action. It also shifts the narrative and perception around these groups from organised crime, motivated by economic incentive, to something more akin to the religious-political extremism that we associate the terrorist label with: ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram; irreconcilable enemies who engage in, and must be engaged with, a holy war.

This, I believe, indicates the projection of American Christian nationalism that postures towards the existential-and-forever war that Trump & Hegseth’s Department of War wants to fight. Seizing critical resources is about the money, yes, but it’s also – perhaps more enduringly – about the dominionist realisation of ultimate control over the world. The terms of this war, Victory or Annihilation, are absolute.

For those of us who advocate for the dismantling of Prohibition in favour of a regulated drug economy, the FTO designations signal an even wider chasm in the way of the reconciliation (and perhaps even legitimisation) that needs to happen for regulation to succeed. And for environment defenders more broadly, the first shots of the War on Narcoterror are making Prohibition’s morass unavoidable.

A new paradigm for drugs and the environment; how can climate activists adapt?

The aggressive form of resource capture by the US in Venezuela and state capture at home portends a replacement of the quiet, “business as usual” climate destruction for profit with a more malignant kind – a gloves-off rejection of social and environmental courtship outright in the name of ideological survival. In this case, it is a mythologised white Christian nation who feels its survival is at stake. Who else will follow suit? Beyond the expected retrenchment of global Prohibition frameworks, which we’re already witnessing with the WHO’s recent coca leaf review that reasserted its place in Schedule I as per the 1961 ruling,[23] I worry about rising opposition to socioecological justice.

The climate movement has made huge strides in the last decade or so by embracing and platforming the expertise and eco-wisdom of indigenous people, often in regions most acutely affected by the rising climate crisis. Prohibition concurrently criminalises indigenous agroecological and traditional practices which keep critical forests and their inhabitants in good health; it enables the persecution of communities and land defenders as well as the capture and exploitation of their land by both organised crime and state actors.[24] The climate movement’s “ontological turn” towards indigenous climate teachings, as academics would call it, is powered by spiritual openness and humility towards subaltern knowledge paradigms. It runs against the current of Christendom, especially the dominionist and proselytising kind, and therefore is likely to be in the crosshairs of Trump’s culture-war campaign. If the intensifying War on Narcoterror follows its WOD and GWOT predecessors, it will rapidly envelop speech and freedoms deemed wrong-think as it strives for narrative and ideological control.

Climate advocates need to acknowledge (and I believe will acknowledge fast) the seriousness of the link between drugs policy and environmental harm: Prohibition is a major ally of extractivism and obstacle to climate justice. At this pivotal moment, we need to defend the frontline climate defenders who are killed by the hundreds every year by opponents of drug and environmental reform that continue to benefit from Prohibition.[25] Moreso, we cannot take the supposed secularity of the climate conversation for granted. It would behove us to seek allies in religious organisations, especially those working at the intersection of deradicalisation, justice and nonviolence.

Finally, we need to prepare strategies for facing bad-faith actors. This will involve learning countermeasures to narratives that deploy un-reason like Christian nationalism. On this, I think there are many lessons we can draw from direct action and other radical forms of activism from times and places where the weather was unfavourable for progressive change. If the teeth of Prohibition and environmental destruction are getting sharper, then we must get nimbler; spikier.

Share

[1] Vanessa Buschschlüter, 2026. ‘US military says five killed in latest strike on alleged drug boats,’ BBC News. 1 January.

[2] From remarks at ‘The ‘Narcoterrorism Threat’ event on Intenational Human Rights Day 2025, co-hosted by Amnesty International, Conectas Brazil, International Drug Policy Consortium and the Washington Office on Latin America. 9 December. See References: UN Special Rapporteur Ben Saul, ‘The Narcoterrorism Threat.’

[3] Patty Nieberg, 2025. ‘US Southern Command posts photo of Marine with ‘Jerusalem Cross’ patch’. Task and Purpose. 9 December.

[4] Both quotations in this paragraph are from pro-democracy thinktank the Kettering Foundation – Maura Casey, 2024. ‘Project 2025: The blueprint for Christian Nationalist regime change.’ 19 August.

[5] In chapter 5: ‘Imagining America’, David Campbell, 1998. Writing Security.

[6] Witchcraft and drugs have been entwined since time immemorial. This connection gives us the trope of “riding broomsticks” but it was also a key driver of the witch hunts in early modern Europe that created over 100,000 victims of torture and execution. Detailed in H. Sidky, 1997. Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs and Disease.

[7] As relayed by Benjamin Breen, 2021. ‘The failed globalization of psychedelic drugs in the Early Modern World’.

[8] Orivaldo Lopes Jr. and Janaína Costa, 2018. ‘‘Drugs and Religion: Contributions to the Debate on the Science-Religion Interface,’ pp. 2-3.

[9] I cover this in more depth in my UG dissertation from the late 19^th century onwards. For the in-between period, histories of opium are illuminating.

[10] Anne Foster, 2019. ‘The Philippines, the United States, and the Origins of Global Narcotics Prohibition,’ p. 29.

[11] Susan Speaker, 2001. ‘“The struggle of Mankind against its deadliest foe”: themes of counter-subversion in anti-narcotic campaigns, 1920-1940’, pp. 592-597.

[12] United States Mission to the United Nations, 2025. ‘Remarks at a UN Security Council Briefing on Venezuela,’ 10 October.

[13] Nick Allen, 2011. ‘‘Jesus loves nukes’: US Air Force taught the Christian Just War Theory,’ Telegraph. 5 August.

[14] Lydia Wilson’s excellent essay delves into the reimagination of medieval Crusades by Christian nationalists over the past ten years and Pete Hegseth’s position in this extreme cultural movement: Lydia Wilson, 2024. ‘Pete Hegseth’s tattoos and the crusading obsession of the Far Right,’ New Lines Magazine. 29 November.

[15] Jasper Craven, 2024. ‘Pete Hegseth’s Crusade to turn the Military into a Christian Weapon,’ Politico. 6 December.

[16] Cameron L. Cowan, 2025. ‘Christian Nationalism and the US Military,’ The Cameron Journal. 10 January.

[17] Associated Press, 2026. ‘Unsealed indictment reveals charges against Nicolás Maduro and his wife,’ Guardian. 4 January.

[18] Clemmie James, 2026. via LinkedIn. 5 January.

[19] Ana Faguy, 2026. ‘Trump says US will ‘run’ Venezuela and ‘fix oil infrastructure.’ BBC News. 3 January.

[20] INTERSECÇÃO, 2025. From Forest to Dust. via IDPC, 12 November.

[21] Felipe Krause, Course Director for the Latin American Centre at Oxford University, 2026. via LinkedIn. 4 January.

[22] Office of the Spokesperson, U.S. Department of State, 2025. ‘Designation of International Cartels.’ 20 February.

[23] World Health Organization, 2025. ‘WHO Expert Committee concludes critical review of coca leaf, recommends maintaining current controls.’ 10 December.

[24] From Forest to Dust.

[25] Global Witness, 2025. ‘At least 146 land and environmental defenders killed or disappeared globally in 2024.’ 17 September.

References

Allen, Nick, 2011. ‘‘Jesus loves nukes’: US Air Force taught the Christian Just War Theory.’ Telegraph. 5 August. https://archive.ph/20231230035723/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8684257/Jesus-loves-nukes-US-Air-Force-taught-the-Christian-Just-War-Theory.html

Associated Press, 2026. ‘Unsealed indictment reveals charges against Nicolás Maduro and his wife.’ Guardian. 4 January. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/04/nicolas-maduro-cocaine-corruption-charges

Breen, Benjamin, 2021. ‘The failed globalization of psychedelic drugs in the Early Modern World.’ The Historical Journal 65: 12-29.

Buschschlüter, Vanessa, 2026. ‘US military says five killed in latest strike on alleged drug boats.’ BBC News. 1 January. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czdq1ple2l4o

Casey, Maura, 2024. ‘Project 2025: the blueprint for Christian Nationalist regime change.’ Charles F. Kettering Foundation. 19 August. https://kettering.org/project-2025-the-blueprint-for-christian-nationalist-regime-change/

Campbell, David, 1998. Writing Security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity. University of Minnesota Press.

Cowan, Cameron L., 2025. ‘Christian Nationalism and the US Military.’ The Cameron Journal. 10 January. https://www.cameronjournal.com/christian-nationalism-and-the-us-military/#:~:text=The%20Military%20Religious%20Freedom%20Foundation,for%20Rouges%20Magazine%20in%202020

Craven, Jasper, 2024. ‘Pete Hegseth’s Crusade to turn the Military into a Christian Weapon.’ Politico. 6 December. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/06/pete-hegseth-defense-religion-christian-00192117

Faguy, Ana, 2026. ‘Trump says US will ‘run’ Venezuela and ‘fix oil infrastructure.’ BBC News. 3 January. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd9enjeey3go

Foster, Anne L., 2019. ‘The Philippines, the United States, and the Origins of Global Narcotics Prohibition.’ The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 33(1): 13-36.

Global Witness, 2025. ‘At least 146 land and environmental defenders killed or disappeared globally in 2024.’ 17 September. https://globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/at-least-146-land-and-environmental-defenders-killed-or-disappeared-globally-in-2024/

INTERSECÇÃO, 2025. From Forest to Dust: Socioeconomic and environmental impacts of the prohibition of the coca and cocaine production chain in the Amazon Basin and Brazil. via IDPC, 12 November. https://idpc.net/publications/2025/11/from-forest-to-dust-socioeconomic-and-environmental-impacts-of-the-prohibition-of-the-coca-and

James, Clemmie, 2026. “DRUG PROHIBITION DRIVES EXTRACTIVISM: “Fighting the war on drugs “ has for decades been a useful narrative distraction for territorial violence, natural resource extraction of fossil fuels, timber and minerals the world over.” via LinkedIn. 5 January. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clemmie-james-29916a1ba_drug-prohibition-drives-extractivism-fighting-activity-7413981463089532928-XAcl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAD3PhSMBnNtGhcmmBpArQ_WcrIn31lW-IW0

Krause, Felipe, 2026. “Drug prohibition has long been a central organizing logic of geopolitics in the Americas, and the events in Venezuela make this especially clear.” via LinkedIn. 4 January. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7413314959952175104-9tTs?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAD3PhSMBnNtGhcmmBpArQ_WcrIn31lW-IW0

Lopes, Orivaldo Jr. and Janaína Costa, 2018. ‘Drugs and Religion: Contributions to the Debate on the Science-Religion Interface.’ Religions 9(136): 1-13.

Nieberg, Patty, 2025. ‘US Southern Command posts photo of Marine with ‘Jerusalem Cross’ patch.’ Task and Purpose. 9 December. https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/marine-jerusalem-cross-patch-photo/

Office of the Spokesperson, 2025. ‘Designation of International Cartels.’ U.S. Department of State. 20 February. https://www.state.gov/designation-of-international-cartels

Sidky, Homayun, 1997. Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs and Disease: An Anthropological Study of the European Witch-Hunts. Peter Lang.

Speaker, Susan L., 2001. ‘“The struggle of Mankind against its deadliest foe”: themes of counter-subversion in anti-narcotic campaigns, 1920-1940.’ Journal of Social History 34(3): 591-610.

United Nations Special Rapporteur, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights (Saul, Ben), 2025. ‘The ‘Narcoterrorism’ Threat: Exploring Avenues to Uphold Human Rights Amidst a New “War on Drugs”.’ 9 December. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/terrorism/sr/statements/sr-ct-remarks-us-war-narco-terrorism-09-12-25.pdf

United States Mission to the United Nations, 2025. ‘Remarks at a UN Security Council Briefing on Venezuela.’ 10 October. https://usun.usmission.gov/remarks-at-a-un-security-council-briefing-on-venezuela/

Wilson, Lydia. 2024. ‘Pete Hegseth’s tattoos and the crusading obsession of the Far Right.’ New Lines Magazine. 29 November. https://newlinesmag.com/essays/pete-hegseths-tattoos-and-the-crusading-obsession-of-the-far-right/

World Health Organization, 2025. ‘WHO Expert Committee concludes critical review of coca leaf, recommends maintaining current controls.’ 10 December. https://www.who.int/news/item/10-12-2025-who-expert-committee-concludes-critical-review-of-coca-leaf--recommends-maintaining-current-controls

The machine shop permeated a gentle dryness. This despite the places in which it was beginning to meld with the outside – seams opening where the corrugated roof met the old walls, a suggestion at one end of a small window where now there was just sky. Wet here was sealed and modest. Kerosene smell, of course, and the mysterious liquorice notes of the insides of engines. Just enough to soften your lips.

So there was the orderly place, near the garage doors. It was a geometry of shelves and their little containers, stools and gantries, a drill press standing like a sentinel, a wicker armchair with tousled red cushions. Beyond, the shop was filled to the ceiling with space it had taken as its own.

Strange dormant creatures lurked under tarpaulins. “Go ahead,” said Malcolm, “have a look. Just be careful.” I ducked through a gap in the cabinets and tugged at the corner of one of the tarps. Smooth, glinting chrome underneath. “That’s the Big Healey,” Malcolm interjected from across the shop. “But it doesn’t drive. When I realised I was missing the parts, I gave it a good polish and leave be. For another day. Beautiful car.” I, eleven years old, was mesmerised by my funhouse reflection in the chrome bumper and the way the light played over the tight row of metallic grills. This plus its round dull headlamps made for a mischievous face. “Next to that is another of the Old Man’s, an Austin Seven. A real piece of history that, it were the car that put Britain on the road.” Malcolm’s tone was reverential and I glanced back at him, nodding solemnly in faux comprehension. The Seven was a very Wild West-looking car, I thought – especially sitting as it did mostly uncovered, with the tarp draped like a headscarf to ward against dust devils. “That one needs a lot of work doing to it, it’s full of rust.” He chuckled. “It’s even older than me!” Behind the cars was a thicket of indecipherable and edged shapes, scrap metal like teeth in the gloom away from the worklights. In the shadow, I heard for the first time a faint dripping.

Years later an errant, passing scent brought this memory back to me. I called mum to ask her to try to remember the name of the place we’d stayed on holiday that year, with Malcolm and his classic cars and the machine shop. She knew the name of the village; after sustained internet sleuthing, I was able to get in touch with the B&B’s current owner who relayed to me the following:

Malcolm and his wife were friends of the family. He’d always had a business of restoring and flipping classic cars alongside the B&B, but as he got older he’d often complain lightheartedly about the increased fiddliness of the mechanics, the strain on his eyes from needing to pay such close attention in the dim workshop. He was becoming less confident behind the wheel too, preferring to avoid having to drive at night. One twilit evening he was racing home across the lanes to beat nightfall when he turned a blind corner and collided with a deer. A stag, apparently. Its antlers shattered the windscreen, and the impact deformed the car bonnet. Malcolm suffered a fractured collarbone, whiplash and a mild concussion from hitting his head against the steering wheel. The stag died noisily, kicking its front leg out over and over as though to push away the assailing car it bled profusely against. Malcolm staggered to the verge, where another motorist came across him minutes later and was able to fetch help. Malcolm said deliriously something to the effect that he wanted to comfort the animal in its final moments but it was thrashing too erratically for him to get close enough. He held his head in his hands, where the thick dampness of a bruise was beginning to cloud.

After that, he and his wife moved away. They sold the property to the current owners for a ceremonial sum and liquidated the contents of the machine shop in bulk to one of those clearance companies. The car Malcolm had been driving was his beloved MG, ‘Malcolm’s Girl,’ and its fate after being towed to the recovery garage is unknown. Presumably it ended up scrapped. Maybe some of its components live on in other classic MGs like one I often see gliding up the backroads near my home on Sundays. I am told at the end of the phonecall that the machine shop was renovated out of existence and in its place are two newbuilds.

Flash

A high and desolate village, aptly named, once sat in the upper folds of the rucks – the last series of rolling craggy hills before the highland winnowed out into vast featureless moor. Flash had one freehouse, twelve dwellings, two farms, a bus stop, a weather installation and a chapel. The slate buildings were squat and austere. They huddled together at the intersection of two minor roads, just below the hilltop. To sit on the freehouse patio on the corner was to feel the downdraft of the soaring wind as it crested the hill’s eastern slope. A village of bunkers, one mid-century travel writer had remarked. The bus stop was reinforced concrete. Some time past, before every family owned a motorcar, Flash’s five or six children would take the bus down the hill each morning to the school at Bramden Bridge. It’s a livelier place in the valley and has come to boast a thriving outdoors tourism scene. When I encountered Flash, the bus service had diminished to by-request-only.

I couldn’t help but feel the circularity; the farms had been there forever, but the village was really founded on the chapel. “1805” was inscribed in the defensive lintel above a heavy studded door. In the beginning the chapel was all of it – school, community centre, storehouse, refuge – and with the indefinite closure of the freehouse a few years prior it had again become the last position of retreat, consolidating scant remaining warmth behind two feet of stone.

Inside on opposite walls were two mementos mori. One was a wooden memorial board to the Great War with four names painted on it in gold, to which nine more had been added in the forties after an American bomber crashed into the adjacent hill during bad weather. The other was a felted purple banner with yellow tassels which proclaimed ‘STORMS,’ under which were a litany of dates. Many had names. I recall studying this banner for a long while, incredulous at the severity of the worst ones; between January and February 1887 the village was besieged for twenty-three days – the ‘Jubilee’ storm.

Whomever was tending to this banner ceased their duties around 1971, attested by the last listed storm date over five days in April that year. Flash briefly made headlines in 2002 for its final great tragedy. Weeks of heavy rains had eroded the thin hilltop soils, causing a landslide that devoured and assimilated the village into the churning earth. The photograph accompanying the story, taken by helicopter, showed the front part of the chapel remarkably still standing amidst the wreckage. It later succumbed to subsidence and was swallowed back into the hillfold.

Today, it can be traced on foot by following strips of buckled road along the ridgeline until you see the bus stop.

- from Walking Britain’s Lost Places, volume II

Roy

Death called for Roy like a cold grey dawn. Colourless on the bed, that brilliant green snarl of his irises (a defining characteristic that he had grown up around) dissipated up into the wallpaper. The field mist later dried off into a brittle day typical of the late Autumn. He was discovered by his sister Jean and niece Agatha around three p.m.

Green Roy. Keen gardener and lean, a solitary man who for a long time had allowed the quietness of a country home to settle into him. In his heyday he’d seen far reaches of the former empire, and perhaps these experiences nourished some seed of impenetrability. As a boy, Jean recalled, he was touched by an inner world. Present but holding his tongue, boy Roy interacted with the outside through alight eyes. On a family holiday to Norfolk, when he was about eight or nine, he became very overwhelmed in Wroxham because all the shop fronts, owned by the Roy family, seemed to have his name on them. “He always hated big gatherings and, you know, being uhm being perceived by strangers.”

Never fortunate in romantic love, he instead devoted his yearning to his inhuman neighbours. Birds Roy loved most of all. A secret he took to the grave and holds still is the relationship he shared in later life with a barn owl he named Áine, a most special bird who lived in the copse behind his house. In silky summer evenings, Roy kept his bedroom window open so that Áine could perch on the sill. She occasionally brought him gifts, and allowed him to caress her crest. On crystalline winter days when he was cooking in the kitchen or had lit the wood burning stove, Áine might sweep down along the driveway and knock at the window to be let in. When he lovingly did, she would scamper to the heat source and settle down by it like a cat. They spent a great deal of time observing each other, looking inquisitively into each other’s eyes.

Roy was buried in a plot next to the one his parents shared in a parish near Harrogate, some four hours’ drive remote of his home. A month after his passing, Jean and Agatha were clearing out his possessions when they discovered his other great secret in a locked bureau. The little key was still in the lock and Agatha curiously turned it. Inside was an enormous manuscript: over a thousand handwritten pages and delicate illustrations detailing the world of Tarralaria, an enchanted realm whose geography, ecology, magic, history and geology Roy had exquisitely imagined over decades of green solitude. There were no humans in Tarralaria’s pages, but abounding legends and languages of its animal and more-than-animal inhabitants.

Agatha carefully turned the pages and landed on a sweeping double-page illustration of a court scene in an incandescent, ethereal palace. Reading a few pages prior revealed this as a moment of high tension when a society of owl-like beings called Orrlids found themselves cornered into the brink of a war they had little prospect of winning. She thought about how her uncle had looked after he died. His composed limbs, like wings without their feathers, held the lingering grace of a bird struck down in mid-flight. As they departed the house that day, after the ambulance arrived near dusk, Jean stopped the car at the foot of the driveway and began to weep. She leaned against the steering wheel. Agatha unfastened her seatbelt and hugged her, both women huddled sunken against the dashboard. After a few minutes, blinking through tears, her mum looked skyward and exclaimed “Agatha, look.” Above them, a barn owl was making wide circles of the house and surrounding trees.

Subscribe now

It’s December 2025 and I am 25. I’m unemployed but feeling professional about it. I’ve produced two theses on frankly weird shit and this year I developed a habit of taking notes by pen in little black pocket notebooks - fieldnotes. I like enigmatic; I like calling situations “anthropological.” Anthropology is a fantastic way of seeing and being in the world because it makes me feel like an alien tourist, or some kind of quilled creature.

These are two rhizomey stories that wend their way towards this endeavour:
1. a meeting and keeping place for my writings yes very orderly
2. a discomforting little thorn that tells me to keep writing
3. moneyy (maybe even enough for a sweet treat once per week)
4. an endorsement to get weirder, jester, under watchful eyes

maybe one day they’ll use some of this as evidence in court. until then, please enjoy this shifting and amorphous collection of shells, residues, sludges, monuments, shrapnel, reflective surfaces …
here is my work of bricolage.