Welcome to the latest issue of my newsletter. If you subscribe I’ll send you a free copy of my Microcosmos Fiction Magazine, containing five original stories. Thanks for reading.

The second issue of my occasional short story magazine is now available on all the main ebook stores. Here’s a link to the list of store links and here’s the book description.:

Stories from a writer’s microcosmos.

This second issue of Microcosmos Fiction Magazine will surprise and entertain. The five stories included are:

‘The Druidic Origins of Association Football’, in which a history professor proposes a novel theory about the beginnings of the beautiful game.

‘At the Palo Alto Café’, in which a café owner talks about the people on his staff who never quite achieved the Big Thing.

‘The Village App’, in which a London exile thinks he can improve the lives the people in his Devonshire village with the help of an app.

‘MGAA’, in which an underground organization plots the restoration of Avalon and the two kings.

‘The Stand-In’, in which the winner of a literary prize decides to get someone else to accept the award on his behalf.

It was more than ten years since I last walked past Tate & Lyle’s Thames Refinery, and I remembered the heady aroma of sugar processing as being more pervasive, much denser and sweeter, than it is now. A trick of the memory, probably. Silvertown, a strip of Thameside land bounded by the Royal Docks to the north, the River Lea to the west, and Beckton to the east, is one of those ‘in-between’ places. It’s hard to imagine, walking through its melancholy post-industrial streets, just how crammed with people and pulsating with activity it would have been when the Royal Docks were the busiest in the world and the riverside factories employed thousands.

Little remains of the Sugar Mile. Keiler’s, Trebor Sharpe and the rest of the jam and biscuit makers are long gone, the Plaistow Wharf Refinery is much smaller than it was, though still producing its legendary Golden Syrup, and the tribe of the Sugar Girls, who worked in these factories, is no more, their jobs automated out of existence. But the Thames Refinery still looms over Silvertown, vast and unapologetically functional, the largest sugar cane refinery in Europe.

On the other side of the Albert Road, London City Airport straddles the retired Royal Docks, regeneration in motion, its aeroplanes unloading their human cargo from Milan, Frankfurt and Paris. As these business folk take their taxis to Canary Wharf and other exotic places, do any of them glance up and wonder if the sugar in their latte-to-go comes from Silvertown?

I re-read Jorge Luis Borges’ short story ‘Emma Zunz’ recently. It’s a tale of revenge, and I went back to it because I was writing my own tale of revenge. I couldn’t imitate Borges even if I wanted to, but I don’t find the comparisons daunting or depressing when I read the masters in this way.

On the contrary, it’s inspiring to be reminded of the heights that fiction can reach. ‘Emma Zunz’, as many have noted, is not a typical Borges story because it has a female protagonist and a straightforward crime plot. Still, some of the themes and motifs are typically Borgesian: the contrast between inner and outer reality, the blending of realism and symbolism, the mirrors on the Paseo de Julio in which Emma ‘perhaps’ sees herself multiplied. And there is the setting, which is Buenos Aires.

I’ve never been to Buenos Aires. I know it mostly as it’s portrayed in the stories of Borges, which is the Buenos Aires of the early twentieth century and of his imagination. It was Borges who gave me its poetry of tango halls and dockside bars, of guitars heard from a garden patio, and an estuary whose waters are the colour of a desert.

No doubt, this Buenos Aires has vanished, just as Dickens’ London and Balzac’s Paris have vanished. Yet, if it’s possible to be nostalgic for a place that is not one’s homeland and that one has never even visited, then I am nostalgic for this Buenos Aires. If I am ever fortunate enough to go there, I know I won’t find the city Borges knew. Still, I hope I might stumble on some trace of it, perhaps in an ancient face or an antique mirror.

I said I know the city ‘mostly’ from stories of Borges. The other looming figure in my Buenos Aires imaginary is Diego Maradona. All great cities are complex and contradictory. Borges’s Buenos Aires is refined, literary, melancholy, albeit a place where criminality and violence might surface at any time. Maradona’s Buenos Aires is boisterous, earthy, working-class, joyous, and heartbroken. Though he wasn’t a native of the city, Maradona became famous playing for two of its football teams and returned to one of those, Boca Juniors, in the twilight of his career.

Borges died in 1986, four months older than the century, and two weeks before Argentina won its first World Cup. That tournament was Maradona’s finest hour, an astonishing example of how sustained individual brilliance can drive, inspire, and bully a team into becoming world champions. I don’t know if Borges and Maradona ever met, and they appear to have little other than a nationality and a city in common. Football and literature rarely cross-fertilize. But perhaps the animosity and ritualised violence of the Boca Juniors-River Plate rivalry isn’t so different from that enacted by Red Scharlach in ‘Death and the Compass’ or by the narrator of ‘Streetcorner Man’

John Carlin, a British journalist who grew up in Buenos Aires, wrote a piece about Maradona’s death in the Times which made me realise that my undeserved nostalgia for the city, transmitted by Borges’s writing, was perhaps a pale reflection of a more profound yearning in the Argentinian psyche. In Carlin’s words:

In another of his stories, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, Borges describes a man who sets out to recreate the great novel of Miguel de Cervantes. He produces a ‘fragmentary Quixote’, but Borges tells us: ‘Cervantes’s text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer’. Borges and Maradona lived in the same city, but each inhabited a different Buenos Aires with its own myths and associations. They maintain their improbable co-existence in the Buenos Aires of my imagination, and I will continue to dream of a city I have never been to.

[All images in this section are public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.]