Chris Stanley's Bazaar

A few weeks ago, I paid three pounds for a concert ticket. Depending on what year it is, this could be an enormous extravagance or a huge bargain, but in the middle of 2020 I think we can broadly agree that it’s a waste of time. However, this was no investment. The ticket isn’t likely to be worth more than what I paid for it in years to come, but I wanted it anyway. When it arrived, professionally clamped between two slices of cardboard and sealed in a plastic wallet, my heart felt a little shaft of sunlight, which took me back to 7th May 2001. I’m going to tell you what this ticket stub means to me. In 2001, I was a student at the University of Leicester . I was in my second year, and truth to tell, it wasn’t going all that well. I was doing an English degree, something which I wasn’t sure was really for me. With no options in the first year of the course, I was inevitably stuck with Shakespeare and minute line readings of The Good Soldier , when I wanted to be explaining to pink-chee...

Hi all I set myself a challenge today: could I come up with a horror story from nothing and get it posted before the end of Hallowe'en? The results are below. Read on if you dare! I Hear You Knocking I’ll see your flaming Buddhist, and raise you these pics from Tuol Sleng. Very grim. Drew’s pointer hovered over the upload option, as he mulled over whether this would put him ahead of the curve. This was Dark Night, after all. This was no time to be squeamish. He clicked it anyway, reasoning that even if he got called out for being dull, he hadn’t gone through his Cambodia folders for a while, and it had been nice to revisit old memories. The Khmer Rouge had given him some of his first cheap scares, and over the years he had added to the vacant, battered skulls and stacks of limb bones with some lesser-known delights: audio files, testimony and translated confessions from some of the two million. But he wasn’t giving those up without some serious leverage. Almost im...