Psychodography

“It was a dark morning, and forsty when she let the dog out for a wee”. It gets darker, as one man and his dog lead us on a dizzying dérive across south Manchester and into the psyche of a Britain on the brink of Brexit. With the sharp ear of the journalist for the (dys)topical, the golden misquote and the deadly funny, Gareth Twose brings us face-to-face with a nation littered with the tattered wrappers of dying capitalism and the debris of an old identity. These are no Wordsworthian contemplative walks.  Instead, the pull of the lead dictates the pace, so that ‘every time she picked up a scent, tail wagging like a metronome from side to side and kind of nose-hoovering the surface of the grass at speed, she was off’. As the grip tightens on the lead, it is lost on certainty, on language, on orientation – ‘only one turning and you mis remangled it. Overleafed it’ – and the dog-walkers are left to play out ‘the ballet of fails and crumples’ down in the ‘dingly dell bit’ of the park. Walkies!

Rachel Sills