🌞   🌛
John Arthur Nichol

  • At a building site in Manly Vale, where there used to be a billiard table factory and then a furniture warehouse, the scaffolding gains two levels, and each level has its workers evenly spaced. It’s like the backdrop to an 80s music clip.

  • It Almost Makes Me Want to Learn to Knit

    Looking into a needlecraft shop from the doorway. Two women dressed for winter stand together in front of open shelves packed with colourful balls of wool. One of the women, in jeans and loose black jumper, is looking down at a big book she holds open. Her friend, also in black, has leggings tucked into calf-length boots. Knitted socks are ranged along the shelf-top, each sock displayed on a flat, upturned foot shape. Beyond the shelves is another aisle, and a wall covered in tall wooden racks and shelving units filled with balls and twists of wool and yarn. The floor is polished timber.

    A needlecraft shop in York Street, Sydney

  • Someone take it away by the scruff,
    Cause it thinks killing children is tough;
    Oh, how many of those,
    Until everyone knows
    That enough is enough is enough?

    🇺🇦

  • Putin’s prison, in spite of his orders,
    Still struggles to widen its borders;
    Since arming the gaoled
    Appears to have failed,
    Perhaps he’ll try drafting the warders.

    🇺🇦

  • How bravely they froth and they foam,
    The Russian elite, when they roam;
    See news from the desk of
    Young Nikolai Peskov,
    Who served while he partied at home.

    🇺🇦

  • King Street Facade of the Forbes Hotel, Sydney

    Looking across King Street Sydney at the side of the Forbes Hotel, a four-storey brick structure with ornamental brickwork on the top three floors. An undulating half wall at the top, incorporating two tall triangular peaks, is very clear against two cream walls of a taller building behind. Every door and window is black timber and glass. The ground floor is half grey wall and half black doorways, with the hotel name at the top.The hotel presses against a taller building next door which is also brick, and shows the lettering 'Warehouse 1914'.

  • The world is suddenly full of triple decker baby movers.

  • A man in his 60s, neatly turned out, walks briskly past in Aldi. There’s no one with him but he says “Oh!” in loud surprise, and follows up with two more of the same.

  • A young man’s lumbering run, shoulders dropping one way and rolling back the other, like a jerky metronome.

  • A young guy pedals dreamily past Collaroy Beach with a piano accordion in his basket.

  • A serious jogger burns past the wetlands on Pittwater Road, until his big, serious dogs run either side of a light pole.

  • Strange Tower at Railway Square, Sydney

    A view from the ground looking up at a steel tower that stands on top of a concrete structure labelled 'Railway Square'. The tower rises on three girders, with circling, spiralling straps of metal winding through the space between, like mobius strips. At the top of the tower two horizontal circles are joined by metal spikes. They look like a crown of thorns. Perspective makes the tower taper sharply into the sky, which is bright, unbroken blue.

  • Ukraine blah blah the West - let him bleat.
    It’s the people he’ll never defeat;
    They’ll adapt, they’ll invent,
    Innovate and pre-empt,
    Till the Russians go home in defeat.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine

  • The Russians’ attempts to be great
    Find them paused in a troubling state;
    No success in attack,
    So their cleverer hack
    Is to go dig a hole and just wait.

    🇺🇦

  • Politicians grow weak with their heady
    Illusions of peace, and unsteady;
    Their glib panacea,
    Give Russia Crimea …
    Is Bucha forgotten already?

    🇺🇦

  • A Wall of History

    A wide photograph looking across a street to the side of a flat-roofed, windowless, two-storey building. It’s a brick wall painted predominantly in deep Prussian Blue, but there are patches where other paint, or no paint, is showing. On the right, almost all the top half shows an older base colour of dark green, where the framework supporting an advertising hoarding has been removed after many years. There are two patches of bare brickwork inside the green area, one at each end, and patches of light blue, white or the same deep blue of the rest of the wall. Black stains gather along the top edge and run down the wall in streaks. Near the ground, on the left, a big section of blue has been cut back unevenly to bare brickwork beside a sign saying 'Wicks', and beneath a panel of big coloured squares. Two surfboard signs stand out at the other end, and a Customer Parking sign in the middle.

  • To hell with the wavering cluster
    Of leaders who quake at the bluster
    Of one little scrote
    Killing kids by remote,
    Which is all the success he can muster.

    🇺🇦

  • Four children in Uman are slaughtered.
    Still counting. And Russia reported
    A strike with precision.
    I long for the vision
    When Putin is hanged, drawn and quartered.

    🇺🇦

  • It’s a cowardly kind of disease,
    Letting tyrants behave as they please;
    Escalation’s a fear
    That we constantly hear,
    But the word we observe is ‘appease’.

    🇺🇦

  • Warm Light and Comfort Colours on York Street, Sydney

    The window display of a needlecraft shop. Against a background of crocheted blanket and plain hessian sacking, colourful balls of wool tumble from basket and bag amid examples of embroidery kits, knitting needles, bags, embroidered straps and labels, and bundles loops of thread. A tall arrangement of flowers fills the middle, with a tiny small potted succulent at its base, and on the right is a mannequin’s head and shoulders wearing loops of thick, knitted scarf in autumn colours, and a floppy knitted beret in black and yellow. At the back, on the left, an upstretched mannequin’s hand emerges from a green knitted wrist-warmer.

  • In the far distance, a colossal pole leans over at the top, weighed down, it seems, by banks of mounted objects. I know the dreary truth of it, but choose to imagine the pole engaged in studying the ground, or that someone very tall has tripped there, knocking everything askew.

  • Lyons Road, Drummoyne. A little dick in a big truck blows his horn.

  • A blokey bloke crosses the road in shorts, t-shirt, bare feet, beard and baseball cap. And backpack. With faded pink crocs hanging from a strap.

  • A man’s dress-shoe stands empty in the road, its pointy toe still aiming for the footpath.

  • The Forbes Hotel, 1836

    On the Corner of York and King Streets, Sydney

    Three sides of an old building facing a street corner. We are looking at the building’s front door, on a very narrow side facing the corner. The two street frontages angle away to either side. The building’s exterior at ground level is grey, with a line of black tiles near the ground and layers of decorative stone work at the top. The narrow front facing us contains a pair of narrow, black-painted timber doors, each containing two four-paned windows and a timber panel below them. Above the doors is a closed black rectangle with black bars, which may once have been a window. This design of door is repeated multiple times along the two street frontages. At ground level the building is scrawled with graffiti. On either side of the front door is a tall, narrow brass plate with the hotel logo - a letter F incorporating the arms and torso of a waiter in formal dress - and the words Forbes Hotel 1836. Topping each brass plate is a decorative black lantern on a metal bracket. Above these is a small half-circle balcony with a rounded sandstone base and black, wrought iron railings. Beyond the balcony is a door with nine glass panels. The first floor of the building is made of bricks, and each of the street frontages has a square sign with the hotel name and logo.