It’s not all ‘rose-tinted’

In a rare turn I was forced, in issue 10 of In Retrospect, to re-address one of my previous articles (this one in fact) due to a profound experience courtesy of a library book.

One Saturday morning, the day before Remembrance Sunday as it happens, I made a visit to the local library so that the family could swap out some books and toys we had borrowed. On a table near the entrance they had put together a display of titles relevant to the following day; factual books about the First and Second World Wars, fictional books set during these conflicts, and various other tomes with ties to the period. One of these caught my eye; a book titled ‘Brighton Diaries’ by Ken Chambers. Aside from the relevance to my locale, it was the subtitle of the publication that interested me the most: “Memories of a Young Man in Peace and War 1929 – 1943”, so I grabbed the book and checked it out of the library, mainly to reference the photographs in the book to see what the author was wearing at the time.

You can read the full article here: https://inretrospectmagazine.com/article/its-not-all/

More like this:

Excerpt from “The House at the End of the World”

After a climate disaster resets the world to a pre-electronic age, a thick, impenetrable cloud layer renders the surface inaccessible. Alex, his Uncle James and their elderly cat Gaspode, live in peaceful isolation atop a hill in an observatory turned farmstead, their days marked only by tending livestock and avoiding the sun’s harsh glare. With no way to know if anything remains beyond the sea of clouds, they have long accepted that they might be the last people left alive.

But everything changes the day an airship emerges from the mist.

Read More
Class2
A Class Apart

For my In Retrospect Issue 07 lead article I contemplate the social classes of the original owners of vintage clothing

Read More