“When life is this dull, you have to invent purpose. Collecting torn-up newspaper gives you a hobby, provides an anchoring intimacy with your surroundings, keeps the streets clean. Or so you think. Then one day you wake up and realise… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
“I have a great sense of Stuart and silence on these nights. The village, wrapped in sleep; owls glide between the yew trees, badgers… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
“And it is strange: a few moments after the cars that brought us down drive off, I become aware that already I have discovered… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
Twenty miles on, we have spotted a roadside sign: 'CHAINSAW CARVED MUSHROOMS'. Troubles promptly forgotten, Stuart falls to gawping at the road ahead. What… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
“You'd think the homeless would despise the rest of us, but it seems the thing they want to do most is talk. If only… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
I don't know, Alexander, sometimes it gets so bad you can't think of nothing better to do than make it worse. — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
“Disobedience is one of the few tricks you have left to hang on to the idea that you continue to exist distinctively and are… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
“Sometimes Stuart seems like an irritable fisherman. He bobs about, on the disruption of his life, a small, unsteady figure, fishing for order. Then… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
“Is this what real homelessness is like? Not just a particular set of roof and walls gone, but a sense of the death of… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
It's a question I often ask myself: what would I do with me? And I don't know the answer. I don't know what I'd… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
“As his mother drove him away on the day he was let out, Stuart broke the cardinal prison rule: like Lot's wife, he looked… — Alexander Masters Copy Share Image
