Home of The Naughty Stories Series
Born in Poole, Dorset, in 1965, Sedley Proctor grew up in London and was educated in Winchester and Nottingham. In the 1990s, he worked in fringe theatre and was involved in productions of Macbeth and Bertolt Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities. His own play, Salt Lake Psycho about the notorious murderer, Gary Gilmore was put on at the now defunct Man in the Moon theatre in London, Chelsea. From the mid-nineties until 2013 he lived and worked as a teacher and translator in Southern Italy. In Italy he continued to experiment with his writing, devising an invented dialect, writing a blog satirizing the international politics of the early 2000s, collaborating on a screenplay with French writer, Claude Albanese, and performing his poetry in front of bemused locals and amused ex-pats. Apart from his own books, he writes under the aliases F. M. Frites and M. T. Sands.
Thereafter I was to think of him as a horse with no name, a lion without a mane. In April, several years and several months after J’s disappearance, on Boxing Day, 1999, from a recording studio in Clapham, a horse purporting to work for one of the music magazines she never read anymore phoned up …
“Nothing but dream, shadow,”declared the boxer. Up by the pagoda, the thief came across a scene involving an old drunk and whore who reminded him perversely of his wife, even if she was never a harridan, or shrew. There was a certain way about the whore, perhaps common to all women in the middle of …
Inside the drowned man, Hobbes found the whale. Inside the whale, Hobbes found nothing but junk. Among the cardboard boxes and bin-liners, outside a restaurant called perplexingly Le Chat Noir, someone had dumped a manikin, which appeared to have been super-glued with angel wings. A large black dog or possibly werewolf springs and snaps off …
Over the obdurate face of a woman dressed in the black robes of a widow flowed a sequence of images involving: ground launch missiles, Stalinist propaganda posters, a convoy of tanks rolling through the desert. A mummified figure passed above a massed crowd of flaying and beating breasts; the bandages seemed to come loose over …
“I began,” she declared over the tea strainer, “to note the changes in his appearance… He stopped going to have his hair cut. He began to wash less and less. His jokes became progressively more obscure; he would lapse into long, unaccountable silences, punctured by exclamations and laughter.” In the middle of the hall was …
Wandering, lost among the crowds where I caught the strains of Luck, which was all it took to remind me of my good fortune… They had found a nice shaded spot on a park bench between a beech tree and the flowerbeds, the bees and hover flies, and the odd bobbing pigeon. His companion had …
O Texan Fyodor, you have plagiarised my heart! There was a hole in his shoe and his toes were sticking out of the sock. He pulled the blanket round him and put his hands down by his balls to keep warm. The blanket was soon wet, and he could not feel his toes. A passer-by …
I’ve never spoken about this before, though perhaps it can be inferred. The theory of doubles, as I have thought of it, of course, is not really a theory, but rather a series of motifs or themes. As if it presented a way of connecting things in my mind… the love between us flowed along …
On his right hand, between the thumb and forefinger, there is a deep cut. The cut was unhealed and was made about two days before his death. Forensic experts suggest that the subject was in a fight, one that, on that occasion, he came out the victor. There was a crack in the bow, a …
“To Blackwell… J digging his late Docke, he did 12 foot underground find perfect trees over-Covered with earth – nut trees with the branches and the very nuts upon them their shells black with age and their Kernell upon opening decayed but their shell perfectly hard as ever….” From Samuel Pepys diary, 22 September, 1665 …