Author Archives: Delicto

The tide waits for no one (but maybe for content)

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The tide is advancing and the boy and girl appear oblivious. I worry that they will be stranded on the rocks, but it seems that they don’t care. The sharp edges cause discomfort for the girl in the swimsuit as she crawls over them. The boy sits looking at his phone. She gets to where she wants to be and the boy starts filming. When she does a headstand, I realise that this is for Tik Tok. I hope that she loses her balance, falls, and that there will be lots of blood. But she completes the manoeuvre and goes back to where the boy is scrutinising the video that might make her famous. 

I plot their escape route. There is no way up because there is a high wall built for William Rashleigh as the foundations for a marine villa. In recent times, the comedian Dawn French might have looked upon the boy and girl and thought the same as me, but she is long gone. There is only one way, and that is into the sea. 

The boy takes his white t-shirt off. He wears a pair of long swim shorts and is pale and slender. He looks longingly into the sea, thrusts out his chest, and throws himself in, his black hair slick and wet, bobbing in the waves, and eventually swimming back to the rocks. If Dawn French was there, she might have shouted, “Get your shorts off skinny!” But, as I have said, she is gone. 

All this time, the girl with the long blonde hair has been taking selfies, an obsession with likes and follows, and I decide that I don’t like her. Perhaps the boy took a swim to rid himself of the monotony and shallowness of it all. He will now have to pretend how wonderful her photos are. 

They get dressed and gather up their belongings before jumping into the water and wading waist high towards the beach. I wish that she would stumble and fall beneath the waves. That would be very popular on Tik Tok.

That Dream / I Luv Ya, Will Ya Marry Me?

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I dined on slivers of Parmigiano Reggiano and a Banana Ice vape; the combination could be the meal of the damned. Later, I dreamt that Yungblud was dancing in front of me and singing ‘I luv ya, will ya marry me?’ Afterwards he sat cross-legged on my sofa wearing grubby boxers and white socks and nibbled on a pork pie. I told Charlie about my dream. “Not that little twerp from Doncaster,” he said in his French accent.

Stolen Words / The essence of finality

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Annie Ernaux. ‘Les Années’ / ‘The Years’. Paris. 2008.

That Moment / There is a penis in my Guinness

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The bartender pours me a pint of Guinness. There is something exciting about him. The fantasy, service, and the desire are charged with a kind of unspoken drama, where connection and expression flourish. 

He stands at the centre of this world: confident, attentive, just out of reach. There’s power in the dynamic where he’s part host, part performer, and part confessor. That mix of emotional availability and physical proximity is incredibly compelling. 

He leaves the Guinness to settle and waits. It’s a subtle performance of masculinity, of beauty, and a flirtatious smirk. There’s a silent dialogue: who’s paying attention to whom? He represents a safe focal point for flirtation and fantasy. He’s someone I want to admire, talk to, maybe even imagine a story with, without needing it to be real. It’s an aesthetic moment as much as an emotional one. 

He’s a kind of canvas – with a quiet understanding, a rescuer, a rebel, a secret crush. Each interaction, no matter how fleeting, is charged with possibility. 

He starts pouring again, and I ask for a four-leaf clover on the top of the Guinness. When he hands me the drink, I see that he’s tried to draw one in the foam. 

I think there’s something haunting and poetic to explore in this distance between us – the observer and the observed where we are both muse and mirror. That space between emotional hunger and aesthetic distance – that quiet pull toward someone who may never cross the line into intimacy. 

I realise that he hasn’t drawn a four-leaf clover after all and can see that it is a penis instead. He leans over and whispers that only wankers draw a four-leaf clover. I take a sip, and he smiles, quietly calling me a cocksucker.

The Homosexual Endgame / A Room and a Death

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Image: Wolfman

In March 1913, the destitute Frederick Rolfe left his small room at the Albergo Cavaletto in Venice and moved into the Palazzo Marcello where he shared a flat with another poverty-stricken Englishman named Thomas Pennefather Wade Brown. On the evening of October 25, they dined and each went to his bedroom. The next day Wade Brown found Rolfe lying fully dressed on his bed where he had fallen with a final heart seizure. On September 25, 1968, a 64-year old man, one-legged and wheelchair-bound and looking almost ninety, died of a stroke in his shabby room at Manhattan’s Sheraton Russell Hotel. His name was Cornell Woolrich. One day, when I am old, and have fallen on hard times, I shall seek out a seedy room in an insalubrious part of Rome where I will live on Peroni Nastro Azzurro and canned sardines, and try to recreate the deaths of these homosexual writers.

The things I thought about while riding my Vespa today

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Artwork: Aditya Phadke

Why do people want me to write for free? If I want to do it for free, it’s because I’m doing it for myself. And don’t give me the ‘it’s good exposure’ bullshit. It’s because you don’t want to pay anything.

Why is it that when Charlie does the washing his whites come out white, and my whites come out pink?

Whose pair of black Calvin Klein boxer briefs are in the drawer? Not Charlie’s. Nor mine.

Do I believe the neighbour who says that her grandson, Owen, is doing fantastic? I thought he was worth a shot until I found out that he was a bit of a psycho. But there again, I have a weakness for bad boys. That answer might come another day.

I listened to a Beatles album and concluded that they are still boring.

Why does Sky Arts think that we are obsessed with Andre Rieu?

What was the attraction of Barbara Hepworth, and why are people obsessed with her work? 

After a one-night stand, why do things always turn out different when sunrise comes?

Why is it that you think you are so bloody handsome, and believe that everyone wants a piece of you, and then someone takes a photo, and you realise that you look a bit of a dork?

Charlie / A moment in a Cornish harbour

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Image: SnappyGoat

Charlie stands in the glow that surrounds him. He is a dark silhouette bathed in the yellowish hue of an afternoon sun. He is unrecognisable and might be anybody. I hear strange voices that are drowned by the cries of seagulls. I help him down from the harbour wall and he smells of wood sage and sea salt.

It’s a beautiful sound. And it’s a sound that I love

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Image: Archer Iñíguez

Flup, flup, flup, flup. That’s the only way to describe it. Flup, flup, flup, flup. It dawned on me that the flup, flup, flup, flup had a regularity about it. Maybe every thirty minutes, never more than forty five, but the sound can be heard from early morning to late evening. When does a sound become a sign? I suppose it is when you want it to be. That flupping noise is made by Kieran, the farm boy who I’ve known since he was fourteen. That was five years ago, and now he’s grown into a handsome young man of nineteen. He works in nothing but a pair of filthy old denim jeans and a pair of wellington boots that flup along the road so that you are never in any doubt as to where he might be. I thought that farmers would be busy milking cows or ploughing fields, but Kieran spends his days flupping along. I end up waiting for flups and hide behind a wall to watch him stroll by. His bare chest will be covered in cow shit, and hay, or any other agricultural detritus, and it becomes fantastically homoerotic.

I’m on a beach with nothing to do except write shit on my phone

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Image: Readymoney Cove / PHG / 2025

Sometimes, you have nothing to do except watch and think. It’s Tuesday afternoon, it’s overcast, and I’m sitting on a beach… I tap random thoughts into my phone… and later, it reads like a diary, but also conjures up memories of being a child when we had ‘news books’ in which we wrote any drivel that might have happened.

This is my drivel…

Megan tells me a story about Peran of Polruan, with his salty brown legs, who lives alone in an old fisherman’s cottage called The Buoy. Never a visitor. Not a word to anyone. The girls think he’s a Cornish Saint and want to have sex with him. Every morning he catches the river ferry and returns at teatime. Where does he go? What does he do? On summer evenings he reads on the doorstep. I’m intrigued, but I want to know more about the books that he reads.

***

I’m looking for a bit of phwoar on the beach. I want a handsome young guy who strips to his shorts and goes swimming. But on this cloudy Tuesday afternoon I’m blessed with old ladies in one-piece costumes who do sedate breast-strokes to the pontoon and back. Shortly after four o’clock, a blonde schoolboy appears and parks himself close by. His shirt is untucked and the school tie hangs loose around his neck. From his bag, he pulls out a copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and starts reading. He seems happy being with Ralph and Jack, and I wonder which one of them he’s sympathetic to.

***

It’s been a month since I had a cigarette. I realise this whilst standing on the quayside. Instead, I’ve been using my Pro Max Double Apple – 10K puffs. What might you get up to with ten thousand puffs? Behind me, a sour-faced woman moans to her husband that I’m vaping. I turn around and give her a deadly look and she tuts. There wouldn’t have been any remorse if I’d pushed her into the sea.

***

“The Tesco delivery is coming tomorrow morning,” says Megan. She makes it sound like this is the highlight of the week. It might well be. She’s changed a lot since moving down here. Where is the Megan I once knew? The girl who drank Aperol Spritz by the dozen and got her tits out afterwards. “That’s exciting, I look forward to it,” I reply. She gives me a wicked look. “I was hoping that you might stay in and wait for him. I think that you’ll be less sarcastic after you’ve seen the Tesco guy.”

***

I write at the kitchen table with the door open and ignore the wasps that fly in and buzz above my head. I’ve realised that they soon get bored and leave the same way that they came. Megan appreciates my eclectic music tastes and has recommended an album called Senza Estate by My Friend Dario. It plays on my laptop while the wasps gather around the Corn Flakes. One of the tracks is called Keep on Cruising which is calming and innocent, and far removed from the cruising that I’m used to. 

But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day

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Image: Sid Vicious / Ebet Roberts / 1978

“The Laurels Residential Care Home is pleased to announce that the Space Kids will be here on 8 June 2045.”

The pending arrival had been flashed onto the wall of every bedroom. Old people liked it when the Space Kids came. They came across the fields on Ducati Thrust Bikes, not a sound, and only the shaking of the hedgerows gave any indication that they had arrived. They gathered in the ChatGPT room and shouted for everyone to leave their pods. The Space Kids had brought holograms of dead stars and allowed them to mingle with the residents. Patrick Swayze and Kurt Cobain chatted with them, Prince and Amy Winehouse waltzed around the room, Bruce Willis cracked jokes, and Michael Jackson reeled off poetic verses from Thriller. But their favourite time was when the Space Kids fired up the ‘retro spectro disco’ where the likes of Pulp, Oasis and Take That got them all dancing. Towards the end, there were traditional food dishes like Big Macs, Nando’s Chicken and Pepperoni Pizza with Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream to follow. It had an emotional ending when the Space Kids paid tribute to the home’s oldest resident who was treated to a Sid Vicious avatar singing a punk version of We’ll Meet Again. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.