Ana Kinsella | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023 Entry My first home in London is a houseshare with five Icelandic artists. The flat is a maisonette with a small garden on a Shoreditch housing estate, and the garden is neglected, with a fringe of bamboo taller than any of us. I find it through a friend of a friend and take the room without viewing it. These facts are enough to make me feel legitimate and deft at being in the city, despite my newness. I’m a natural. It is not my first time living away from home, but it is the first time that it feels meaningful, a page turned rather than merely interrupted. I have a job, sort of, and a course of study, and people to have dinner with at the wide pine table whose grooves and knots I can still feel under my fingers. The East...

Isobel O’Donovan | Tolka Issue Four, February 2025 I remember my mother’s voice in the kitchen, as though choruses of her could spill from an opened cupboard. Among the delft and vocal cords, a nestle of laughs and cries pushed through the yellow yolk of the sun streaming through the window. My infant head laid on her chest, ear pressed to lung like a shell whispering of the sea. The place where sleep seeps through a tablecloth like spilt milk, ink. When the Internet unfastens my limbs from my mind, it is to this warm, lullabied body that I long to return. Something punctures the memory – a niggling feeling of is that all? Such multitudes of experience shaped into an apron by the cookiecutter of nostalgia. It’s better now, I think, as the clock counts hours that are just for me, no nappy cloth frozen solid on the line....

The Hanged Man I associate the tarot with my early teenage years, a particularly disempowered time when there was nothing to do but when every moment was saturated with an indefinable yearning. At fourteen, I couldn’t even get a job as a lounge girl in the local pub, the means by which most of my friends gained some independence, working there after school and sneaking drinks with the barmen after closing. I wandered around town with my printed-out CVs, dropping them in front of managers who binned them as soon as I left the shop. In those days, time stretched and warped around us. We were waiting for something external to come and change our lives. The tarot promised us a message from the beyond. The Hanged Man smiles as he hangs upside down. I often drew this card as a teenager, and his expression troubled me. That (ironic?) smile...

Ralf Webb | Tolka Issue Eight, July 2025 People lose their minds on the first hot day of the year. This is a truth unique to these islands. Men strip off and light up in petrol station forecourts. Office workers on lunch break collapse face down in the grass. It’s a kind of domestic apostasy. Sun madness. Chlorophyllous delirium. One spends half the year holed up in damp-ridden, poorly insulated lodgings that the sudden promise of warmth, a super hit of vitamin D, engenders a state of temporary insanity so acute that it might merit as a legal defence. Things, in essence, get weird. Something like this seems to be happening in Wiltshire’s Bradford-on-Avon, where, on an unexpectedly sweltering mid-May afternoon, in the region of four hundred Morris dancers have descended, carrying percussion sticks, dulled swords and polka-dotted handkerchiefs to help celebrate the community’s seventh annual Green Man Festival. Bradford-on-Avon...