Arts & Culture

Independent Film in Close-Up

A seat at the 79th Edinburgh International Film Festival In the lobby of the Edinburgh Cineworld, as I doomscroll and wait for my 6:30pm screening, a twenty-something man several feet away stares down at a teal-and-orange poster splayed in his hands. The Thelma Schoonmaker Prize for Short Filmmaking Excellence, its heading reads, below which are ten short films each labelled with the little caption: World Premiere. In four days, one of those films will win the £15,000 to ensu

Soren Rasmussen

Love in the Bubble

Love in the Bubble 300

On forgetting the name of your dog I started to wear my favourite perfume again. It is citrusy, and my mom gifted it to me, but I stopped using it for a year because whenever I did, I expected to find you sitting next to me. I wore vanilla for a while. I liked it less, but at least I was not haunted by ghosts. I would spy on your life like a child outside a candy shop. The new city, the new job, the new girl. And what about me? On my side of the fence, I was stuck. Couldn’t m

Love in the Bubble 295

Apply for The Saint — it might get you a girlfriend Everyone wants a cute meeting story. It’s a guaranteed smile and chorus of cooing ‘awws’ when you’re introduced to her friends and she starts recounting how you rescued her from a shark or a burning house, while you sit there with a bashful smile. Meeting stories matter because they hold two stories at once: how you met each other, and how you both happened to be in that exact place at that exact moment. It’s why I’ve never

Love in the Bubble: Is There Space For Us?

Have you ever thought the universe folded in on itself just to make room for us? Have you ever thought forever was something you could cup in your hands — fragile, trembling — and keep? Because I did. I still do. We’re lying bare in my bed — the sheets still warm, the air thick with everything we did and didn’t say. It isn’t a special night. The alcohol hums through my veins like static, whispering that this must be real, that the universe really did bend its edges to make s

Love in the Bubble — Issue 290

You are on holiday with some friends and see a child wearing a Manchester United t-shirt, his favourite football team. It’s so cute, so...

Love in the Bubble — Issue 289

“I like you, but can’t date you.” Had I a grain of sand for every time I heard that, I’d put Castle Sands to shame — where I go to think...

Love in the Bubble — Issue 282

“Making a playlist is getting what you want to say without actually saying it. You get to use someone else’s poetry to express how you...

Love in the Bubble

A column on love in St Andrews “Reader, I married him.” In my pre-university days, I spent all my spare time reading Victorian novels and...

36 Hours

36 Hours in Berlin

After your train from Berlin Brandenburg Airport has inevitably been delayed or cancelled, courtesy of the famously unreliable Deutsche Bahn , it will probably be dark by the time you arrive at your accommodation. With your pre-conceived notion of German efficiency shattered, head to an ATM. Berlin’s approach to payment seems trapped somewhere in the late 1970s – it wouldn’t surprise me if some restaurants still operate a barter economy. The other thing to note about Berlin