Flatland is a social satire by Edwin Abbott Abbott, published in 1884. The book describes a world of only two dimensions, in which each character is a different class of geometric shape, and is narrated by a pseudonymous ‘Square’. One day, the Square is visited by a Sphere from Spaceland, a world that has three dimensions. The Sphere visits Flatland every millennium in an attempt to introduce a new apostle to the idea of the third dimension.
A decade after first watching Dazed and Confused, I still find myself trawling through rails in vintage shops with only the costumes of the cast in mind. And as soon as I spot an item that even slightly resembles something one of them might wear, I hear Steven Tyler’s voice in my head, singing loud and clear: “Sweeeeeeeeeeet emmooooooooootioooon”.
My name is Tom and I have a job as a radio presenter for BBC 6 Music. It’s a pretty nice gig in that my week consists mainly of bombarding my head with a variety of terrible, unfortunate, occasionally magnificent and often confusing music. A combination of going through lot of records people have kindly sent, and shopping until I drop for new and interesting things in the stores around London.
In the lunch break of a soul-sapping temp job, I typed my own name into a search engine. Travelling back a few pages into the sticky ‘ooooo’ of Google, I found a review someone had written of a film I had acted in when I was a child. I was struck by the author’s tone.
