Dispatch Magazine

“It helps that I’ve got no teeth,” says Ged Eccles, folding his face in on itself. His upper lip vanishes and his chin rises to meet his nose, as though someone has pulled a drawstring behind his ears. For a moment, his whole face seems to collapse towards its centre. Then it unspools, and everything snaps back into place. Ged takes a contemplative pull on his vape and slots his dentures back in.

“Kids have hit me. I’ve been grabbed, groped and pushed. I’ve had people pull my witch hat off and fling me backwards,” says Nyx, as she is known on the Witches and History tour she leads through York. “I once had someone follow me, shove a camera in my face and ask if I was wearing knickers.

As Istanbul’s baking sun beats against the windows of the air-conditioned clinic, a man with a round, freshly shaved head lies waiting for his new, proudly hirsute life to begin. Blue lines curve across his scalp, marking out the hairline he has paid to acquire. Encircling him is a team of three specialists who have done this hundreds of times before.

Emily Fisher is not your average 20-year-old “Scouse prinny”. Yes, she likes Harry Styles, getting her nails done — long, pointed and pillarbox red when we meet — and pulling up to the function with her trademark bouncy blonde blow-dry. And yes, she likes sunbeds and goes pole dancing with her friends for fitness. But she also loves driving the company hearse. This is because Emily is an undertaker.

At some point in its recent past, Boscombe ceased to be just another faded Victorian seaside resort and became a place where the lost and desperate began to collect like debris at the mouth of a river. “You come here to either die or recover,” say locals who have so far managed to do neither.

The crowd assembled on the steps of the Senedd knew they were witnessing history. They craned their necks towards the parliament entrance, their red dragon flags fluttering across Cardiff Bay. Then Rhun ap Iorwerth emerged. It was 9 May, and Welsh politics had reached a moment many had spent their lives waiting for. For the first time in more than a century, Labour's dominance had been broken. Plaid Cymru, the left-leaning nationalist party, was poised to take power.

Twenty-five years on and, downtown, there are reminders. To get to the dispensary, the liquor store, the Duane Reade at East 2nd and B, you might go by the firehouse, and you might see the mural on the bay door: a large replica of the company's patch, a cartoon fireman running with an axe and a hose, above the words Los Bomberos Primero. It tells you who Los Bomberos Primero are, whose firehouse it is: E 28 L 11 (Engine 28 / Ladder 11).

At the end of the 1949–50 academic year, colleges across America produced much the same kind of yearbook. There were photos of football teams and dances, earnest messages from college presidents, private jokes that now seem quaint. Students posed beside the names of hometowns they had left behind.

Somewhere above us, from behind the castle walls perhaps, a man yodels. It rings out over the terracotta rooftops and the forest towards the horizon. I wonder if he does this every time, to coax the celestial bodies, or if he, like me, is a virgin. There are a hundred or so of us on the hillside, groups arranged discreetly in west-facing pockets of the topography — on rocky outcrops, under pine trees — private and collective, like opera boxes.

Last August, three blacked-out Range Rovers crawled through the high-hedged roads of Hampshire, drawing closer to the hamlet of Micheldever Station. Inside one of the cars was Irish billionaire John Magnier, the owner of every English acre that whizzed past his window. In his 70s, the Cork horse-racing magnate wasa regular, if infrequent, visitor to his 4,000-acre estate, which, when he bought it, was home to a handful of large tenant farmers. But few relished his arrivals.