Dispatch Magazine

As a rule, life in the Hampshire town of Chandler’s Ford follows the familiar rhythm of suburbia. Its 20,000-odd residents go to the Waitrose or big Asda. They take the bus into Southampton or Winchester. They walk home from school along leafy pavements. There are few interruptions. Not since that morning on 13 September 2007, when marksmen from the Metropolitan Police shot and killed two men attempting to rob the HSBC.

One Sunday afternoon in April, sitting in his family home in Nairobi, Adrian Waweru followed a routine familiar to thousands of ambitious young Kenyan writers: he went looking for a commission. He didn't bother browsing traditional journalism job boards or leaning on a Rolodex of industry contacts. Instead, he opened TikTok.

“Spirit says there’s a woman standing right behind you,” warns the Reverend Louis Gates, as his eyes begin to flutter in their sockets. A heavy silver pendant hangs around his neck. He speaks softly. “Oh yeah, she’s right there. She’s old. She just keeps smirking at me, shaking her head.” I turn around. Behind me is a wall. It is covered with black-and-white photographs and pencil portraits of long-dead Spiritualists. Another photo shows a younger Gates, wearing a bolo tie and the same heavy pendant.

The thwup-thwup-thwup of a helicopter announces another load of oil workers returning from the North Sea. It’s been three weeks since they last stepped foot on shore. Any minute now, they’ll file into The Spider's Web, right next to Aberdeen Airport, for one last pint or four. “A Tennent's,” they'll say, in Scottish, Geordie and Liverpudlian accents, before dispersing across Scotland, northern England and beyond. No British city is more dependent on a single industry than Aberdeen.

McCall Weibel has finished both the Chicago and Salt Lake City marathons, but she has never run in a race against 60 horses. Ahead of her 40th birthday, she decided to remedy that. The Utah native flew to London and booked a three-hour Uber to a tiny town in mid-Wales, arriving £250 lighter to try her chances in Llanwrtyd Wells’s “Man v Horse marathon”. The gruelling contest takes runners, horses and riders across valleys and up 1,300m of elevation.

There’s one particular family memory that sticks clearly in Claire’s mind, of her son Daniel as a toddler, in mid-2000s Dorset. “It was like one of those idyllic holiday days from a TV show,” she recalls. “We’d been on the beach all afternoon. Daniel was having the time of his life, playing in the sand a few metres away from me.

Newhaven's West Beach has been closed before. During the First World War, the East Sussex town, just 65 nautical miles from Normandy, became a supply port for the Western Front, and the beach was closed as a matter of national security. When the railway company that owned it refused to reopen it afterwards, public anger grew so intense that a group of councillors marched to the gates and tore down the barricades. The beach was reopened.

It is dinner time at Barrett Brown's flat. In the cramped kitchen, two locals whom Brown calls his “cholos” are cooking huevos a la mexicana and beans. A jumping mixture of The Doors, David Bowie, and MF Doom blares from a knackered, old laptop. Mice dart across the floor. Brown, a journalist and former member of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, sits opposite me.

The circus, as ever, had landed. It always does. It has come to Chingford in cycles for as long as this stretch of the London-Essex border has been turning out footballers, and it arrived this year with a particular intensity — partly because the England side keeps edging closer to glory, and partly because sports media, with its ever-thickening cross-pollinations of gambling, advertising and that weightless noun content, is about the only medium still in the ascendant.

It takes around 60 days to turn a human body into compost. The process is surprisingly simple. A body is placed inside a sealed vessel, covered with straw, alfalfa and wood chips, and left for bacteria and microbes to do what they’ve always done: return flesh to soil. The remaining bones, which break down more slowly, are later ground into a fine powder and folded back into the mixture.