Tag Archives: Covid-19

Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Everyone Knows How to Fix a Bike Apart From Me

by Freya Thursfield

Freya is 19 and in their second year of undergraduate study in the English Department at King’s College London. They’re from London, but grew up between the UK, Lithuania and China. 

I don’t cry until the valve cap on my bike’s front inner tube snaps off in my hand, at which point I stand in a deserted street next to a public bike pump and sob for about five minutes. I had been coping with a global pandemic very well, but now being an adult has crept up on me and I am unprepared. This bike is also my only way of getting to work, which I need to do in less than 24 hours. The chain is so rusted I’m not sure it’ll turn even if I get the inner tube fixed. I don’t have a new inner tube, or the equipment to replace it at home, or the skills, or the energy, the way an adult would.

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20th - 21st Centuries, Long Read, Visual and Material Culture

Alfred Cohen: An American Artist in Europe

by Max Saunders, Professor of English at King’s College London

Max Saunders shares the story behind the exhibition Alfred Cohen: An American Artist in Europe which was due to open at The Arcade at Bush House in March 2020. The exhibition had to close to early due to COVID-19, but is now available to view online.

When my step-father, the painter Alfred Cohen died in 2001, my mother, Diana Cohen, and I decided that rather than having a funeral or memorial service, which he’d have hated, we’d celebrate his life with a memorial exhibition in his studio instead. As I started tracking down his earlier work for the show I became fascinated with how different it had been and how many different but equally engaging styles and techniques he had evolved. He was a much more versatile and mercurial artist than I’d realised.

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