Spain
I'm a 26 year-old Scottish writer and editor, currently resident in Andalusia, Spain. My work is featured on Vice magazine where I wrote a series about low-living in London under the pseudonym, Laurence Rivers. I also write book reviews for Military History Magazine.
I founded my own magazine, Talking Soup, in January 2015. The magazine is intended as a platform for people to tell stories about everyday life and get away from click-bait journalism. So far, we have been very successful and I am delighted to feature the works of up-and-coming writers from all over the world.
Thanks to education secretary Michael Gove, a man who looks like he spent his entire school life getting bogwashed and is now enacting his own spectacular revenge, GCSE English students will be denied the pleasures of classic American literature.
I've been working minimum wage jobs for a long, long time. I've stacked shelves; answered telephones; dressed up as a Georgian aristocrat; pulled pints; filed, scanned and filed again. I've screamed at paying strangers in a haunted house; mopped up a little bit of shit, quite a lot of piss and enough human sick to fill a Walkabout keg room.
Illustration by James Harvey My semi nomadic lifestyle worries everyone, my friends wonder how I can live without a savings account and my mother thinks I am depressed. I have no regular job and as far as they are concerned, my boat to achievement has very much sailed away.
Illustration by Tom Scotcher I was trying my best to drink off a hangover last weekend when I noticed the clientele of the local boozer had changed.
I look at myself in the mirror every single day before setting out to a job I hate and think: 'You coward.' It somehow seems easier to keep grinding away at something that slowly kills me mentally while I convince myself that one day I will become a writer or musician.
Inspired by the never ending cycle of work and play that takes us from school and delivers us conveniently by the graveyard, Talking Soup is the home of everyday stories told by real people.
A couple of years ago I applied to be an actor at one of Edinburgh's haunted house-style tourist attractions. How I got the job, I don't know. I guess, thanks to my complete lack of acting experience, I was perfectly suited to the style of theatre they espoused.