I had posted a blog about Sukhdev Sandhu the other day, and then, just a day later, I got a little book in the mail. Its name is I’ll get my coat. Sandhu’s familiar, high-tempo writing about the geography of immigrant England–the chapter titles of this small and beautiful book have in them names like Stroke Newington, Whitechapel, and Ilford, the last a reference to a visit to a cemetery which I found especially moving–is accompanied by some ravishing miniatures by Usman Saeed. Find out more about the book from the website of the publishers Book Works. And if you are wondering about the title, it will become more intelligible as a demand for a dissenting, mobile republic if you read this section early in the book:

But the beauty to which I cleave is ruinationalist: a backwards-glancing, anti-bling cartography of tatty storefronts, derelict railway arches, congested side-alleys–the country into which so many immigrants arrive as opposed to the retail paradise of B&Q warehouses, designer outlets and CCTV-crammed shopping malls at which many comfortably-off second-generation Asians spend their weekends. This is by no means a passport to social status: at a recent networking-cum-speed-dating event in Mayfair, I listened to bright young hedge-fund managers and commercial lawyers enthuse about buzzy new ski resorts and snorkelling in the Seychelles; I replied that polluted canals along the Lea Valley were more my style. One of them said: “But mothing happens in those places.”

Shortly afterwards, I got my coat.