Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s SPACE issue. From the very small to the enormity of our imaginations, essays grow from the furtive earth-bed of mushroom forests to the stars. Granville Carroll’s afro-futuristic cover artwork “Becoming” places us in space. John Angerson provides the obligatory rocket-propelled photos. Matilde Gattoni reminds us that one’s freedom to explore space can suddenly be taken away. The connection with space doesn’t stop there. Melissa Tuckman’s aptly titled poem “Space Junk” connects space debris to modern living. A new section on New Nature Writing probes the world beyond our urban confines. In the second outing for Decolonising Travel, there are excruciating, painful stories, sexual imaginings in the steam room, and personal reflections on historical ties to oppression; all whilst giving writers who have come through VONA/Faith Adiele’s writing programme space to share their work. We finish the issue with a stroll through London — the most ethnically diverse world capital — through the lens of Books Editor Nicolas D. Sampson.
...Pillars came before wheels. They decorated temples in Turkey more than 11,000 years ago, they held aloft roofs in Gujarat 4500 years ago but that wasn’t why I wanted a home with pillars. I was trying to replicate an ancestral Indian home, where elders mingled after dinner while the children ran amok, their hands grasping the pillar as they puffed or fell. What I had in mind were slender wooden posts scruffy with age, possessors, of dignity that would imbue the house instantly with a timelessness that would keep me anchored between the past and the present. I had never lived in such a house but had felt it live and grow within me through seventeen homes in three continents over four decades until my husband and I moved to Hyderabad. Settling here felt right.
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