As these words and all the rest are being printed, some of us here at Chasing Cow Productions will be stomping up and down the fells of Scotland’s Southern Uplands, on a kind of artistic-residency-walking-holiday. As you are reading them, we will have just recently returned to Dorset. It’ll be good to be back, as it will be to have gone away.

While this issue is at least formally unthemed, the cover of this issue gives expression to the varying spirits of the selection this time round. Multitudes have developed in-between all this paper. Do they give rise to new interpretations or are they an Escher-ising of independent receptions? The cover began its life as a river, before a moment of it was fixed by a camera and ‘cropped to the point of abstraction’, I am told. Just as ripples in a pond expand out and allow artists the use of all sorts of supposedly profound metaphorical constructions, so do they make murky and opaque the bed beneath the flow – but where would the fun be in anything were it all straightforwardly intelligible and unchallenging?

The shifting of meaning is a central element of Grace’s latest essay, as she discusses Aphrodite-Venus and the island of Cyprus. A short story by Boris gives us a claustrophobic look out at infinity and insanity, featuring one of several instances of pathways in this issue; Jon Lever plots a route in a poem and Thomas Bachrach intervenes on trespass, one of the most salient political issues of our time. Fred takes under discussion an oft-utilised scene in film and questions its assumptions about the production of the individual, and Bryony tackles a similar form of complacency in her poem. Moving swiftly onward, we next have two differing guides; one to help us understand that august bird from our resident ornithologist Anna, and from Jack, a guide to summer films we can watch whilst sheltering from the sun. Stefan, in his inimitable satirical style, has created a review of a fake book. Or a fake review of a book? Whichever one you like really. For my part, I offer a dramatic scene.

While we may be suffering a drought in this country – something surely to get worse as the climate crisis continues to be accelerated by our blessed leaders in Westminster – we fortunately do not exist under a drought of entertaining, thoughtful contributions by those that allow us to publish them. We are immensely grateful for them all, as we are for you reading.

Tom Beed