Poison

Friday

Patrick Smith

Why I take frog poison

You picture the rainforest, naturally. A clearing at first light, a shaman with thousand-yard eyes, the canopy screeching overhead. What you do not picture is a fourth-floor flat on an east London estate, a woman wafting sage around your head and the slow realization that you have just handed over £150 to be – quite literally – poisoned. This is kambo. And at the lowest ebb of my late thirties, becalmed in a miasma of self-loathing and suffering from PTSD following a moped accident in Thailand, I had decided it was precisely what I needed. Made from the dried skin secretions of a giant monkey frog, it is also, as of last month, suspected of having killed its first Briton.

Saturday

Keith Miller

At last, a novel about the art world that rings true: Annalena Mcfee’s Nightshade reviewed

From our UK edition

On a winter’s night an artist of moderately exalted reputation and in lateish middle age journeys across London, away from the stuccoed comforts of what was until recently home towards a studio in the East End, where a much younger lover lies waiting. Observations, generally of a caustic nature, about the comédie humaine encountered along the way and the state of the wider world jostle in the artist’s febrile mind with an apologia for the previous nine months’ events.The artist is a woman, Eve Laing, but the tropes past which Nightshade flits like an Underground train are strikingly, almost mundanely, male — the ageing, status-anxious creative, the mid-life crisis, the much younger lover, even the caustic observations.