From one big shed with no windows to a container ship to another big shed with no windows. And then it appears – like magic.

In a wired world it’s mysterious how little we know about where our stuff comes from. Even though we don’t want to know.

But maybe one days these firewalls will start to burn up. The people who make the stuff we email with will email us. And in the meantime some people are following the empty containers back to China…

Where our stuff comes one: Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory

Where our stuff comes from two: Manufactured landscapes

Shelagh Delaney’s graceful, poised and restless account of Salford in 1960

Picture story

A Tumblr site about getting lost in York – away from the main tourist ruts.

York’s superdense historic core is ringed by leaden encampments of suburban public and private housing. It’s real commerce, like everywhere else, is conducted within earshot of its orbital roads. It’s shot through with utopianism, brutally and forgetfulness. Like everywhere else. A transit town of crosses and circles in the mysterious and overlooked flat lands of the Vale of York

Mayday on Holderness

Ted Hughes

This evening motherly summer moves in the pond.
I look down into the decomposition of leaves -
The furnace door whirling with larvae.
From Hull’s sunset smudge
Humber is melting eastward, my south skyline:
A loaded single vein, it drains
The effort of the inert North - Sheffield’s ores,
Bog pools, dregs of toadstools, tributary
Graves, dunghills, kitchens, hospitals.
The unkillable North Sea swallows it all.
Insects, drunken, drop out of the air.
Birth soils,
The sea-salts, scoured me, cortex and intestine,
To receive these remains.
As the incinerator, as the sun,
As the spider, I had a whole world in my hands.
Flowerlike, I loved nothing.
Dead and unborn are in God comfortable.
What a length of gut is growing and breathing -
This mute eater, biting through the mind’s
Nursery floor, with eel and hyena and vulture,
With creepy-crawly and the root,
WIth the sea worm, entering its birthright.

The stars make pietas. The owl announces its sanity.

The crow sleeps glutted and the stoat begins.
There are eye-gathered eggs in these hedgerows,
Hot haynests under the roots in burrows.
Couples at pursuits are laughing in the lanes.

The North Sealies soundless. Beneath it
Smoulder the wars: to heart-beats, bomb, bayonet.
‘Mother, Mother!’ cries the pierced helmet.
Cordite oozings of Gallipoli,

Curded to beastings, broached my palate,
The expressionless gaze of the leopard,
The coils of the sleeping anaconda,
The nightlong frenzy of shrews.

The picture story can be found here

Photo story of Easter trip to Sarajevo can be found here