Cover: Photograph © Heather Simpson. Swan’s Nest Bushy Park London
The summer 2026 issue of Lighten Up Online has a wide variety of offerings at its international garden party with, indeed, garden items from Australia, Denmark and the USA, as well as cats and cat burglars, dogs cosmic and noisy, empiricists, opossums, spirit guides and superheroes. There are also card houses, clouds, small towns, spas, the thrills and spills of the digital world, threads, tongues scorched rather than twisted, Welsh rugby, warnings to hospital visitors and writers of the weird while something unspeakable is done to poor old William Dunbar and Latin. And that’s not to mention alliteration, cars, cricket, National Incontinence Day, and a new medical invention and, yes, it’s that brush-wielding cow again, but with a picture this time and, as usual, much else besides.
Embedded or couched in the four Intervals are Felicia Nimue Ackerman, Jerome Betts, Jane Blanchard, Michael Calvert, Pat D’Amico, Steve Diamond, Noah Goode, E. J. Hutchinson, Tonia Kalouria, Steven Kent. Philip Kitcher, Susan McLean, L. A. Mereoie, Alan Millichip, Martin Parker, Harry Ricketts, Henry Stimpson, Eleanor Jane Turner, Tom Vaughan and Russel Winick.
Retching and reeling from peering into refrigerators with rotten contents come the survivors of Competition 73 in the shape of Marshall Begel, John S. Eustis, Philip Kitcher, L. A. Mereoie, Alan Millichip, Martin Parker, D. A. Prince, Margaret Owen Ruckert and Michael Swan.
As always, it is a pleasure to greet new names in the ranks of LUPO’s light regiment, in this case the scintillating squad of Val Anthony, Thomas Beckman, Marie Burdett, Noah Goode, E. J. Hutchinson, Deborah Lloyd and Henrik Thorsøe.
Finally, thanks to Felicia Nimue Ackerman and Heather Simpson for the use of their photographs and best wishes to all our contributors and readers around the world.
