Short Stories

I’d never encountered one of them before, but one day he was just there, exactly as you might expect him – black-and-white hooped jersey redolent of so many Marcel Marceau routines, black beret placed at a jaunty angle atop his […]

A little precise, you may think, but I’m only so aware of the time due to it being the same time I always wake for work, even on this, the first day back following the Christmas break. I can’t remember […]

The little patch of earth sat there as a direct challenge to all our creative energies. Over the years we had seeded it, turfed it, covered it in wood chippings, planted it with flowers and even, at one point in […]

Although I am both an English teacher and a writer, I always seemed to have an uneasy relationship with words. This is not to say that I disliked them, or they me; in fact, I love words and welcomed them […]

You know how sometimes it always feels like you’re trying to catch lightning in a bottle? There’s always a train or a bus to catch, but you can’t afford to wait for a later one to come along because, of […]

The months have done their moonlight flit once again, seemingly disappearing overnight and taking with them a big chunk of the year, leaving us once more scratching our heads at the threshold to year’s end. I liken the change to […]

With These Hands My great-grandfather was a builder, as was my grandfather and most of his brothers; if I were to look hard enough, I could probably find the brick-and-mortar evidence of their working lives scattered across half the country. […]

The charity shop was bustling with life, even this early on a Saturday morning. The piercing shriek of metal on metal shredded the air as a few people flicked through the rails of clothes, dragging hangers and hooks along the […]

As is so often the case, absence seems to be the catalyst for sudden change, as the return always gives things back anew, or altered at the very least. Sadly, so it seemed with this absence. On returning from our […]

The giant ladybird filled Aurora’s eyes with an immediate sense of awe. Sat comfortably with her knees tucked up tight on her old Edwardian sofa Aurora knew immediately that what she had just seen was not of this world. The […]

“Go to your room!” How many of us dreaded those words as children? To a young person with more energy than a nuclear reactor, all the time of youth to fill and a wide world to explore, that one phrase […]

The heat is beginning to seep out of the day now, and in response everything slowly stills like the final ripples weakening ripples pushed out by a rock tossed into a pond. The cats doze in the shadows, voices have […]