This weather is magnificent. This whole Summer has been so far. As a little gardener it’s been a fabulous mix of glorious sun with enough rain in-between to help with the watering. On Monday with the aid of a gadget I obtained after much reading of reviews from trusty amazon,…
Growing Old Wisely
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Apps and online help and general fuckwittery
Apps. I want to talk about apps. The little irritating junky things they want you to download onto your phone to access everything from a prescription to a service provider. Designed for the young and flexibly fingered. And perfectly sighted. I’m computer literate. I have a tower pc in to…
Summer noise and burst pipes
Every year I forget how noisy this season is. Great industrial, howling lawnmowers a persistent screech of busyness. The strimmer and the hedge trimmer manned by men with noise cancelling headphones, oblivious to anything around them including children and small dogs. The communal areas, the church gardens, the cemetery and…
The Rearrangement: a modern story
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Cockroaches
It was Friday afternoon in a little Yorkshire town and the men scurried like little brown beetles to their prayers. Pyjama dresses, half mast trousers, skinny ankles and huge feet in cheap trainers. Absurd and comical and deadly serious. Little boys with little hats dragged along to be initiated into…
The Rearrangement: a modern story
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The Power
At Screaming Time the women of Lextalionis gathered in their many millions and spewed their anguish out into the atmosphere. They let go of their anger and their torment and cast it far out into the black spaces between the planets. Lately there were so many women that the noise…
The word police
I’ve been wanting to write about Lucy Connoly for a while now but I’m so enraged by the injustice that has been done to her I’m afraid I might end up in prison too. This was not at Speakers Corner or on a rally over a microphone but on her…
The Rearrangement: a modern story
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Lextalionis
Sometimes, when a storm breaks days of stifling, sticky humidity and lightning cracks open fissures in the night sky you can hear the women of Lextalionis laughing. In the dead women’s place they laugh all the time unless of course it’s The Screaming Hour, but generally their world peals with…
The Rearrangement: a modern story
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Martin
His flat was a dump. It smelled of damp and cigarettes and grease, three day old chow mein and the sour cheese tang of unwashed man. He was sat on his lumpy, worn sofa gulping down a can of cheap supermarket lager and idly stroking his manhood. Moans and grunts…
The Rearrangement: a modern story
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The Rearrangement: a modern story
They came in great numbers these women. Ravaged and mutilated and angry. Climbing out of the pc monitors and the television screens. Out of the wooded paths and the quiet streams and the rural roads. Out of the seedy hotel rooms and the penthouse apartments. The brothels, the backstreets and…
Living well alone
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Text messaging & the art of gaslighting No.1
He bombarded her with text messages all day long. Inanities about where he was working and what he was having for lunch. Funny little anecdotes about his day. Reeling her into his life. Mildly bemused if not a little irritated at the banality of them. she gradually began to enjoy…