Exit Left

In 1987 I joined the Young Socialists at my local Labour Party Club and for pretty much all my life I’ve seen myself as ‘on the left’ and in the fight over apartheid, clause 28, the Poll Tax, sale of council houses, the war in Iraq, trade union rights, austerity and generally being one of the usual suspects in a myriad of different campaigns and causes.  I’ve met some wonderful people who…

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Sombrero Vikings

We were using music as a starting point to write a story and having mused on a track from the film ‘Little miss Sunshine’.  I came up with this.  What do you mean, you’ve never watched it?  Oh you must…you just must. …

The rain had bottled them up in the van for forty minutes.  This was too much for Suki.  Even though she was a nine-year-old expert in dinosaurs, bugs and, as of this week, birds,…

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Bimbling out of my life

Bimbling out of my life

I’ve not posted a story in over a month.  Honestly, I’ve been doing stuff, I really have.  It’s not all been sipping champagne whilst being fed grapes by the bronzed and the beautiful…at least not at all the time.  So here for your delectation is another little ditty from my writing course.

Bimbling out of my life

On an island off Africa (but somehow part of Spain), where plastic grass framed a…

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Two very short stories

Two very short stories

Two short stories this week.  Bargain!  The task was to write a story of just 150 words (ish) and one of 40 words (ish). Falling I saw my TV vanish into the floor followed, a moment later, by the carpet, the sofa, the cat – then… me.  I was still holding the remote as I fell off the edge of the world. My street, my town …everything followed, spinning into chaos. And “they” said it was…

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No previous convictions

This started off as a short story about a 92-year-old crook but I think it works better as a script.   Exit DS Hicks and DCI Oates. Scene: Hallway – DS Hicks gently pulls the door from the interview room behind him. HICKS: So, do we continue the interview? Will the brief be up for it? OATES: Who?  Rumpole Rupert?  He’s alright. New Year’s day?  He’ll be getting top whack for this, don’t worry…

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Nice Cara

I thought I would carry on writing about this character Paul (the Photojournalist who’s got a spot of PTSD and is unbearably honest to people).  This week’s homework was seeing what happens when said character goes back to their hometown.  I’m not sure it works as a story but he is fun to write. Nice Cara My indignation felt like a ghost from the past. “Why? I’m a nice person!  I don’t even fancy…

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It's just so scrummy

It’s just so scrummy

We were asked to describe a scene in a way that says something about a character…so… Three options:  take a break, see a therapist or get fired.  So here I am, rural Austria, on a narrow country road, sliced through a shallow valley between two banks of custard yellow flowers stretching to the horizon.  Don’t ask me the name of them…I don’t do flowers. It’s a bright morning, no clouds to obscure…

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Framed

Short story on love and starting over   Until yesterday, the photographs stood like certificates of a joyful marriage.  He took the shots; she built the frames with wood, shells and shinning small stones. Now it would all be remembered, nothing new.  This morning she watched him lowered into the earth. Words were said, faces streamed and she heard so many ways of saying ‘sorry for your loss’,…

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Worrying about worrying about worrying about...

Worrying about worrying about worrying about…

I get anxious.  I’m beginning to feel that I’m built for it: the turn of the stomach, the tingle of the shoulder muscles, and the collision of random thoughts like the regular groaning thud of an offloaded hot dryer. I get sad too. And, again, I could be just designed this way, venting a sigh like the brakes on an arctic and passing through friends generously proffered positive perspectives on…

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Nowhere

Class assignment:  write a dialogue that sets out an alternative world.  (Vaguely based on experiences in the Nowhere Inn, Plymouth. Nowhere Inn 8.30pm and Russell, a multi-reality hippie with boss eyes, consoles his friend Tom. “Stop telling me to ‘chill-out’ Russell; you’re doing my swede in.” “It could be worse.” Said Russell, as he stirred his crème de menthe with a flake. “Getting bummed out…

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It's good to talk

It’s good to talk

Another story project:  Describe a family from a character’s perspective. I’m the youngest of four sisters; I have two older sisters, and we talk…a lot! Our whole family are talkers.  We talk over things, under things, through things and of things.  We talk with each other, over one another and between each other but mostly we talk about each other.  We even talk as we’re listening.  Irritating? …

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Sayin’ 'Like'…it’s like, really like annoying

Sayin’ ‘Like’…it’s like, really like annoying

I overcame the lure of the yoghurt flapjack and found myself meditating on my Americano in the Waterstone’s café in Exeter.  I like the place, you get to people watch shoppers on the street below and it doesn’t have booming music which makes it so much easier to overhear conversations. I shouldn’t be listening in, but it’s hard not to and it’s not as though I pick a seat with that in mind.  When…

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Dear Archie

Create a letter as part of a narrative she said….so:   Dear Archie, Sad news.  Your cat, Mingo is dead.  An incident with a television set in the herb garden on Saturday night caught him temporarily off guard.  A rum deal but thankfully he had a long life.  Be consoled, his end was remarkably swift. Glad to hear that you are on the mend after your bruising encounter with Grandpa Alexi.  I had…

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Drinking with the Gods

Random piece of the journal: 11.30 pm I’m sitting in the kitchen on my forty-ninth year of making laps of the sun.  My current job, my eightieth, is as a live-in carer and current home, my sixty-first, is a converted Station House on the edge of Dartmoor.   In comparison to some places I’ve lived in, it’s bloody lovely.  It’s the night before my birthday and I’ve homework to do for my writing…

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Grumpa...

Grumpa…

A short story from my increasingly fun time writing class: A wild tiger, in England? Have you felt the warmth of an afternoon sun on your bare back, let its heat roll through your shoulders and down into your bones? Have you felt the warmth that begs you to breathe deeper?   Have you seen, in late autumn your own long purple shadow and thought that by a mere touch of your toe to the earth you…

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The meaning of life and all that jazz...

The meaning of life and all that jazz…

I’ve learnt to recognise signs of when I’m getting low: an overindulgence in aggressive types of cheese is one.  If I’ve hit Roquefort bottom then I know I’m having a serious wobble.  Another is the slide into a philosophical frame of mind. The cold black waters of the troubled mind stir like the icy waters of a winter lake with shimmering troubles of jagged thoughts that hiss in my ear… ‘what is…

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Bing!...and breath

Bing!…and breath

Another short story from my writing course that is, mostly, not based on real life…mostly. Bing!…and breath… We use to be dangerous; a brigade of banshees who could frighten the crap out of a Greenham Common copper at fifty feet.    And now?  Now, we’re five obedient women waiting for this man to dingle his bell at us.  The man says, “the bell acts to bring your focus back to the vibrations of…

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