Slapstick and Tickle We met at The Accident Prone Society Annual Dinner and Dance. Always a messy affair. I’ve been going for three years now and it always seems to consist of a group of awkward people dancing in their dinner. I can never work out why they book the same ballroom, up three flights [...]
WALKED THE DOGS. The puppy played with a cocker spaniel. The elder canine kept an avuncular watch from the distance. Pup keeps seeing squirrels high above her in the trees and her excitement inspires the Elder who capers arthritically over to try to join in although she's past being able to crane her neck and [...]
AMONGST OTHER THINGS whilst staying in lovely Devon, we thought it might be a good idea to visit the Tiverton Canal Centre. The appeal of driving along the B roads was very strong after the recent traumas of getting stuck in traffic jams on the M5. So, we set off. The hours passed by. Or [...]
IT’S THE BLANK page which causes all the trouble. Or the blank screen with the vertical flickering text bar. Crying out to be filled like a hungry dog in the back streets of Sorrento it needs to be silenced with some crumbs of creatively-inspired comfort. One solution is to dredge the swirling wells of experience [...]
• THERE ARE more than 2,000 species of toenail. • Toenails are so called because they 1) originate on toes and 2) were used as nails before nails were invented. In fact the Great Pyramid of Cheops is held together by no fewer than one billion, billion individual toenails, many believed to ave been clipped [...]
THE STONES ATTRACT pagans, mystics, England football fans and other types with a slim grasp on reality. Politicians, Big Brother contestants, Alan Titchmarsh and blogging ‘experts’ all gather to worship the rising and setting of the sun on the longest day. It’s a ritual whose origins are lost in the dim distant mists of time. [...]
The Duvet Factory Girl NOTHING EVER HAPPENED to Jim Collins. Nothing, that is, apart from commuting into work at the bank and commuting back. Five days a week, then a weekend taken up with the lads down the pub. And Sunday spent recovering and regaining any reserves of strength to start the whole cycle all [...]
OKAY, I HAVE an admission to make. At risk of using the first person personal pronoun too often, I have absolutely no idea what I am going to write today. They say that writers’ block afflicts even the most celebrated, globally-published, celebrity-endorsed bonkbuster novelists. Quite who ‘they’ are I don’t know, but ‘they’ seem to [...]
IT WOULD BE a feather in my cap if I could write a scream of consciousness without any clichés. But it’s because they’re so well-loved that they’re clichés after all. But if I was to grasp the nettle hoping that lady luck was smiling on me I might not look before I leap and come [...]
IT WAS WHILE I was lying in a painful, twisted heap on the floor, during my yoga class, that I suddenly wondered whatever happened to an old friend. He is a rake-thin, wiry chap so it was probably the apparent flexibility of his body that brought him to mind at that particular moment. Trevor Herstmonceux [...]