A journal for new writing

When I met her I was bored.

Bored of the questions couched in hopeful terms, the suggested dating apps, the dates set up by friends, the introductions to “great” guys. But most of all I was bored of the accusation that lay beneath it all; that if I didn’t find someone,...

1. From automatic writing

I was on the tip of the tilted pyramid-shaped building, unable to decide if I
should take the plunge or not, because it was not quite familiar to me what
would happen, since I haven’t been there before, not to mention I was
scared, because even...

I don’t want to be too early. Or too late. Or right on time. Like some fucked up Goldilocks. Everything has to be perfect. As usual – I always have to be perfect. I never am. 

Still, it’s been ten years and I’ve thought about this moment so many times since that first,...

“Show me,” she said. “Show me how to do it.”

He stared at her through the upside-down legs of the chair he’d just propped up on
the last table. She couldn’t be serious. The pub was closed, it had gone midnight.
She must be mad, he thought, then wondered what had change...

An unwritten letter,

An absent tailor,

A heart worn thin,

An unravelling king.

I.

“My dearest Excellency,

Thank you for your letter”

He gazed, silently, at the notepad in front of him, for some minutes. Then, equally silently, he tore out the page, crumpled it into a ball, an...

Bleary-nosed and rabbit-faced in the cantankerous legions of impossible marshmallows, browned out by the heckling mongeese, so listless and wan in the moldering translucence of the day, traversed a solitary white triangle over the everlasting lackadaisical centuries of...

                                       Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied

Dennis heard Rosaleen talking in the kitchen and a man's voice answering. It wasn't heated but rapid,...

Aspen walked the moors. He did it every day. It was part of his ritual. He would set off out from his hut with his dog, Harper, at his side. It was usually cold, the fog rolling down from the hills to coat the valley in obscurity. It was three miles from the hut to the...

Richard hadn't been to many funerals. Throughout his life he had either avoided them or only been persuaded to go by an anxious friend or relative, who wanted company – someone to be with for the obligatory occasion. But this one, somehow, stood out as being important....

“Woohoo” 

Britany let out a too-loud cry of joy as she stood in St Pancras station’s concourse, under the black departures signboard that had just changed to show her 17.50 train to Paris! ‘Finally’ she thought. After five years of interning and working as a lacky in th...