Five little letters If you wordle, do you brag when you get the thing in three, or fewer? The silly little poser sets your day off smiling if all the squares go green. How very clever you are. But what about those horrid mornings when you’ve got the hateful something, R, A, something, E: Grace, […]
A fishy tale – 100 words
A fishy tale I don’t think about kippers very often, but there they were in the fridge with their dead eyes and yellow label. A weekend breakfast: how nice! I remembered smoky sweet flesh and views over harbours. Warm them in a jug of boiling water – why a jug? I wonder – then serve […]
Saturday song – 100 words
Saturday song The trouble with tired is that, in theory, it’s perfectly natural: we are only meat and ideas and electricity and need our rest as much as our tea and cake. But often, the little weary voice ‘I’m knackered, leave me be’ is drowned by the drum thumps of needs-to-be-done and the shrieking hullabaloo […]
The Fear – 100 words
The Fear Hello, my dear, Don’t get up. I’m coming to sit with you, here for a while on this comfortable sofa where it’s safe. Oh no, you don’t want to be going out there in the world where it’s difficult and people will judge you. You know they will. Just stay a while with […]
Quitters’ charter – 100 words
Quitters’ charter No to caring about bulges – yes to a body that lifts weights. No to suffering for weeks then quietly giving up – yes to climbing more hills. No to being more like her – yes to ‘who cares? This is me’. No to finishing books that bore – yes to ‘this looks […]
No such thing as bad weather… 100 words
No such thing as bad weather… Yellow warnings, 98% humidity, a damp dread, collar up, hunched dash to the car. This Weather! The dogs’ gaze is begging: when? Look out there, I say. Do dogs shrug? OK, let’s do it, it’s not going to improve any week now. Dress for the weather, they say. […]
My truth – 100 words
My truth I once had a truth. It was a glinty-eyed runt in the litter of my life’s history. When I gazed at it, love squeezed my soul: I fed it the nicest morsels, held it close in the dark. And it grew big and strong. One day it escaped – bounding and fanged – […]
Thomas Nicholson – 100 words
Thomas Nicholson Behind my house, looking up the hill – and into the past – I can watch him or what’s left, in an iron basket, dancing a helm wind jig, shirt tatters fluttering. I think I can see the ripples of the air around the gibbet – his and the man he murdered. You […]