…not a very happy man.  He’s been doing this job: getting up at 4.30am, sorting letters, and then trailing around delivering them, for forty long years.  There was a time when he thought a lot about doing something else, but then it had become too late. Too late to fill out application forms, go back…

He’d never been on a holiday before, which is funny, seeing as he lives in a caravan.  They moved about a lot, so nowhere was officially ‘home’, except for the two-roomed mobile house they always slept and ate in.  His mum and dad were good at some particular things, and they tried to make a…

It’s bin day on Tuesdays, but if you weren’t used to the ways of our street, or if you hadn’t watched Harry every week, you’d think it was on a Monday.  On Monday mornings, out the blue or green bins trundle, at least eight of them, pulled along by Harry.  He does his own house…

It was the end of the holiday. Wasn’t planned to be, but she had had enough, and that was that. Apparently, he was exasperatingly obtuse for not realising that it was the end until she’d actually told him. It had been a trying week; the weather had been unchangeable, on the wet end of the…

My first memory of it was when I was 7 or 8.  Some time before the conversation, I had discovered a little pink shoe washed up on the shore, and thought it was something worth telling people about.  One evening, I was listening to my cousins chatting about their discovery of what I thought was…

Twice this week, I have had an extraordinarily happy time doing something very ordinary.  During those two times, I have remembered people who aren’t here any more, and felt closer to them.  What was I doing that created this magic?  I was gardening. Earlier this week, my mum, my daughter and I dug in potatoes. …

How can there possibly be a link, I hear you ask.  Well, the thing they have in common is a lack of vision.  Mine, that is. So, we’re having people round for a Chinese.  What to make for dessert, I wonder.  Why not Vienetta, my husband asks.  First, I shoot the suggestion down in flames,…

Which means:  stand up, turn the oven on again and put the taco back in, because I don’t have the energy to do it myself, but really don’t want to be accused of nagging.  Under some self-scrutiny, it seems that, most of the time, there is an unspoken current of discourse running through my life. …