Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2017

On Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve is my favourite day of the year, partly because it’s my birthday and you get to open some gifts early and also because some of our happiest memories are about the anticipation of Christmas. For chuldren, of course, is about presents but it’s the silly/ridiculous gifts that give adults the most joy, particularly when they are for other people. Christmas gold they, like PG Wodehouse’s story Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit, never lose their power to make you laugh. The time a neighbour wrapped up a packet of red lentils in beautiful red wrapping paper and sent it over to my mother on Christmas Eve, my aunt’s indignation when her cousin gave her a pair of Christmas knickers in a size 22 - “I’ve a good mind to give them back to her and say ‘Olive they’re too big for me’.” Then the sweet friend who came every Christmas Eve with a beautifully wrapped mouse for the cat which she placed carefully and ceremoniously underneath the tree. Every Christmas Eve my mum and dad took me to

The cat who hated Heathcliff

All witches love cats and magic realism so this excerpt from my short story is a combination of the two. He was an angel on a cloud, cooing into a basket of newborn black kittens and became so entranced he fell in and became a kitten, half cat, half angel. Being half angel, his tail was incomplete. His mama, who was lovely, took one look at him and said “such as sweet little face, and look at his poor little tail. I’ll take him home”. His mama named him Café Central, after the famous coffee house in Vienna where the artists and writers went to ignore one another. His mama’s friends thought it pretentious but it suited him, for Café Central, like his mama, was fond of art and nineteenth century novels in particular. Being half cat, half angel, he liked looking into novels, looking right through them, running through them, chasing them to a dramatic conclusion, feeling the sweetness of happy endings tingling on his new cat’s whiskers. His mama, who was a witch, but really a nice, ki

The reviews that get away

What happens when you consult a psychic the night before a DLA assessment? Well, anything can happen really but, regardless of what the fates have in store, you will improve your karma immensely if you leave the psychic a glowing testimonial. Incorporating client testimonials is a key strategy for growing your business, so the marketing gurus say, but what of the reviews that get away? The testimonials garnered by clairvoyants tend to be edgier than those solicited by plumbers and occasionally are too eccentric to make the website. Here"s my favourite one this week, published with the kind permission of a client and friend who finds herself having to take things easy for a while " "I had a reading with Elizabeth the day before going for an assessment for my DLA. She told me to be careful that I didn't fall and there was a strong chance it would be cancelled due to some kind of disruption. After a stressful trip into Nottingham, I was sittin' there for ov

Entanglement

A poem My atoms desire your atoms, they are poems that soar above the stars that made them they reach out to you, wanting, dreaming of fate, although it scorns them for nothing much happens when you fall in love on a sub atomic basis Just wanting, just dreaming of the light that shines on your face, the same light that travelled from a star to find you in this room where I find you, seeking a sock, consulting the clock on your iphone, measuring our time must atoms rhyme? to form a garland of verse or must they disperse, to the dark side of verse, Where I curse the impulse that compels you to leave me for the cornflakes aisle in Tesco and there find atoms of our former selves on the pastry shelves that day we got profiteroles that touched such sweet things in our souls til we mingled and tingled like a loom band bewitched.