Barny

<u>Pocket Money</u>

Hidden in gloom-light, he shadow-shifts within the numinous cloak of darkness rippling and folding into a Samhain-shadowed mist, as it protects him within its unsettled veil.

Hood pushed back, revealing small horns twisting, like red fingers, on dark hair, falling away over his shoulders, he glides over the grass.

Drawn…[Read more]

I’m late with the congratulations – life has been frantic for a few days! Thanks so much for the prompt, @jillsted. A thoughtful piece from @libby is a more-than-worthy winner. And well done to @knickylaurelle for a splendidly acute story.

Congratulations, Libby! Well and beautifully written to you and Ath too 🙂

Thank you, Jill! That was a lovely surprise when I switched on this morning. Such brilliant writing from Knicks and Ath, everything so vivid and pleasurable to read.

The Artist of Wexton

A gust of icy wind blew across the beach, and I turned to one side and pulled my coat tighter. Doing so, I realised that something was wrong, but I wasn’t quite sure what. An elderly woman stood about fifty yards to the west looking out to sea. There was something almost mournful about her, and, against my usual inclination I…[Read more]

(Untitled, 394 words)

The book was finished, the story told. But more importantly, the truth laid bare. Every pocket dimension of past trauma exorcised. Every chapter of his life stamped adult, checked as complete. Every fragment of what it meant to be human sorted and struck through.

Now was a new time. A beginning time. Time to rejoin the…[Read more]

This month I’ve gone for an essay, or at any rate not a story.

338 words

Outside my window there’s the small garden and then a field, where a tractor drags a harrow. The harrow’s arms are open and horizontal. Metal discs hang below them, making contact with the ground, and I hear the discs rattling along the soil and bouncing over flints. The…[Read more]

Here I am, racked with guilt. I did sit down a couple of times to write an entry, but it just wouldn’t come. I had an idea yesterday that I liked, and it may end up as a scene in the WIP, but I had so much going on I couldn’t manage it. Apologies, it’s a fascinating idea and I should have done something. However, you have two very good entries to…[Read more]

I have little nostalgia for the pubs of my earlier days, mainly because the pubs in Sutton, where I spent most of my life, were, and are, a pretty sorry lot. But there is one pub I remember with a certain affection.

Watling Street, which becomes the Edgware Road, that arterial road that runs in a straight line through North-West London, starts…[Read more]

Pretty much, these days.

Most of the pubs I’ve loved are long closed now. The Railway Hotel in Newbury where I first tasted Morland bitter at the grand old age of 15 (just). At 12p per pint even I could afford it. Then there was the Cambridge in Cambridge Circus. To be fair, the beer was dreadful – so bad that I drank bottled lager mainly – but…[Read more]

Apologies in advance, Sandra. I won’t be doing a story this month. I do enjoy these poetry prompts but a combination of holidays and life admin is swallowing the time.

Mention of plain-looking pubs reminds me of another pub with a heart-warming story, the Hope in Carshalton, near where I used to live and even nearer to where I grew up. In appearance a nondescript 1930s local, it was going to close down until a bunch of its customers got together and bought the lease, and then a few years later the pub outright.…[Read more]