Barry Walsh

Don’t ever cross a crocodile.

Back when Chubby was chubby and not six inches taller than me and good looking, his nan died, and he went to the funeral. Afterwards, we met up near his gaff and he was in a bit of a moody with me.

‘All your fault, Teabreak, you twat!’ he goes.

‘Woss that then,’ I say, and I offer him a Number 6 to make up f…[Read more]

“Season to taste”

I could say it started as a joke, except I knew, at that age, Suze and I were, a bit self-consciously, aiming to bridge the gap between our schoolgirl selves and the mysterious, scary-but-enticing grown-up world we were bracing ourselves to enter.

Both of us were in top English. Read our homework to each other, critiqued (a mor…[Read more]

Thank you for the challenge, Libby. And very well done to Terrie for another powerful piece of story telling.

Wow. Thank you Libby for this at-first-sight innocuous challenge. (I tried to resist the autobiographical, but in the end it was the only way for me to go) so thank you Terrie and Ath for such impactful alternatives; I’m glad I didn’t have the task of choosing between them.

Energy and shame

Understanding is a difficult word sometimes. We say, ‘I understand her,’ meaning that we know her reasons for doing something or other. It was as expected. Electricity feels rather different. Do I understand it? I mean, what is it? I was taught a load of rubbish at school about the movement of charged electrons. That isn’t elect…[Read more]

Electricity and us

Electricity has played a considerable part in directing  the path our lives have travelled, from the instant (if only sensory) flash of knowledge, at the end of our first date, that “This man is who I can safely be ME with!” to our fifty years of living in the North East.

At that time (5th April 1963) he worked for a comp…[Read more]

Thanks for the comp, Ath! Another opportunity to stretch myself ☺️

And congratulations to Libby for winning, and the rest of us for giving it a go ????

Thank you Ath, both for the competition and for your encouraging summing up. I certainly would’ve been hard-pressed to choose a winner, so congratulations and thanks to Libby, and also to Terrie and Seagreen.

Why do you always insist on making this difficult?

Terrie’s Plant Song is almost a poem to the language of flowers. Rich and ancient with a deadly heart. The melody, she writes, is intoxicating, and I can’t think of a better word for the whole piece. I said “anything floral” and it’s hard to imagine something more floral than this. A wonderfully…[Read more]

THE GATEKEEPER  

They closed the Winter Gardens. Lack of funding or resources or some other bullshit excuse. Redundancy notices for the gardeners who’d been there for years, and redeployment to grass-cutting duties for the young apprentices who still didn’t know their aquilegia from their allium. They stored the tools in the old stable buil…[Read more]

(This may well be missing the point)

The language of flowers not always sweet

Only after finding, (months later)  photographs other than the ones taken by fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Kally Logan that caused all the trouble did Luke Darbyshere register flowers had twice been fleetingly present on his wedding day. Much of the time he’d been su…[Read more]

Sea, thank you for the useful challenge, especially because it helped me formulate my character as well as sparking such a brilliant range of responses; I wouldn’t’ve liked to choose a winner.

Seagreen, thanks so much. A brilliant prompt for April. Thanks also to my co-authors. There were some great pieces of writing.

I love to plan. That’s why nothing ever gets written.

Honestly, I’m sorry this has taken me so long…

All the entries left me wishing I’d given you more words to play with since each of them teased with hidden depths.

Ath – so easy to read (as ever!) Engaging, apparently effortless writing, but so many questions! Who was this man? Where did he come from and where would he end up?  More importan…[Read more]