Debi Alper

(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]

Only two entries, as Athelstone rightly points out, but both were a joy insofar as they echoed some of my experiences.  Like Jill, Steve and I were but 16 and eighteen – me young enough to be banned from going on the back of his motorbike, but after four years of ‘going steady’, when  Steve asked my Dad for,  permission  to marry me his response…[Read more]

Only two entries, as Athelstone rightly points out, but both were a joy insofar as they echoed some of my experiences.  Like Jill, Steve and I were but sixteen and eighteen – me young enough to be banned from going on the back of his motorbike, but after four years of ‘going steady’, when  Steve asked my Dad for,  permission  to marry me his respo…[Read more]

Aargh – busy weekend filled with grandchildren visits and attempts to add names to a 1905 photo of a Christmas celebration family history question. I’ll get to reading and deciding ASAP.

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]

@ Libby: Sorry not be reading an entry from you, but fully sympathise with lack of time.

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]

Sounds glorious.

Just had a short break in France where nearly all the draft beer is lager style, with the exception of a few unpleasantly-sweet dark beers. To be fair, some of the lighter ones are drinkable, especially if it’s a hot day – which it usually is.

All this talk of real ale reminds me of that magical moment when you enter a…[Read more]

Actually there was a bit of a wobbly phase on the ale front for the first year or two of the new regime, while Nils, who is not himself a real ale drinker, was finding out by trial and error what would sell. There was a heavy emphasis on those light golden bitters that are fashionable these days, but are not much to my taste (unless it’s hot…[Read more]

Oh for a decent pub nearby. There used to be a decent pub only a few hundred yards away from me. It was always The George as it stood by a roundabout on Worthing’s George V Avenue. A couple of years ago it was acquired by the Toby Carvery group. I see that they claim to serve real ale now, but I did try to beers they offered a few times and I…[Read more]

The Woman Whose Nose Pointed North

I had already met my mother-in-law, years earlier, not that I could have known. We had moved onto a still-being-built estate, the house across from ours taken by a large family. So many children were a draw for a five-year-old girl and her brother.

The children, I remember, seemed friendly. Not so the…[Read more]