It was adopted by the Den when the Cloud finally closed

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I hope to stretch you now…

There’s a body.

Whether…[Read more]

And I second Jill’s call for virtual medals all round! 🙂

I realised after I pressed send that the POVs of your three characters  responded to the three possible POVs I’d put in my comp task. Neat!

@jillsted

A lovely interweaving of different memories focused on the annual seaside holiday. Your depictions are very atmospheric, such as, “We would stand in the corridor and e…[Read more]

John.

This is the strangest holiday ever. Chris should have been here. She even did all the bookings for us, and now I have to explain to everybody why it’s only me. The weather is perfect. Not too hot, not too cold. She’d have loved it—walking along the coast, looking down on the seabird colonies. Salt, warm seaweed on the narro…[Read more]

It was more than a holiday; it was a ritual, starting with the drive north. The choice of music; what the kids called my soppy stuff – Savage Garden, Beautiful South and sshhh, don’t say it out loud, Barry Manilow – and the way I always packed the car with a hundred and one things I wou…[Read more]

August, peak holiday season. For the August comp please combine the themes of holiday and sea. It could be from the point of view of a holidaymaker or a person who works in the tourist industry or someone who simply observes.

500…[Read more]

‘Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself…’
Shakespeare, Macbeth

British technology has been so dominant in motor sport for so long now that it is hard for many to imagine the time before World War II when British motor racing was an insular, gentlemanly affair (‘The right crowd and no crowding’ was the slogan…[Read more]

In July 1953 we  – Dad, mum. brother and me, left  our  now-echoing  and curtainless home on the edge of Dovercourt Bay – an Essex seaside town dominated by a pair of cast iron  lighthouses whose clean, and well-protected sands were sectioned by sea-slimy black wooden groynes within which squatted large black crabs. There was  also a…[Read more]

August, peak holiday season. For the August comp please combine the themes of holiday and sea. It could be from the point of view of a holidaymaker or a person who works in the…[Read more]

500 words max, deadline midnight 31st August.

(385 words)

At dawn she was in the kitchen, a follow-on to hours of restlessness, the turning over under heavy blankets, a heart driven to pump quicker than usual, a fluttery stomach. She was sixteen. It was a relief to get up and do something.

The first person downstairs each morning had to check the Aga. The temperature gauge on its…[Read more]

The much faded five inch Quality Street tin I inherited from my mother is near-filled with  buttons, their variety in part due to them having been donated by my aunt Muriel, who was a dressmaker and her mother Dora who was a tailoress. Needless to say, had there been such, I would’ve won ‘best-dressed child’ many a time had…[Read more]

As years roll away from me I look back at reflections caught in memories rainbow.

I know I was lucky. My childhood was idyllic, because woven among the colours of my life and simplicity of youth, the feelings of each moment are held, perfect and bright, like small lights of sheltering warmth against the…[Read more]

Please note that this doesn’t have to be about an object. From the theme up there (points up) “an object, or an event, or a saying, or anything at all really that you remember as commonplace when you were young”

Anyway, thank you for the prompt, Jill. The solstice was my 70th and I went from not thinking I’d make it, to writing a little story about it so that’s something.

The moon has departed leaving an impenetrable night with a cold mist gently rising across the still fields around Amesbury. In the hedgerows around one expanse of grass, sparrows packed close are beginning to shift in their sleep. To the east of this field a steady gaze would be rewarded with the slightest bloom of purple in a world…[Read more]

Pre-dawn on a midsummer morning, Tait Duncan, drove  south-east along an A1 empty of all but Highlands-bound supermarket wagons, conscience similarly uncluttered by the lie he’d last night told his wife as to the reason for his early morning departure. (In what had become th…[Read more]