Knicks

Anyone else getting question marks instead of the smiley face?

Oh, crikey! This has caught me on the hop. Such a great catch of entries!

Squidge – thanks for the prompts. I wasn’t convinced I’d be able to do them justice.

Libby, Sandra, Janette and Alex – there wasn’t a single story I wouldn’t have picked to be a winner ????

Congratulations @ Seagreen, and thank you Squidge for prompt words, comments  and competition – a lot of fascinating uses of the three words.

A great batch of entries. Sadly, my good idea didn’t finally coalesce until I was dozing off last night.

Rusty

Killing a man is easy. The hard part is disposing the body. Was disposing the body. Until I tried a wheelbarrow. Yup. Same type of wheelbarrow Mavis used in the garden, but mine was rusty.

Last year, I made the beginner’s mistake of using a garbage bag, but the lower back isn’t at forty-eight what it was at twenty-eight. Thanks to cri…[Read more]

UNTITLED (300 words)

Betty Hoskins – aged 95 years – and probably a pipe smoker for the last 85 of them. She’s at the allotments, perched on a ragged, weather-beaten wicker armchair beneath an arch of bamboo rods and green netting, enveloped in a haze of what she calls her ‘medicinal’ blend.

It’s late evening, the sun is bedding down behi…[Read more]

Strange tastes

Oh, I did miss my Bert. Watching him through the window, wheelbarrow-in-hand, shaping our garden into all sorts of strangeness: gaudy, modern art in bloom.

Me, I preferred order. Neatness. A little chintz perhaps; a Capo Di Monte on the sideboard. ‘Let go, Pammy! Unstiffen your lip,’ Bert would say while waltzing me roun…[Read more]

Yes, thank you, Sandra, for a prompt which took me on a tangent I quite enjoyed!

And congratulations, Squidge. Well deserved!

Congratulations to Squidge for winning and to the rest of us simply for being amazing ????

Also thanks to Sandra for shooing me in an unexpected direction ☺️

“Stealing and giving odour “ [Twelfth Night]

From my very first whiff of the pipe tobacco I was a sucker for the scent of Balkan Sobranie. Given its name, thirteen-year-old imagination conjured red-jacketed hunters chasing yellow-eyed wolves through night forests. My Dad’s dour, ‘Four Square far cheaper,’ confirmed its blend  of leaves — Latakia…[Read more]