Whisks

Thanks, Libby!

Book 1 in the series was a bronze winner in the Wishing Shelf Book Awards last week too. So I’ve had lots to celebrate on the writing front. A very nice feeling after the years of drought when I was chasing agents!

Thanks for the kind words, @sandradavies! I appreciate it. And congratulations to you, Libby! I enjoyed yours and every other entry coming out of this prompt. It was a good one 🙂

Thanks, Sandra, for the prompt, which I did find somewhat challenging (not a bad thing).

Fantastic entries from everyone else! You motivated me to (try to!) do better.

You may not have expected it, but you should believe it, Libby. really sharp story there.

Thanks, Sandra. I enjoyed that prompt. And thanks to all the other entrants; I really enjoyed reading through them this month.

“you will mistake the gulls

for the screaming of a girl

and run out of your flat

to an empty landing”

you will turn your head this way and that and peer over the railing to the stairwell below,

seeing no-one, hearing nothing, not even an echo of the sound you followed in the first place. You will grasp the red-painted railing with both…[Read more]

Of course, I felt stupid when I realised. There I was standing on the landing in shorts and tee-shirt with my apron on. “World’s Best Chef” it said on the font. Katya bought it for me for Christmas—oh—must be ten years ago. Mrs. Hardcastle from number seventy was out there as well. I wonder if she thought…

‘Morning Mrs. Hardcastle. It was the gu…[Read more]

Promise Landing

(410 words*)

The screams tear Seth like cheap paper from shallow, disturbing dreams, and he gasps awake, eyes on the living darkness that writhes, malevolent with secrets, in the corners of the room. His gut can tell it’s way beyond midmorning, though the blackout curtain over the single window could convince him it’s the wit…[Read more]

No, there’s little or nothing to tell you a railway had ever been there. A short stretch at the Tralee end re-opened in the nineties with one of the original locomotives, but it only seems to have lasted less than twenty years. There’s still a Tralee and Dingle Railway Preservation Society page on Facebook, though.

Glorious. I’ve been to that part of the world and had no idea there had been a railway there, let alone one with such a remarkable history. It’s a shame it didn’t survive long enough that the preservation movement had got going, though by the sound of things it was probably lucky that they quit while they were ahead.

It must have been well over thirty years ago, on holiday in North Wales, when, after visiting Beddgelert, we went for a riverside walk along what must have been the Aberglaslyn Pass. Noting the width and smoothness of the footpath and how it bored its way straght through some rocky outcrops, I remarked wistfully that we must be on the trackbed of…[Read more]

Fabulous blog again, Richard. I’ve always been fascinated by narrow-gauge railways. I’m not quite sure what it is, but maybe it’s the feeling of being able to step into (or onto) something that doesn’t look feasible. I remember my excitement as a child on holiday visiting the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway in Devon.

Mind you, you wouldn’t get me…[Read more]

‘you will mistake  the gulls

  for the  screaming of a girl

and run out of your flat

 to an empty landing’

No.

The landing is not empty.

You know what you see.

And the gulls, well, you should have remembered, they’re always there. Wheeling and calling, ghostly as Valkyries, looking for a better prize than picking at bleached bones of…[Read more]

I think I should belatedly clarify my last post by saying that, whether you believe that striking and picketing are right or wrong, that’s not the point I was making. The fact remains that the Labour Party was originally founded to represent the trade unions in Parliament, so Starmer’s action was a betrayal of everything the party once stood for.

No, I can’t say I’m impressed with Starmer’s ‘Labour’ party. So little so, that, given that we live in a rock-solid Labour seat and that it was plain the Tories were going to get hammered anyway, I was quite glad we were in the far West of Ireland on polling day and so had an excuse not to vote. How can a party leader who disciplines one of his…[Read more]

You’re quite right, and I made an over-generalisation instead of a point! What I was trying to say was that even though the superficial details of policy may change from government to government and party to party, the underlying assumptions are adopted almost intact. To borrow a cliche, the playing field remains the same. It may develop over…[Read more]

Interesting that you should say ‘since 1951,’ because I was remarking only the other day that the last government we’ve had that could truly be called socialist was Atlee’s. But I don’t think it’s true to say that governments since then have been pursuing the same, even more or less the same, policies, and indeed your second para gives the lie to…[Read more]

Congratulations @sandradavies!! Well deserved!

I loved each dragons – real, metaphorical, and felt. This was a delicious prompt to sink teeth into. Thanks lotsly, @seagreen 🙂

“The country needed someone like her” is one of those things people say when they vaguely recall the 60s and 70s through the prism of relentless rightwing media. It’s as though the fact that you could buy your own telephone with better features than a Post Office one after the GPO was broken up for sale was a sign of Liberty leaping over the…[Read more]