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Uncle Les

I found out my Uncle Les had carked it recently. To be honest I thought he’d already have been long gone. Must have been a good old age. My Uncle Les was a sheep farmer out in the woolly wilds of Northumberland. He had a little wife who cooked for him, did his laundry and brought up their four daughters, who adored him. Les had a Border Collie called Midge who spent most of her life working and the rest out in the barn, in pup. I remember I was up at the farm one day, when the girls ran into the kitchen interrupting our tea and begged him to come and see the nest of new-born mice they had discovered near the whelping box where Midge was feeding her latest brood. I tagged along behind, struggling to keep up with his huge determined strides down the hill to the barn. Les spoke briefly and gently to Midge, and then without breaking stride, walked over to the nest and stood on it, twisting down his size 12 through the hay until it reached the gravel. He scooped up the mess of shredded mat...
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The Santa Ana Winds

  My grief counsellor was a serene, soft-spoken woman called Christine, from Blarney, County Cork. Yes, that’s what I thought too. I first met her, almost twenty years ago now. It was a huge step to take, and one that I took very reluctantly. I regarded her with deep suspicion as I began to open up, uneasily, about the daunting range of symptoms I was experiencing, from intellectual and physical lethargy, emotional meditation, loss of concentration, chronic negativity, pessimism, feelings of worthlessness, and unremitting sadness. She listened patiently to my hesitant, broken tones, as she’d learned to do; joining at length, my prologue with tender reassurance, “Low cognitive energy; persistently negative mood. Your loved ones tell you you’re irritable. You’ve lost interest in everyday life.” I nodded. “It’s what’s called ‘endogenous depression’,” she sympathised, in her seductive Irish brogue. I told her she was wrong about that; the depressed bit, I mean, and promptly ended our f...
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An Apple Cleft in Two

  In the autumn of my career as teaching head my Year 4 class won an ‘organic’ apple-themed poetry competition. Unsurprisingly, the first prize was a pair of sapling apple trees named ‘Ellison Orange’ and ‘Discovery’ of Worcester Pearmain and Cox’s Orange Pippin parentage. With expert guidance and a great deal of pride, the children planted their prizes in a carefully selected plot of the recently redesigned school garden. Although we were advised that the trees were of a sturdy variety, we made sure that the saplings were properly supported and carefully nurtured them through each season. No one could contend that they didn’t flourish and thrive in our relatively small arboretum. The results were there for all to see. The children liked to talk to the trees at break times, and we all liked to think that the trees listened. We made a promise to Mr & Mrs Worcester Pearmain, Mr & Mrs Cox that the fruit of their loins would be suitably stimulated and encouraged to mature in ou...
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My Tree is Dead

  I killed my tree today. My hardy Eucalyptus, with its cut foliage for flower arranging and its wood production for firewood, biomass and paper production. Its seed was sourced from the cold and high altitude areas of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. And I killed it today. Not myself, of course; I didn’t have the backbone for that. So I took out a contract. I paid a man to perform the hit and he took the sanction, for a measly £280. I tried to be all Michael Corleone about it – Michael had no qualms, he had no remorse. I failed. I thought I might identify more readily with the hunch-backed jester who bought the assassin Spartafucile to slay the Duke of Mantua. But Rigoletto lost his daughter Gilda instead, and frankly, he wanted the Duke dead anyway - his assassin botched the job, that’s all. No, that wasn’t me either. I didn’t want to terminate the tree, I was only following orders. It had grown insanely out of control and thought to have been commanding its roots from a neig...
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It Gave Me Great Pleasure

The old MC touched a button on the side of his seat cushion, raised the foot rest on his chair and sank into it, sighing heavily, heavier than ever contemplating, for a moment, the space where his navel should have been and how he really should phone his mother. He’d been in much the same position for days now, Radio 3 barely audible in the background, staring through the blinds at the occasional passers-by, posting whatever was going through his mind onto social media, and sipping from a can. “World War fucking 3 could have kicked off,” he posted, “and this lot would still be twittering away – hashtag for fuck’s sake.” The only time he got out the chair was to rescue another cold one from the ‘wine cabinet’ and each time he returned, he slumped back down into its sagging upholstery, touched the button to raise his feet and lay there, wheezing like a broken old calliope, worried briefly, about the beat of his heart. “It’s a navel hernia”, said his nurse wife. “First thing they’ll tell ...
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I Love How I Love You

I love how you rise with the larks yet still fear the dark I love how you believe in ghosts politely if not properly and listen to clairvoyants who telling you what you already know while physics shakes its head I love how your stubborn coffee rituals never change Cold milk on granules, still floating in quiet rebellion on hot water in spite of your hysterical stirring I love how you repeat stuff apart from the stuff you ask me to do I love how your stories take the scenic route whatever we did, whatever we said, conversations inside monologues retold as if the air itself didn’t need to breath I love how you mix metaphors, In your wandering sentences your inexplicable non-sequiturs and the inordinate lengths of your subordinate clauses I love how you speak in tongues I sometimes struggle to follow, yet speak fluently with animals in a language only they seem to understand  I love how you work a twelve hour day and spend the next six telling me about them I love how you have an answ...
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Agnes

 In 1968 the centenarian spinster who lived at the end of my little street of ten cottages died. It came as a bit of a blow to me and my partners in crime who used to have enormous fun at her expense, doing what 10 years-old kids did in the late sixties. It sounds a bit mean when I think about it now, but at the time we just saw it as innocent after-school entertainment. To youngsters like us, it was adrenaline-charged amusement to knock on her front door, clamber over the wall and wait for her to answer it. It was a risky game to light a banger and wait till it fizzed before launching the pretend grenade at her back door. And it was a big adventure climbing over the rickety fence from the cornfield at the bottom of her wild garden and crawling commando-style, through the weeds and perennials to try and sneak a peek through the yellowed net curtains around her darkened sash windows. Except that she never came to the door. Not once. Nor did she make one single ghostly appearance at ...
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