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Showing posts from September, 2011

The One-Legged Girl and the Apple Orchard

If BT could cast a line up to heaven, my Nan would be the first one on the blower. ‘Tom, bring me that phone.   I want to speak to Him.’ ‘You mean God?’ ‘No, not Him.   I mean Him: your granddad.’ She’d get me to read out the number as she dialled it.   I can picture her now: glasses perched at the end of her nose, hunched over with age, repeating and verifying each number as if she had just learnt to count, thumping each digit on the keypad with a wrinkled finger, mumbling something angrily incoherent as it connected.   Before He even answered, she’d begin ranting as if ten years without him had never passed. My Nan likes to moan.   If words were air miles, she could live on the plane.   ‘Me hips are digging in and paining [sic] me like daggers, I can’t hardly walk, me eyes don’t work properly, and what’s more, if I want to see anything clearer than a shadow, I’ve got to hold my bloody eyelid up!   Then there’s this damn perm that’s as flat as road kill and doesn’t look much bette

On receiving tickets for Cheltenham Literature Festival

Among the bills, the court orders, a "threat" and a fine, Rests a little white letter that is simply devine. It has my attention where the others have failed, (Having disputed my defaults, I refuse to be jailed). Unseeling excitement and shredding the rest, Much to my judge, the bank and BT's behest. A little white letter I got through the post, Contained a perfectly unperforated passage of hosts. Escorted along by three national treasures, I’m fleeing to Cheltenham for some literary pleasures.