October 2009
9 posts
The Nervous Breakdown
I’ve started posting short pieces on literary non-fiction site The Nervous Breakdown. The first was the same Last Train story that’s on this blog, but I’ve just put up a new one, Enid from the Block. I’ll be posting to The Nervous Breakdown every two or three weeks, and those’ll be all-new pieces, not extracts from Get Well Soon.
Skool
This story isn’t entirely true.
Nineteen eighty-nine!
The number, another summer (get down!)
Sound of the funky drummer…
…and of willow on leather.
There’s a grey area, a surprisingly long ten-year fogbank. I was at the same school from eight to eighteen; junior, senior and Sixth Form. A decade in the same building; it all seems vague and flat. Surely something happened in that...
Mr. Rollercoaster
This man’s face! His expression…it’s the expression the passengers wear when the rollercoaster comes down from its final loop. Terror, bewilderment. Exhilaration, inexplicably. He sits with this befuddled smile as staff fuss about, transferring him into a bed on the ward’s plague side; eventually he’s snug, propped up by a mass of pillows. The urine bag attached to the bed rail is half full of...
Geezers
Some time before the fluorescent strips came on, grey underwater light was slowly brightening the room. The geezers at the far end were already chatting away, dawn chorusing as old boys do. “’Ow are you then?” asked one. “Terrible,” his mate replied, “I died in the night!” – and they laughed and laughed, and I sniggered and went back to sleep. The far bed was empty and tightly made up. Geezer...
We hope you like our new direction
A friend emailed to tell me what she thought of the blog so far. She’s a very good friend and gave a very detailed critique; one thing she mentioned was that I appear to have two distinct writing styles. I’m using two distinct formats, present tense for the main narrative and past for reminiscences, but that’s not what she meant. She singled out a couple of passages, one more (for want of a better...
In the gym - part 2
“We’re going to put you on a plinth,” Ella informs me, “and see what’s what.” A plinth? Carpenter John organises sweatshop shifts of students to bang out dozens of plinths at the end of each year, white-painted MDF cuboids that hold together long enough to display 100 or so graduate projects, then get smashed up and skipped because there’s nowhere to store them. They’re going to put me on one of...