I’m tough, you said, towards the end, knowing it is hard to stop. The shuttle wants to weave new cloth – we find words; we slot the tongue of the buckle into a makeshift notch. Your old saying – I want a new nothing to hang by my side – resounds. Its after- shocks of […]

As a boy, my Sussex granddad could spot the runty dillin in a pig’s litter, play the fool down the pleached twittern, cry fainits when he wanted out of the game, make jokes about the daglets on a sheep’s bum comparing them to his own number two’s. From the Warwickshire lot I got the blart […]

I’m thinking of a church in Rome that sits upon a clutch of secrets, speckled, rare. Some sixty foot below, there is a house filled-in and lost, burned down in Nero’s fire; on this, the people made another house, next-door a temple; and these are but roots for what’s above, four hundred years thence: a […]

They buried both tins together somewhere under the apple trees, to be re-discovered in one thousand years but they weren’t sure, since he could not converse with them, that he would understand. His little sister, bright and brilliant, sucked on a pencil and decided upon: her last Barbie’s best dress; her own second favourite hair […]

They told us Torfaen – Stone Breaker – was the older name and that our river only became grey – Afon Llwyd – when they came to cut the coal. “You could not see it for foam,” my father said. He remembered its speed, just as fast as we boys found it, taking the feet […]

I imagine him to be a veteran, An old, surviving man, but in fact His words are younger than I’ll ever be again. Those thirty-seven postcards carry Only thirty-seven times a dozen words. And they’re enough to gather up my mother’s Mother’s mother’s worth. Her whole collection Left to us is just behind that frame, […]