I fall asleep with the radiator burning holes into my dreams and the word on my back. ‘Ordinaire‘ standing out in white cake-icing script on a black T-shirt. On the front it says ‘100% Extra…’ I pulled this T-shirt from my wardrobe with my eyes shut this morning. All day I have felt clingy eyes [...]

He moved in with his ex and her father quite a while ago. Lost count of the number of days he’s been living on the worn couch in her living room. Sitting and eating and sleeping. It feels more like a prison sentence now than it did when he first arrived. This is no longer [...]

Gerry sits at his desk with a homemade brownie sitting neatly before him. He has lined it up so that the longest edge is parallel with the end of the desk, and every stray crumb he lifts with a licked finger to his mouth. I know his game. He is making a brownie island. The [...]

Bye bye, prospect of Edinburgh Uni. Hello Cambridge or a big blank nothing, and garish yellow exam timetable pinned to the wall.

I was walking past an open door with cold hot chocolate slopping over the sides of a nibbled styrofoam cup, dribbling down my rain-numbed hands, when it hit me. The smell of her hair, a pleasant, tropical tidal wave of herbal essences. Yes, oh yes! orgasmed a blonde, sun-drenched woman under a steaming shower on [...]

He peered at me with his small, permanently bemused eyes. Several inches of brown, knee-high socks peeped out between brown leather shoes, and brown, sadly misfitting trousers. I reminded myself of the time he wore his tie over his jumper.
He said to my slumped figure, Get some R. and R.
I looked at him blankly. [...]

My first day of freedom begins with a drip of ice-cold water from the leaky attic window. This is number one on the list of things to sort before Thursday. It’s not so bad a way to begin a day, especially it being not at the beginning of the day at all, really, but past [...]

Where did my energy go? I’m popping those probiotics my mother bought me a while ago with a frequency which puts to shame even those many teenage popper-and-ProPlus-takers. These anti-antibiotics, they promise such wonderful things! All good things come at a price, however; with every swallow I’m involuntarily reminded that each must cost around 20 [...]

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness
T.S. Elliot
(This is a tiny part of the poem they forbade me from taking as a souvenir. Only my version was crazily annotated.)

I like to think I dazzled the interviewers with my shiny nervous exuberance and my icy cold handshake, firm against the odds.The snootiest [...]

The reasoning, cynical little part of me is extremely blasé, just as I was when sitting on that sofa all those months ago carrying on full of drunken wisdom and big ideas. Society teaches me to cry when I should instead shrug at things that, in the grand scheme of everything in the world, would [...]