stories

The beer was cold and so was she. Jeremy Bo sat at the bar, gazing lustfully at the barmaid who was cleaning a glass and waiting for her next customer. She wasn’t a pretty girl, not by any stretch of the imagination, but for reasons unknown to him, he could not take his eyes off…

The party was almost over, but the guests didn’t know this at the time. One did. One particular guest had decided that now would be a good time for the party to end. He was not alone in his thoughts, but he knew that only he would take any kind of action. Marty Binge sat, by himself,…

The water was too cold. Everybody thought so, but nobody dared mention it. So the chef continued to wait for the lobster to boil in lukewarm water. It was his first day in the kitchens of The Fish Dish, a small restaurant with no Michelin stars located in a busy part of London. Although it…

Part of the problem was that there was no problem at all, she just liked to think there was. Every day she would rant on about nothing in particular, knowing full well that he was not listening. It was not his job to listen. If it was, he wasn’t being paid enough. She didn’t know…

The river was deep, but so was he. Rupert Finn sat on the banks of the Mersey river and thought about all the fish that had done him wrong over the years. His pet goldfish, who had so selfishly died after being over fed; the dolphin at the aquarium that didn’t wave back; his ex-wife,…

It was no great surprise to the people of Glasgow that Penelope Smith-Jones-Walker-Parks-Singh-Watts-Atkinson-Day-Fletcher loved surnames. This woman from Birmingham had a fascination with her name and a great desire to make it as long and varied as she could. To do this, she had to marry several times. This was not a difficulty for her,…

Maxwell Parmaham was a short Scottish man with a very bad temper. He loathed people and often found himself hitting them repeatedly. When he was not flying off the handle, he was flying on an aeroplane. Although he wasn’t a people person, he was a damn fine pilot. He knew it and so did everybody…

It was Ernie’s first time driving a bus. He’d wanted to be a bus driver for as long as he could remember, and now here he was in the driving seat behind the wheel of a bus. And what a bus it was. He had been pleased that his first journey was on a double…

Kevin was a man of simple pleasures. He liked his ovens hot and his fridges cold. If the television and toilet were both working, he could happily spend his day at home alone. Kevin was also not afraid to show his sentimental side, which often led to overbearing urges to cry at small dogs. One…

Jenni tells me that the thing she would like more than anything in this world right now is a comfortable bed. At the moment she’s sleeping on a 30 year old mattress made of polystyrene that she bought from a shop that is now a Chinese take-away owned by a Frenchman with a goatee. She…