My tables Water table Tabulate Tibia Tabitha Jicama Pemmican Porcelain Pachyderm Panacea Piecemeal Pancreas ‘Popotamus Otter bus Totter us Opprobrious Opposables Omissible Homily Simile Slimy me Filigree Evergreen Silly teen Teeny sill Tannic swill Taco Bell Tampa Knell Tempeh smell Labneh well Lapels shell Table

‘I can’t do it, Marge.’ ‘Yes you can, all you need is reach a bit further.’ ‘I can’t! My belly’s in the way!’ ‘Breathe in and stretch! Imagine you’re at my yoga class.’ ‘Fuck, Janice. I’m not into yoga and you know that.’ A large clot of soot falls into the hearth and explodes into a fine black mist. Tim starts choking violently. ‘Oh, love, are you OK? Come back out.’ ‘I can’t!’ He barely got five words out before being overcome by another fit of coughing. Janic

‘It’s all because of the bloody Romans.’ ‘What?’ ‘Aunt Lizbeth threatened to disinherit me.’ ‘Seriously? What did the Romans have to do with it?’ ‘She got really pissed when she chipped her tooth. She’d just got it crowned. I think she was joking but she went a paler shade of beige when she bit down on that.’ ‘The Romans chipped her tooth, and you’re getting disinherited?’ ‘No, she chipped it because there was a bit of stone in the cake I brought for tea.’ ‘OK…’

‘We don’t know anything about this girl. You can’t just go and marry her.’ ‘But Mum she’s a princess.’ ‘So she says.’ ‘Look, the Pintocratic Kingdom is right here. Here’s a picture of her.’ ‘Hm.’ Her Majesty gazes down her nose at the Wikipedia page. ‘We’ll test that.’ The next morning, the Queen greets the stranger whom her son had brought in out of a storm, and who claimed to be royalty from the Kingdom of Pinto. ‘How did you sleep?’ ‘Oh, terribly. The silk

Penkethman’s Pest Exterminators. Peter Penkethman had built the business up from nothing. Not it was a household name. If you’re about to obliterate something you’ll ‘go the full Penkethman’ on it. ‘Call Penkethman’s on this one!’ goes the cry when there’s a right royal cock-up to deal with. Penkethman’s takes the town to the cleaners. Arachnids, aphids, bedbugs, caterpillars, roaches, rats, rabbits… The family business is responsive to community needs, and if Mrs Bramble has

‘He’s off the rails.’ ‘You really need to rein him in.’ ‘Rein in? How? I don’t have any say here.’ ‘You have a say when he spends half the annual budget on flying a speaker in from Germany.’ ‘That was a bit crazy.’ ‘Crazy? I was the one who had to host him for a week. Brian just told me it was happening and that was that.’ ‘Bit irresponsible.’ ‘The other group members don’t know what to make of it. I think no-one quite feels they can say anything.’ She sips her

‘I didn’t know where to look, I swear.’ ‘What do you mean? She couldn’t really have.’ ‘I tell you, she was sitting there, dressing gown hanging open, holding two massive cabbage leaves on her tits, snot all down her face, crying her eyes out. I don’t know if I was more embarrassed at the tits, or the snot.’ Shery’s eyes widen. ‘Ooh. I see.’ ‘You do, do you? I didn’t.’ ‘She must have mastitis.’ ‘Glad it all makes sense to you. I turned round on my heel straight up but she yell

Palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss. Hand Give me your hands. When April, with its showers sweet, the drought of March has pierced to the root, then people get itchy feet and want to go on pilgrimages. Trot trot trot to Canterbury. Palms, hands, pilgrims, applause, handshakes, agreements, matrimony, business deals – further and further from the tree. Palm trees entirely obliterated by their metaphor, overshadowed by symbolism. 2,600 species of palms, waving in balmy cl

I thought it was geophysics that drew me to her. Nothing to do with volition. Asphalt ley lines through the concrete jungle, inexorable. Power lines through the earth, sparking, dangerous. There I was one day and Zap, I’m toast. Earth, water, electricity. What I didn’t know was that she’d been 'dowsing' - that’s what I’m renaming stalking. Dowsing for attention. How could I know that the serendipitous coincidence of interests was months in the planning? I should have been mor

‘Amo, amare, amavi, amatus’ The TV screen is grainy. The school collars and accents starched and restrained. The colour absent. They watch the old new clip with ill-concealed shock. ‘See that, Lily? You could have had to learn Latin by rote. If you didn’t parrot everything out, you got the cane.’ Lily squints at the screen. ‘Where are the girls?’ ‘Hmph. Good point. Anyway get your nutrition assignment done before dinner. Easier than Latin at least.’ Lily raises an

Shit. What am I going to do if this goes tits up? It’s my first proper heist with the Barnsley Boys and I have everything to prove. Got to be honest, not happy with my ‘Posh Nonce’ nickname. Anyway, the target is the new outpost of the Camden Crawler. They had the cheek to set up practically in our backyard. Can’t say as I blame the bosses for losing their shit. Why Michael had to pick me to be the main muscle I have no idea. He had an evil glint in his eye. Mind you he alw

(3 mins) She slowly crept through the slightly open window to the small room. Sitting in the dark, she spun her body and let each of her children off. One by one the 347 scurried off her long translucent body as her legs, all eight of them, spread and panted to hold both onto the frame and the cornice. (17 mins) Billy the Cart Careening down the hill his billycart started to wobble badly. The ball-bearing wheels spun and threw sparks off the gravel-embedded asphalt. ‘Oh

(3 mins) The roo stood tall in the grass. ‘This is how you pretend to be a stump,’ she told her joey. Joey could not sit still. His ears twitched. He looked over his shoulder. The human turned their head. ‘Look, kangaroos!’ ‘Way to go, Joey. Way to go.’ She leaned back on her tail. A tale of marsupial parental disappointment. (17 mins) ‘I felt I was being thrown off a cliff. It was terrible. I can’t believe they did that to me.’ ‘Really?’ He looked dismally down at

In the beginning, there was milk. Then the Great Chef dropped in some vinegar, and lo, the milk did separate. And after that, the Great Chef took aside the curds, and there was a great straining, and a salting, and a pressing, and after due time for reflection, there was cheese. And all saw that it was well. Since then many things have changed, substances sublimated and altered, but in honour of this event, to this day the moon is still made of cheese. The benefits of the G

‘Argh!’ ‘What’s up now? Hey watch out, you’re hitting a whole lot of keys there, it’s confused now.’ ‘I know the file is on there somewhere. I just can’t find it.’ ‘You tried the Search function?’ She eyes him balefully. Then redirects her gaze to the screen. ‘I can’t remember what I saved the file as. Word won’t search like Acrobat, more’s the pity.’ ‘So, if you knew what the name was, you’d be good?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Hmm.’ He stares into the distance philosophically. ‘What oth

In the immortal words of the Iranian midwife who delivered my sister, who was also our landlady, ‘the baby is yelloooow’. In other words, she was jaundiced. The physical ailment did not last long in the Middle Eastern climes, but the twists and vagaries of the next forty-odd years left a distinctly jaundiced hue on interactions between the two of us. Causal factors included evasive, not to mention cowardly, tactics of some others of our nearest and dearests, which yellow stre

On the 2nd of June 1702, Anne Bramble, originally of Parson’s Lane, Shoreditch, lodged a complaint to the local magistrate that Tom Berridge, of 24 Chancery Lane, had ‘harassed and tormented her through relentless pursuit for the past twelvemonth, such that she was not able to stir abroad without his shadow haunting her, and she knew not what to do.’ Berridge is noted as vehemently denying this accusation, stating that ‘Their butchers and milliners being the same, by chance,

‘Oh my goodness.’ Becky stops outside the café. A man is clutching at the brick wall, retching at a shrub. ‘Are you OK?’ (He patently is not OK.) The street is strangely deserted. His shoulders are heaving. His knees wobble. This is no time for squeamishness. She runs back into the café, comes back with a glass of water and some tissues. A choking, wobbly drinking process ensues. The man is about fifty, with grizzled hair and wearing a nice suit. He stares at her aghast. ‘Do

‘She left.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know. Urgent call of the wild? It was thirty years ago.’ ‘Where did she go?’ ‘I don’t know. She turned up in Arizona a few years later, I saw a news report some concert. She teamed up with some Peruvian band and an elephant re-wilding program, I seem to remember.’ ‘Odd combo for an engineer.’ ‘It would have been odd if it weren’t odd.’ I carry on kneading the dough, pounding a touch harder as images of Rosa’s schoolhood tick past in my memory. Are

‘Fingerprints’ ‘Seriously, how am I meant to get past this?’ Arms akimbo, Janice surveys an uneven stack of crates piled obstreperously along the side passage of Goods Inwards. ‘Don’t look at me. I haven’t been to enough therapy sessions for my OCD to achieve that.’ Betty’s stance unconsciously mimics Janice’s as they now both stand contemplating the chaos. Their eyes meet. ‘Sue,’ they say in unison. Betty shakes her head. ‘It’s got her fingerprints all over it. Plus