(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

They’re picking the cherries one by one, and then by twos, and fistfuls. The wasps buzz as they move up the ladders. Up the tree, pushing past the branches, reaching. Fingers, arms, sides, legs, all scratched, red as casualties after a rough night down town. Impossible to tell whether the hum through the head is incipient heatstroke, tinnitus, or the cicadas. A woman laden like a tortoise with a wrapped bundle bigger than herself full of straw-like substance, rolling slowly u