Once a week, my grandad would bring me a McDonald’s strawberry milkshake. For a poor kid in the eighties, this was a mega treat. I have a clear image of him, standing impressively large in the doorway to our kitchen...
Category - Journal
It’s hard to put into words what makes my friend Becca so special. Perhaps it’s easier to describe what it’s like to spend time in her company. Almost instantly, you are infected with her enthusiasm and...
I sit out of sight, staring across at you and thinking back over all the times we shared together. Offering paper prayers to the dead on the Tibetan Plateau, getting dirty in the Cambodian jungle, scaling Scafell, descending...
Hay fever. Fuck hay fever. Fuck hay fever like it’s fucked me. In the eyes, the nose, and the throat. My eyes are red, like a cartoon junky; like a bong-smoking night creature thrust out into morning; like the protagonist...
I have just overheard a story that my dad was telling his old friend on the phone. I have never heard this particular story before. It is not a big story; it is an anecdote. A surname that jogged something in my dad’s...
Car boots occur early on Sunday mornings. For that reason, they exclude those people that still like to enjoy a Saturday night. For some, the car boot is a pipe dream that evaporates when those first sweet sips of cold nullifying...
Since July, my good friend Elliott has been attentively rearing two chickens in his garden. He built them a coop, christened them Betty and Leia, fed them, and even read Animal Farm to prepare for all eventualities. He has waited...
I have thrown in the towel. The same towel that for the past three months has wiped sweat from machines I never really understood, in the gym where I never really belonged. It was inevitable that sooner or later my mental resolve...
I made a curried parsnip soup this week. It smelt wholesome. I left it to cool in the kitchen. Just before I went to bed, I put it in the fridge. The next day my girlfriend texted me to say she had found a giant black moth in my...
My life has turned into a Channel 4 documentary. It is called:- Pimp the Wimp. The premise is simple: take a skinny, directionless, unhealthy and generally defeated call-centre worker- the wimp [that’s me, if you didn’t...