World of more

"What was that?   Oh my god, what was that?" "I would guess, to judge from the  loud clanking and the bumpy ride, it was the lift breaking down in some way." "Oh god!   Oh god!   No!   God!" "Are you OK?" "What's going to happen?   How will they get us out?   Do you think we'll fall?   We'll fall won't we?   Oh my god." "No.   The lift won't fall.   They're very much designed with not falling  in mind." "I can feel the walls closing  in.   I suffer from claustrophobia you  know, I could have a panic attack at any moment.   Oh god.   Someone's got to get us out.    How  can you be so calm?   We might run out of  air." "We're not going to run out of  air.    Look, there are ventilation holes." "I knew I shouldn't have come  out.   My horoscope warned me.   Why do these things always happen to me?   I was late to coffee morning w...

"Max!" He refuses to hear, striding on down the lawn.  His ungainly trainers, bought a size too large for him to grow into next year at big school, threaten to trip him nearly every step, but he stomps onward. "Max!  Where are you going?"  Ellie is tugging his arm to slow him.  "Max.". He stops, and turns to his younger sister.   "I'm just going.  Away from them."  He waves his arm back towards the house and, as if he were a conductor drawing music from an orchestra the sounds of angry shouting rise once again from the dining room.  Even leaving his lunch uneaten and pushing through the patio doors into the garden hasn't stopped his parents yelling at each other. "Please don't?"  "It's always the same.  Every bloody weekend."  Ellie looks fearfully toward the house as he swears.  "They pretend like it's a nice family lunch, then they just row.  I've had enough." "What are you going to do?...

The door closes only with a firm shoulder, creaking over the jamb and ruffling the carpet to isolate a small l-shaped room.  More furniture than space; bed, desk, wardrobe and table loom over narrow red-carpeted valleys. The wardrobe is like a mountain, a blank-faced massif of wooden veneer topped with teetering crags of papers and files, foolscap spilling like snow and threatening to avalanche the duvet far below.   The bedside table's dark wood is bleached with a chorus of halos from overnight drinking glasses.  A skewed pile of books sits within easy reach of the bed, train tickets jutting as ersatz bookmarks.  Above the bed posters detail improbable mountain-bike stunts and sweat-sheened cyclists powering to victory.   At the desk and shelves, where the light spills glare over diary, homework and scraps of paper, the music system is surrounded by an ever-expanding kaleidoscope of CD cases and book spines. At night, car headlights slide across the ceiling, le...

I'll admit it was his body that first attracted me.  There is something about the way the line of his torso flares up from muscular waist to shoulders broad and flat that excites me.  No outfit masks that beautiful taper, even winter coats reveal the sumptuous dip of lower back before it swells out into buttocks. It may have been his body to first catch my eye, but since first moment my passion has been anything but shallow.  I look past the well-toned figure to see a generosity of spirit as he greets his colleagues, a potentially proud father as he plays with the children of friends, and an inspiring joy as he revels in the bars and nightclubs.   Our time together now is interrupted often as I become overwhelmed by the certainty of future happiness.  I see us galloping horses on a beach in Corsica, the warm evening air scented with sea.  I see us brewing tea for each other as the winter evenings draw in, quiet conversations in our cosy lounge.   And I...

We paddle in the shallows, waves splashing over our ankles.  The water cools the skin and forces blood from the toes so we flatten the ribbons of sand with stamps to squeeze warmth back into our feet.   The sky ripples with cloud, and wind squeezes under cuff, up trouser leg and down collar.  Our shoulders hunch and hands search into pockets to stave off the cold. She gossips and smiles, but anxiety billows and ebbs in my stomach even as I grin at her stories.  Somewhere at the base of the dunes, where the grass gives way to sand, lies the source of my tension.  A ring, sized to slip over her finger, sits in a box, which in turn lies in a bag.  It cannot be seen from here but each time she glances up the beach time slows as I wait for awareness to break across her face.   She asks what we will do next.  I tell her we need to leave and my gut stabs with nerves as the moment of action draws near. We pad across the expanse, tracking footprints over b...

Kicked by Google's decision to switch off FTP transfer for Blogger created blogs, I've moved this website to the fantastic Movable Type 5.  I've used Movable 3 in the past and been impressed, but 5 is something else entirely.  I'm still not convinced it's legal for such a powerful piece of software to be free (for me anyway). Installation was straightforward.  Migration was not.  There's plenty of sites out there that will tell how to format a Blogger export so that Movable Type will read it, but try as I might I couldn't get MT to parse it correctly.  Even more frustratingly it would tell me had been successful, but no entries would appear. The solution was a little arcane, so I thought I'd post it to help others in the same boat as me.   In short, it seems MT is very picky about line endings.  I'd been saving the import file on my Vista laptop, which of course then puts a Windows standard line ending on it, which in turn caused MT to throw a wobbly...

For the first exercise in my creative writing class we were asked to write something "inspired by" the similies we had generated in class. He was glad to finally be alone.  Four hours of walking had carried him up and away from the bustle of the cars and villages; the nagging intrusions of billboards and shopfronts had given way to a calming view of forest, lake and rock. His walking poles clacked a rhythmic accompaniment to his strides over scree and boulder at the base of a limestone cliff.  He'd been contouring below this vertical rockface for ten minutes, searching without success for a break or ramp to allow him access to the higher reaches of the mountain. A hundred metres away a bare patch of turf abutting the rockface hinted at a path that ended at the cliff itself, but as he reached the small plateau of dusty earth it became clearer the path continued into a huge crack cleaving the cliff.  Jagged fists of stone faced each other across a vertical cleft no wider th...

For a Christmas present, Islay enrolled me in a creative writing course.  Weekly I sit in a school classroom with a diverse array of other aspiring writers.  We are given something to write about each week, and must share with the class for feedback too.  Given that I was sharing my writing with others I thought I ought to publish up on the hairy great web too.  So, expect to see a weekly entry for the next few weeks.