Tag: Family
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The Greatest Gift Of All
Learning To Love Yourself Out in the green Derbyshire hills a ginger man sees in another year. Just like me, he has seen many, and, like me again, too few have been happy. He has a fine family, and fine love from his wife, from his children, from their children, from other people, even from…
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My True Gifts To My Son
My True Gifts To My Son It came to me in a painful flash of obvious, duh. He can sing, he can write, he can make music, he can make friends, he can do so many things, but I’d never taught him anything. What he was, he was because of him, not me, nothing to…
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What We Should Leave Our Loved Ones
What We Should Leave Our Loved Ones when all this is over when you are all done what will there be left when you are all gone will there be paint still wet on a door will there be dirt unswept on the floor those unweeded borders will they still be there and if they…
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It All Keeps On Coming
It All Keeps On Coming driving on the motorway the setting sun blinding this son setting out on the road to nowhere to some other place somewhere that is not here I remember we did this once before a box van full of all we had all of us all boxed in mother and her…
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The Difficulty With Love
The Difficulty With Love The difficulty with love is the word love. I can’t tell you how much I love my brothers. I can’t tell you, because I can’t tell them. It’s not how we work. Love is not a word we have in common. We meet, we eat, we drink. We talk, though we…
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The Terraced House
The Terraced House It was up a hill but a step down from the place we had called home. It was all my mother could afford after they split the money. A terrace, not a semi, with two bedrooms instead of four, a pokey living room and a kitchen like an ice cave. The back…
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Suffer Little Children
Suffer Little Children What is in their minds? As they kill their own children, what are they thinking? Arthur Labinjo-Hughes: A life cut short by cruelty
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An Old Gold Ring
An Old Gold Ring Going through the glitter tat that we’ve gathered over years of buying this and that, shiny shit and twinkly bits of jewellery, some good, some crap and bought for no better reason than because we could, I found an old gold ring. A heavy thing, it belonged to my grandfather, long…
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The Terror Of Love
The Terror Of Love Out with my son, a too rare event, on a weekend, even rarer, we eat and drink and talk like solid old friends, and I’m silly happy to realise that is what we are now. We wander through the eating places and the bars of the city, places known to him…
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New Tricks Old Dog
New Tricks Old Dog even a young pup can sometimes show an old dog a book of new tricks
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Worn And Worn
Worn And Worn An antique gold band. Her grandmother’s wedding ring. Worn from being worn.
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I Remember You
One year gone, one year on, but I remember you. That little girl with a cherry red flame of hair that was to be the colour of your life, hot and vivid and passionate. I remember the fear in the eyes of the young woman you became when thay said you carried more life, and…
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Watching People Die
Watching People Die I sat and watched her as she died. My grandmother, Winnie. Her skin, always white and weather beaten, like leather by now, bleached right out by the fags that took her breath away, was wrinkled as the hide of some old beast, which is what she never was. Bright and true, she…
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Nothing Lives Forever
Petals fall softly All that lives must one day die Even those we love In memory of my little sister, who passed away too soon, today.
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Old English
We had a pet dog when I was a boy. A great, stupid, soft, shaggy Old English sheepdog. I think my mother bought him to make up for the regular lack of husband. I can still remember the smell of his fur, even now, so many years later, a wet, sweaty, slightly dirty smell. It’s…
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Not Remembering
I don’t recall him being born, my son. Not enough, anyway. I remember scenes from the day: the blood; the unexpected bright colours of things that came out in the amniotic fluid; the hospital smells; the echoes; and the dawn, the brightness of the early morning sunlight. I remember his surprising black hair and scrunched…
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A Small Act Of Vengeance
The father arrives. He pulls up on the road and he beeps the horn and he waits. Perhaps he beeps again. But he always waits. The boys are never ready. He waits five, ten, sometimes more minutes, but he always has to wait. When the door of the house opens the boys run down to…
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The Super Hero
Protected by the impenetrable shield of self-absorption the dark-haired young boy strode around the garden dispensing justice with his thumb-cocked finger-gun. He paused to mutter warnings to his foes and comfort to his friends before dashing ten yards or so to the other end of the universe to repeat the process. Hands on hips, the…
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She Moves Forward
She steps out of the door and moves forward. Before her are her dreams, the things she wants and needs, the hopes and likes and loves of her life that are yet to come. They have plagued her, these dreams, haunted her waking hours for so many years that she has come to resent their…
Writing Me Up 