Month: September 2023

Working on down the contents page of my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, we come to the sixth story in the collection, a collection of images or anecdotes,  ‘Totality’. This is a necessarily short introduction to a short exercise in writing. There are still 24 more stories to introduce, but we are moving along quite nicely in this month of short stories!

I saw this little collection within a collection as a series of ‘postcards’ – brief, almost pictorial, images of everyday happening. Not very exciting; not alarming; not perhaps even very interesting, but snapshots of life. Here is the first!

One day when I was young I was walking with my grandfather along a wide pavement on the hill leading to his house. We passed a young man who happened to have a blond beard.

If you ever grow one of those, I’ll disinherit you, my grandfather said to me.

I didn’t pay much attention at the time—for several reasons, mostly to do with age, it didn’t seem very important.

Twenty years later I had a beard. Ten years after that my grandfather died. And I remembered his words.

‘Totality’ can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.

Working through the contents page of my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, comes a taster from the third story in the collection, ‘A Time of Plague; A Time of Love’. There are 26 further stories to introduce, so we are still just beginning this marathon: a month of short stories! I began writing short stories during the Covid lockdown as a break from poems… to make a change… and found that I liked the genre.

A time of plague – what was I thinking! And now a man and a girl; a poet and his muse; a lecturer and his student take the stage.

 A tale of two halves!

It was strange to think of the poet sitting in his usual chair, drinking his usual espresso coffee and watching the world go by. As usual. She liked to think of him like that—his old scarf still around his neck despite the warmth of the place, his jacket open on the usual black T-shirt and his bag on the floor under the table—although she knew that now—now in this strange time—he would have to be at home. Because he was old—well, old by her standards—and he wasn’t allowed to leave his house—he had told her that—in case he came into contact with a plague victim and caught the disease—at his age, it would be very difficult to shake it off and recover, she could barely bring herself to think that it might mean he would die. That couldn’t be allowed to happen, she would never forgive herself if meeting her for a coffee killed him! And she couldn’t visit him as she usually did every Wednesday…

The first half of the story certainly shows a girl in love, infatuated, perhaps, by an older man. But the second half is written in a male voice and the poet may have a different view!

‘A Time of Plague; A Time of Love’ can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.

Following on from yesterday’s introduce to ‘The Den’ in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, comes a taster from the second story in the collection, ‘Age’. There are 30 stories in all, so we are still just beginning this marathon: a month of short stories! I began writing short stories during the Covid lockdown as a break from poems… to make a change… and found that I liked the genre.

I suppose it is one of the inevitable consequences of growing old that you dwell, to some extent at least, on age – indeed I have just written a long poem (not yet published anywhere), ‘Reflexions on the Isolation of Age’. So I suppose that it was not really surprising that during the isolation of Covid I wrote a piece about living alone in old age!

The story is about a man who is advancing more or less happily through his later years, with few cares or worries, unconcerned about his life… until one morning when he wakes up with no idea why he isn’t in bed! He struggles to remember, becomes concerned…

 John was worried that he was getting old. And in that thought he knew there was a second, hidden, almost subliminal buried concern. Getting old—yes, he knew: in his early seventies he didn’t feel old, didn’t in fact feel any different to the way he had felt thirty or forty years ago but his hair was white and thinning, he was, he to admit less agile, he took more care up ladders… that sort of thing. But the worry he wouldn’t voice was that he was losing his memory. Or his mind, an unseen evil voice whispered.

This was just a vague, a background notion that surfaced when he couldn’t remember a name or a place. His memory for the past—the more distant past—was invincible… as evidenced he thought with a grin when his sister has emailed yesterday that she had found his school log tables amongst her books and in an instant he recalled the slim grey covered booklet with its black capitalised title, covered in the sticky-backed film he had used on all his school books. He wasn’t really concerned he told himself.

But then dawn had found him sitting naked in his lounge…

‘Age’ can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.

I thought that I would introduce the short stories in When I Am Not Writing Poetry one by one. There are 30 in all, so buckle down for a long haul: a month of short stories! I began writing short stories during the Covid lockdown as a break from poems… to make a change… and found that I liked the genre.

The first short story is about a boy – my grandson – who wakes early on a warm summer night and failing to fall asleep again decides on an adventure. It is a story of the night, of noises of the night, of strange noises, of what? Of bravery even. What woke him? What had penetrated his sleeping consciousness? What was there?  Outside his window in the almost dawn? Ghosts? Witches? Was he brave enough…

G. had no idea what had woken him, what had brought him alert and fully awake to the bedroom window in his grandfather’s house in the middle of the night. The gibbous moon lit the garden a little from behind the drifting clouds and a summer breeze ruffled the hedgerow, but apart from that it was completely still and quiet. Now that he had moved to the window—quietly so as not to wake his brother—he felt wide awake and on this hot and stuffy night had no wish to return to his bed. He wondered what it was that he had heard. Had he heard something? He did not remember the sound but that seemed to be the thought in his mind as he found himself gazing out. He must have heard something or he would still be asleep—he didn’t usually wake up in the middle of the night. Despite the heat he shivered!

‘The Den’ can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.