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Walking home from town the other day, I got chatting to a lovely older guy at the pedestrian lights. We stood there, strangers side by side, waiting patiently for the green man to appear, and the accompanying ‘beep beep beep’. Both of us invisible. Without introduction, he launched into a conversation about the weather, and…
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I had often wondered why my parents christened me so late; not as a baby, but as a strapping 4-year-old. I’d already started nursery school, wearing my favourite tartan dress and scratchy mustard tights most days. I must have asked my parents about it all, but no one ever seemed to want to answer. The…
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I’ve swallowed a block of concrete. An impermeable lump is now sitting heavily in my chest. I am motionless, corpse-like as I sit at the nondescript desk I’ve called home for the past 20 years. I’m grateful no one is close enough to see the tears building in my eyes, threatening to spill down my…
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I’ve always been ‘bookish’. Not that surprising for a writer. What is surprising is how long I spent ignoring my natural ability for prose, preferring to shrug it off as something entirely unremarkable. Instead, I focused my efforts on Modern Foreign Languages, and a bit of Latin thrown in for good measure (still to this…