Notice

I have spent the last two months ruthlessly editing the 80-odd texts comprising this work. Three were expunged, one was completely rewritten, and the others were hopefully improved upon. Some needed full-on surgery, others a few words changed here and there. I have made the texts available for public viewing again in the hope that……

The Harrowing

A nurse came over to my bed and said: “Well done you!” It was a balmy midsummer evening. A little while earlier I had been strolling around the hospital grounds when I found a fellow patient sitting against a wall. She (I think it was a she – it was another life ago) had clumsily……

X Marks the Spot

I once tried, as a teenager, to fellate myself (I was centimetres away, just as I am always a few lexemes away from what I want to say). No other male has told me they did this but I suspect many adolescents try (in the spirit of adventure) and fail (a downside of being upright).……

Whodunit

There are ten basic cloud types (genera) that derive from five fundamental forms (sheets, wisps, rolls, etc.). They are divided into three levels – cloud low (CL), cloud medium (CM) and cloud high (CH) – according to where they are found in the troposphere. Genera are divided into species, which are subdivided into varieties, leading……

Vilnius city tour

An open-top bus with the words VILNIUS CITY TOUR splashed on the sides in bubbly letters regularly passes through my beloved neighbourhood of Žvėrynas. It makes its way from the KGB museum, across Žvėrynas Bridge, past Our Lady of the Sign (a showy neo-Byzantine Russian Orthodox church), to a Radisson Blu hotel by the river.……

Under duress

Many moons ago, I was in a bar that I loved, in a time that I loved, enjoying a quiet drink with H. His ex-girlfriend called; she was translating a text and wasn’t sure about the meaning of the word ‘duress’. H knows words but, feeling under pressure to impress her, on top of being……

Thud

According to a study by linguists at the University of York, the ‘th’ sound (voiced dental non-sibilant fricative), that vexing English lisp, will have disappeared in London by 2066 as a result of the spread of Multicultural London English. Thugs will be fugs. Thought will be fought, The thickset thug thwacked the throaty theologian’s thorax……