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Cows were like, ‘What are you doing in our field?’ and I was like, ‘Well, it’s actually a public footpath. It says so over there, on a sign.’ And cows were like, ‘We don’t do signs.’ And I was like, ‘Well, if you want extra evidence, it’s
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Subscribe now It was autumn: everything was dying, including me, but the attractive beckoning mists of that season were underway, and I was in a “seize the day” kind of mood so I decided, against the advice of many close acquaintances, to go onto RightMove and rent three leaping deer
Subscribe now I am househunting on behalf of my cat But there doesn’t seem to be much on the market right now It is not as if she is asking for the moon on a stick Just a quiet place, away from main roads With no moronic asshole dogs
Subscribe now The Black Tree was what everyone in the village called it. Nobody alive remembered a time when it hadn’t been there or hadn’t been black. A perplexing runt amongst its tall confident siblings, it never got bigger, never went into leaf, never died, never withered. It
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* I sometimes forget that in a pre-smartphone age most people didn’t take a lot of photos of their everyday life. My family did, and I am thankful for that, especially as I get further into the researching and writing of my new novel, which is set in the early
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Subscribe now Winter was finally over, the wild garlic had shot its load, and, although the car boot sale had been rained off, the sun was attempting to prise apart the clouds and just the right amount of refreshing breeze was tickling the infant bluebells in the hedgerows, so it
Subscribe now Isn’t it great that we no longer have public beheadings in the UK, as well as having central heated houses and toilet roll and vinyl records and Penicillin? I think so, and I certainly would not like to go back to the many drawbacks of the Before
My mum, Jo - whose work you can find here - has very kindly handed me some of her original linoprints to give away to any new paid subscribers who opt for the reduced price annual subscription or founder member option today I absolutely love the hedgehog (which originally appeared
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Subscribe now * Jim is a cat our male cat Charles brought over to our house in early December last year. It’s mid-April now and Jim’s still here so I guess it means he’s officially ours - especially since the lady whose barn he used to live in
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This is a piece I wrote in January, 2018, directly after I’d moved to an extraordinarily lofty and isolated spot in the Peak District specifically to write my short story collection Help The Witch. A few of you might have read the piece at the time or/and Help
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This is a free post for all subscribers. I’m keeping it that way because I appreciate everyone who subscribes this Substack, paid or not, and prefer that these 2200 new words of fiction be widely read, rather than limited to a few people. But if you are in a
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This is a piece I wrote last autumn, but I thought it worth posting again here, since many of my Substack subscribers won’t have seen it. Plus, in the week of Villager’s paperback publication, it’s probably a good guide for anyone wondering whether to read the book.