District line

  • My Most Precious

    Do you ever stand, toes at the threshold of that yellow line and imagine some nutcase is going to push you in front of the train? I always do. Every time the warm assault of air whips the hair against my cheek, I cast a furtive glance over my shoulder and judge. Charcoal suit; not…

  • A Confetti Western

    The man with no name stationed himself beneath the shadow of the giant cactus. The rim of his hat almost covered his steely blue eyes – an electronic cigarette dangled moodily from a sneer that seemed indelibly etched on his lips. Stony faced and silent he observed the folks who came and went along the…

  • Up the Hammers!

    “Mind the gap Grandad.” My underground announcer’s voice is a little rusty despite holding my nose so tightly my glasses steam up when I speak. I hold my Grandad firmly as we take our exaggerated step from the carriage. This is the kind of thing that would send him sprawling and I didn’t want to…

  • Values Laid Bear

    I alighted at Paddington station and bought a cookie from the stand. White chocolate and raspberry, crunchy and crumbly and casting delightful smells from its snug paper bag. Before I could walk and enjoy my treat I spied a teddy bear sitting alone and forgotten against a pillar and decided I would do my good…

  • The Pact

    Reaching down to the depths of my bag, fingers grazing the raw underside of the leather, I delve deeper until I feel the rigid filigreed metal of my grandmother’s gun. I trace the cool ivory handle with my fingers and in my mind, taking in the sure smooth certainty of its existence, imagine the recoil…

  • The Plane Trees of London

    My mother missed the trees of London. Where we live, far away in the north of Scotland, our landscape contains only the varying blues and greys of the sea and the soft greens and mauves of the heather heaths. She would sit every day by the window of our lone cliff top house tracing the…

  • Emeralds & Diamonds

    He called me his Queen. I never called him my King. Except once when he gave me a brooch. “You listened?” I said. ” I thought you were asleep.” One night, when the world was at its coldest and darkest, I awoke sweating from a nightmare. It was then I whispered my one and only story into…

  • Blood’s Worth

    Bludworth had a few decades’ amount of blood in pails around the fine doors of Mansion House. Where did it come from? The blood leaked from the boils of the plague of 1665, gathering in pails and soaking the wooden beams of the houses that were now going up in smoke. The men brought the…

  • Silent Greeting

    He saw her inside the Station, with a golden ribbon in her hair. He swept her a bow; she curtseyed in acknowledgment. Every day they passed one another in the same place. He bowed, she curtseyed, but they never spoke. They shared nothing but a smile. At an antique fair one day, he found a…