The Written Word Group

Bewitched It was a cold January morning, with a biting wind and heavy clouds that promised snow.  Thomas was never enthusiastic about school, but this particular morning with only the prospect of an exam ahead, an exam for which he had not revised, he was positively reluctant. Life had been hard recently - well, ever since his father left, really.  He shied away from the painful memories of his father’s departure, of having to witness his mother’s desolation.  It wasn’t talked about now, locked away in a box marked forbidden, leaving him with this aching feeling of having failed, of impotency if only he had had the vocabulary to describe it. He was in sight of the school gates when he noticed something stirring under a shrub at the side of the road.  It was a small bundle of black fur which moved as he approached it.  Suddenly he was staring into the sad brown eyes of a very young dog. “Hello, little friend”, he said “What are you doing here?”.  He offered his hand which the puppy prom

NOW WE ARE ONE  By Aileen Cleave Ripper, Sultan and  Duke eyed me with exquisite feline contempt from their vantage point stretched  along the back of the sofa. “Foolish human” I imagined them saying.  “We know you’ve had cat enemy number one secreted in the study for over a week now.  We don’t need to see him, we can smell, hear and sense him.”. I’ll try reasoning with them, I thought and sat down on the chair in front to ensure I had their undivided attention. “Look, guys,” three pairs of yellow eyes stared back at me without blinking.  “Remember how you came to be here, in this very comfortable home? Remember how cold and hungry and afraid you were?” There was an almost imperceptible widening of the eyes at the word afraid.  Not an emotion any one of them would readily  admit to. “When you had to prowl and hunt and sleep in those dangerous streets?”  Ripper stretched a little further and Sultan and Duke humoured me with a slow blink.  “Well, we welcomed you into our home, didn’t we?

By no stretch of the imagination could I be called a travel writer, but this island’s beauty is moving me to prose.  This island, this Madeira, to paraphrase a famous line, is quite breathtaking.  It’s July, and we are here to escape the stifling temperatures of Almeria, and to date the mercury hasn’t climbed above 27 degrees.  I know my fellow Almerenses will understand the joy of a strong, cooling breeze.   The second pleasant discovery is we are on British Summertime, as should be the entire Iberian peninsula.  Only Franco’s desire to stay in tune with Hitler caused Spain to abandon Greenwich Meantime and move forward an hour.  The temptation to think that Spain and Portugal are some kind of sibling act should be avoided.  The language looks similar on paper, but sounds radically different.  Also, the day here in Portugal is structured differently.  No long 2 pm lunches followed by a siesta.  Here many restaurants and bars  don’t open until 6 o clock,  Because we are here for a mont

  Old Jack looked at his reflection in the shop window.   How much longer can I go on, he thought, I’m seventy years old and have lived on the streets for the last forty years, how much longer before they find me dead in the gutter ?   He looked at his lined, weather beaten face, the once bright, alert, eyes now dull, tired and half closed in the cold wind which blew down the street from the north.   The deep worry lines carved across his forehead, the black woollen cap pulled down to hide his receding hair line and keep his head warm.   The wind plucking at the upturned collar of the old army greatcoat, which someone had given him years before, almost hiding his bearded chin, the once bright and polished brass buttons now green with grime and dirt? He turned his back on the wind and looked down the length of the street, at the light from the street lamps shimmering on the wet road surface as the wind blew across the surface of the water filled potholes plucking at the liquid as tho

  WWG Bloody Partnership I was expecting a quiet day in the office. After yesterday’s post-verdict celebration, as a rare non-drinking copper, I was hoping that today would be a chance to finish my paperwork and even have a bit of a lazy day.  So when the call came in, I was the only one there and was in just the mood for a break from form-filling.   I bounced cheerfully up the steps into the Grand Theatre foyer and had hardly flashed my badge before the woman in the box office, sobbing into a tissue, had silently pointed me to the stairs down to the dressing rooms.  Once in the dingy corridor I was wordlessly shown into a dressing room by a flustered little man wearing a “Manager” badge, at which point my carefree mood changed abruptly.  They talk about people bleeding out. The woman on the dressing room floor had not so much bled out as been opened out. Her organs were on show in a way that suggested butchery rather than murder. There was so much blood. Her shoes which we