My story ‘Dan and the Dead Boy’ is in the latest Fiction Desk anthology, There Was Once a Place, along with thirteen other new stories.
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Dan and the Dead Boy
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A transplant patient struggles to return to normal life after his operation. Available in the Fiction Desk anthology There Was Once a Place. Lying in recovery after my first satisfying piss in three years, I ran my fingers over the dressing on my belly and imagined sliding them through the incision to tear out the dead boy’s kidney. I saw it flop off the bed, a bloody half-moon left behind on the sheet, and landing on the floor to be carried off by a cleaner; and my body being mine again. They say it might last ten years. A decade with it, as my blood runs through and becomes his blood.
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Will I get sued if I put ‘pho’ in this title?
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My local Vietnamese resaurant has a brilliant name. It’s called Mo Pho. I’m not that into Vietnamese food, and while I’ve enjoyed every meal I’ve had there, I think their brilliant name has brought me more pleasure than their food. But it might not have that name for much longer, because piddling behemoth Pho thinks the world is too stupid to tell the difference between this little café and their Leeds-bound empire. I’m annoyed by this, but I can’t help but find it all quite funny, too. Pho’s real problem seems to be that, instead of thinking of a distinctive name, they have just named themselves after what they sell. They’re a pho shop, so they called themselves ‘Pho’, and now they’re upset that other people who sell pho have the nerve to put the word ‘pho’ in their names. Imagine a world where KFC had left ‘Kentucky’ out of…
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iCaster: Turning iPlayer into podcasts
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Wouldn’t it be nice if the huge number of radio programmes on the BBC iPlayer were also available as podcasts? Well, too bad. They’re not. You get the BBC’s arbitrary selection of their programmes, and that’s it.
I’m forever missing episodes or series or getting annoyed that I can’t reliably listen on my commute, so I decided to rustle something up to pull BBC radio programmes into my podcast app. I call it iCaster, because it seemed the obvious thing to call it.
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Weird weird news from the Telegraph
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There’s some very odd stuff in the Telegraph’s ‘Weird News’ section. By which I mean that there’s stuff that isn’t odd in the way it ought to be. The Telegraph describes this section thus:
From the unusual to the funny and the downright bizarre, we bring you a sample of weird news from around the world, along with cartoons, blogs and games… because news doesn’t have to be serious.
Let’s take a look at what they mean by that.
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A rubbish word game
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This tedious challenge popped into my head the other day. How long a chain of words can you make by adding one letter at a time to a starting word? For example: A > AN > PAN > PANS > PANTS > PLANTS > PLANETS A > AN > CAN > CLAN > CLEAN > CLEANS > CLEANSE > CLEANSER > CLEANSERS You’re not obliged to start from a single letter, but it provides some easy steps. Alternative rules: disallow pluralization allow changing one letter, word-ladder style, but not twice in succession allow removing a letter instead of adding one, without repeating words Post your best chains in the comments – or don’t, because this genuinely isn’t a very interesting game.
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Announcing the winner of my recycling
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The world’s greatest short story competition came to a close at the start of this month, and after a long judging process that has mainly involved going to work, doing lots of washing up and having a cold, I have chosen a winner. It was a difficult decision: the field was very strong, and the fact that I had the minimum number of entries required to hold a competition meant that there was less opportunity for a stand-out entry to take the prize. The winner is Paul Kilbey’s story about H from steps drinking a lot of gin. I would justify my decision, but I don’t think the absurdity of Paul’s story can be expressed by anything other than the story itself. I am a little worried about him. You can read more evidence of Paul’s loose grip on reality at Pleasure Notes/Pure Seal Tones. He also does sensible writing…
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Competition entry: Paul Kilbey
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H from Steps was alone at last. Being fun-loving is exhausting, he mused to himself, as he stubbed out his cigarette and reclined into a bean bag. His friends never seemed to understand that “H” didn’t really stand for “Hyperactive,” as he used to tell journalists for a laugh, but for “Hushed,” “Heartbroken,” “Hurt.” Yes, that’s right, he mumbled, reaching for the gin. My friends don’t understand my pain. Maybe I should have called myself “P,” for “Pained” and “Pathetic.” How different, he thought, my life would be, if I had been P not H. For starters, he’d never have got recruited for Steps if his name had been a homonym of an excretory function. There was just no way. So I’d probably just have stayed put at Butlins, where I used to work, he thought to himself, the cold glass rim of the gin bottle pressed between his lips…
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He replaced the spoon on the plate. Most people think that spoons should be made of silver, but they are wrong. Silver is a relatively soft metal, expensive, and tarnishes in the presence of atmospheric sulphides. Jacobs’ spoon was stainless steel: cheaper, harder and infinitely more versatile. It had already been used on the egg that stood before him, supported by its specially designed ceramic container. The steel edge of the spoon had fractured the shell exposing the layers below. Just below the outer case of an egg is a layer of albumen. This is normally a transparent liquid but, when subjected to temperatures in excess of 60C, its protein is denatured and it becomes a white, plastic solid. This egg had been immersed in water at 100C for more than 3.5 minutes. An area of albumen had been lifted clear, using the same stainless steel implement, to reveal a…
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