Cherrypicked stories

Night of the Corduroy Beast After refusing straight to cover my legs with the maroon offenders, a wrestling match ensued at the top of the stairs. To the death! or until I gave in, let myself be clad

¦he swings his arse over from the end of the bed and into the armchair and reaches down to click on the kettle

She took a large sheet of white paper and on this she made the world a hospital with rows of beds and corridors and she painted two nurses running between the patients and a doctor in a floppy white coat

Monday 12th December 2005 ' 12:17 am A very good while later, after we'd put some more air in that whisky bottle, Sherlock and I stepped out into the night and Denise locked the door behind us. Everyone else had long gone. Sherlock stood in the lee of the door and fashioned a rollie, which he lit with the Zippo he keeps on a string around his neck. Looking up, I saw Denise's light go on in the room above the bar. Her shadow passed across the blinds and dropped out of sight as she collapsed on her sofa. I knew that feeling.

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Worried this may be a bit of a cheesy or overdone idea. Feedback welcome.

Poem

Sunday 4th December 2005 ' 9:37 pm ...and so, Sunday night at the local, to swamp my miseries. Or so I thought¦ Mad Mack's (The Mad Mackeral to give it it's full name) is the only decent pub in town. It's opposite the clock tower on the seafront, at the apex of a triangle formed by Prospect Hill, Wrack Alley and Eastern Esplanade. The bar is correspondingly v-shaped, looking like the prow of a ship cleaving through an ocean of maroon carpet: Public Bar to port, Saloon to starboard. There's no dividing wall between the two, though. It's just a matter of furnishing and decor. The Saloon is cosier, with its sagged-out armchairs and nicotine-sepia'd pictures. The Public, on the other hand, has red leather stools and a juke box (a genuine Rock-ola 'Bubbler', complete with arching neon tubes and original 50s song list). There's also a TV set in the corner, a fruit machine, a pool table and a dartboard. These last two, given the snug size of the bar, overlap each other's floor space to some extent. If both are being used at once, the players of one have to give way to the players of the other in turn if dart-punctured buttocks or cue-shafted arseholes are to be avoided.

People text and drink bottled water