Cherrypicked stories

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

Santa Barbara: 16th August 12.25pm Basildon Bonds. Even here by the Pacific Ocean. I have stayed in hostels before. Done my time all over Australia in1999/2000 with Jane. So the moment I walked through the door here I knew the score, the rules, or the lack of them. The mess and laziness.

Sunday 4th December 2005 ' 5 minutes later Out of the Square I go and east along the seafront into the gusting afternoon ' my shadow loping off ahead of me like it's anxious to get somewhere. The sea's the colour of cold snot and as rough as a shag in a dock-side alley. But the air feels good ' stinging my sinuses like a snort of chilled vodka.