What have you got time for?

13 min read

The Swimming Pool at the End of the Season

The lido closes on the last Sunday in September. This year it closes for good, and eleven hundred people have opinions about the water.

Moods: Dark Heartfelt

15 min read

The Sea Wall

The engineering is not in dispute. Everyone agrees what the wall will do. The argument is about which four hundred metres it goes round.

Moods: Dark Heartfelt

15 min read

Every Name on the Wall

There are two hundred and eleven names on the memorial. He has spent nine years finding out who they were. Name one hundred and forty is a problem.

Moods: Dark Heartfelt

14 min read

The Winter Count

One night a year, in the cold, they count everyone sleeping outside. The number is always wrong and it always matters.

Moods: Dark Heartfelt

13 min read

Salvage

Eleven thousand cars have come through the yard. He remembers the four hundred that arrived on a low-loader with the roof cut off.

Moods: Dark Heartfelt

14 min read

The Reef Survey

Twenty-two years of the same eleven transects. She knows exactly what she is documenting and she keeps going down.

Moods: Dark Heartfelt

13 min read

The Last Bell

Eleven pupils, one teacher, and a closure decision that was made three years before anyone was told.

Moods: Dark Heartfelt

17 min read

What the Ice Gave Back

The glacier has been retreating for ninety years. This summer it gave up a rucksack, a boot, and a problem.

Moods: Dark Twist ending

16 min read

Signal Box 14

The box is decommissioned, the levers are dead, and a man still climbs the steps at 05:40 every morning.

Moods: Dark Heartfelt

11 min read

Static

He has been broadcasting into empty air on the same frequency every night for six years. Last Tuesday, something answered.

Moods: Dark Twist ending

11 min read

The Man Who Timed the Trains

For nineteen years he stood on the same platform with a stopwatch. The railway assumed he was a hobbyist. He was not.

Moods: Dark Twist ending

12 min read

The Queue

Nobody knows what the queue is for. It has been there since Tuesday. It is now the third largest employer in the district.

Moods: Dark Funny

11 min read

The Substitute

Year 9 had been through four supply teachers in a term. The fifth one did not seem worried.

Moods: Dark Twist ending