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

14 min read

The Rehearsal Pianist

Thirty-one years in the rehearsal room. She has never played a performance and has heard every one of them go wrong first.

Moods: Heartfelt

12 min read

The Apology Letter

She has drafted it for eleven years. This is the version she is going to send, and it is four sentences long.

Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending

13 min read

The Man Who Answered the Door

Four hundred doors on his enumeration district. One of them is answered by a man who is not on any list.

Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending

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

12 min read

The Locum

Eleven days covering a rural practice. Every patient wants to talk about the doctor she is standing in for.

Moods: 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

11 min read

The Ferryman of Loch Torran

The bridge opened in 2019. The ferry still runs, four times a day, carrying almost nobody.

Moods: Cozy Heartfelt

12 min read

The Weight Room

The average age in the Tuesday session is seventy-eight. The deadlift record is held by a woman of eighty-four.

Moods: Funny Heartfelt

13 min read

Six Hundred Hours of Birdsong

He recorded the dawn chorus in his garden every morning for eleven years. He was not recording the birds.

Moods: 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

Lost Property

Eleven thousand items a year come through the office. One has been on the shelf since 1998.

Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending

15 min read

The Sound Engineer’s Daughter

Four hundred hours of tape from her father's studio, and on nine of them, by accident, her own childhood.

Moods: 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

14 min read

The Inheritance of Tools

Her father left her a workshop she has no idea how to use, and a note that says the tools will teach her.

Moods: Heartfelt

12 min read

Correspondence Course

He enrolled in a beginners' Welsh course in 1998. The course closed in 2003. His tutor never told him.

Moods: Funny Heartfelt

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

13 min read

The Wednesday Swimmers

Six women, one cold lake, every Wednesday since 2009. Nobody has ever suggested moving it to a warmer day.

Moods: Cozy Heartfelt

14 min read

The Long Way Round

Every fare from the hospital gets the long way round. He has never charged anyone for the difference.

Moods: Heartfelt

11 min read

What the River Kept

They drained the reservoir for the first time in sixty years. The village came back up. So did everything in it.

Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending

14 min read

Low Tide

Every August, for eleven years, they met on the same stretch of sand. Neither of them ever suggested it.

Moods: Cozy Heartfelt