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

8 min read

Neighbourhood Watch

The group chat has four hundred and eleven members and eleven years of evidence that nothing ever happens here.

Moods: Dark Funny

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

8 min read

The Balloon Release

The school wants to release two hundred balloons for the anniversary. The caretaker has been to a meeting about this before.

Moods: Dark Funny

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

8 min read

Quality Control

Her job is to taste four hundred biscuits a day and say what is wrong with them. She has been right every time for nineteen years.

Moods: Dark Funny

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

9 min read

The Tally

Four hundred and eleven ewes went up the hill. He has counted them down four times and got four different numbers.

Moods: Dark

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

10 min read

Thirty Seconds of Applause

He played on four hundred records and is named on none of them. Then someone found the tapes.

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

8 min read

Blue Plaque

The committee agrees the house deserves a plaque. What it cannot agree is which sentence goes on it.

Moods: Dark Funny

10 min read

Nightjar

She has recorded the same heath at midnight for nine summers. This year there is something on the tape that should not be there.

Moods: Dark

8 min read

Closing Time at the Wax Museum

Forty-one figures, one night watchman, and a strict institutional policy of not talking about the Napoleon situation.

Moods: Dark Funny

10 min read

What We Do With the Ashes

He left instructions. Four pages of them. His three children have read the instructions and are now standing in a car park at dawn, disagreeing.

Moods: Dark Heartfelt

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

10 min read

The Ninth Floor

The building inspector signs off forty structures a year. This one, he has come back to eleven times.

Moods: Dark

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

9 min read

Night Shift at the Observatory

Four hours of cloud, one thermos, and a colleague who has been dead for six years and still leaves notes in the log.

Moods: Cozy Dark

10 min read

Salt

The village preserves everything. Fish, memory, grudges. Especially grudges.

Moods: Dark

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

8 min read

The Inventory

The job was simple: list everything in the house. The house had other ideas about what counted as everything.

Moods: Dark