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“Grave thoughts in the yard, while I think of you.
“My body disintegrates without you, soul fled already.
“I must put you from my mind.
“I try not to slip into a sleepy haze but without you I have nothing to focus on.
“No light reflected from your eyes to keep me awake.
“No repetitive heartbeat to keep my own heart trained in the art of beating.
“What will I do without you?
“Your kiss was you blowing breath into me. Without it I cannot exhale.”

Sitting on the top deck,
kissing you on your neck,
feelings drowned in Malbec,
listening to Jeff Beck,
tomorrow I will be a wreck,
but I don’t give a feck.

“I want to tell you something”.
“What?”
“Well the other night…”
“Yeah? That other night?”
“Yeah that other night”
“Right?”
“Well… after the… well… you know”.
“Yeees”
“Well you were asleep and I wasn’t”.
“Mmmm”
“And you were looking so peaceful and I was just watching you breathing and you looked so beautiful”.
“Ahh, you are so cute you know that”.
“Thanks, and just as I was looking at you a spider walked right across your forehead and…”
“What?”
“A spider walked right across..”
“And you didn’t wake me up”?
“No you looked”.
“You just let it walk – urgh”!
“Well it wasn’t doing me any harm”
“Yes it was I HATE spiders”!
“Well I didn’t know that we’d just met”.

By the time we got to the side of the canal we were slightly out of breath. But we could stop. Stop running. And while we looked at each other we realised the ridiculousness of what we were doing and I laughed a little bit while you kicked a stone that you decided was slightly out of place. It jumped off of the grass where we were standing, hit the concrete side-path, skittered along and plopped into the canal.

“I can’t believe we just did that”, I said.
And you looked back at me, “I know”, you said, “we really did it”!

And then we heard a shout from the main road, “there they are”.

And we started running and although we were probably about to be caught I had never felt so free.

A couple sit opposite each other in a restaurant discussing didacticism and allegory too loudly. At the next table sits a guy alone just sitting kind of moochy there in the corner. You wouldn’t have known you could mooch without moving until you saw this guy. He’s drunk five cups of coffee since they sat down. The couple want to talk about him but they can’t while he’s there. He might hear them. He has no distractions to speak of except trying to stop himself from spilling coffee down his shirt, which at the angle he’s leaning back in that seat is actually a reasonable concern.

Surely, they’re thinking, he’s remaining awfully laid back for a guy whose drunk that much coffee that fast. And also they’re thinking that they must be about to get a chance to discuss this as after drinking that much coffee he’ll have to go to the bathroom.

Every time he nears the end of a cup he simply lifts his index finger off of the table slightly and the waitress nods at him and brings him another coffee. Or rather each of the previous five times. But not now, not this time. This time he raises his hand and uses that same finger to beckon over the waitress. She walks over and he gets her to move in really close to leave her ear very close to his mouth. The man in the couple looks on enviously as he realises that the guy’s managed to engineer the perfect angle to look down the waitress’ ample cleavage. The woman in the couple is concentrating on something else – she wants to hear what he says – but all she gets is an overpowering sense of a gravel deep voice. It’s her imagination but it almost feels like the bass in his voice is making the hairs on the back of her neck vibrate. The guy gets up and leaves the table moments after the waitress went back to her work station.

She turns to her boyfriend and says, “did you hear what he said”?
“No. Just assumed bathroom”.
“I don’t think so”.
“Man he can drink a lot of coffee”.
“He seems like an interesting guy”.
“You think so”? The man is asking like he feels threatened.
“Yeah, I mean he seems interesting”.
“Interesting how? He’s a guy sitting drinking coffee in a diner. I mean how interesting can you get – woah hold the front page Julie! ‘Man drinks coffee in Diner’ I can see the headlines now”.
“You know what I mean. You wanted to talk about him as well. I could tell”.
“No way”.
“You did. You gave me that look”.
“What look. Like you saw something about him. Probably something funny”.
“Yeah, well he had that joke on his shirt”.
“What joke? I didn’t see a joke”.
“His shirt said ‘Yes I’m alone and with stupid'”.
“Really”?
“No. He had a black button down shirt. No slogans. I was just going to mention the coffee thing. Just say something like I just said, like ‘man that guy drinks a lot of coffee’ I didn’t realise I was going to have to share my wife with him”.
“Michael we’re not married”.
“Yeah, but we’re engaged. And you don’t like me calling you my fiancée”.
“Yeah well it’s a horrible word”.
“Well, I just think you forget sometimes about me”.
“I do not, Michael. I just think you’re a bit of a protective jealous idiot sometimes”.
“Well, I need you. You know? I mean I need you to be around. And I can’t stand the idea of loosing you”.
“Yeah, I do understand that kind of. But I just… I just don’t like the way that you’re always doubting me. It undermines me you know. I mean I got engaged to you didn’t I, you know I didn’t want to at first but you talked me around, so why can’t you trust me”?
“Because you’re a woman. I know it’s not fair but that’s just the way I was brought up”.
“You’re a pig”.

Michael is laughing now.

“Don’t laugh Michael, take that back”.
“No,” he’s smiling kind of wildly, “I will not. Women have been betraying man since the garden of Eden. And you are no different, even if you haven’t got the brains to understand your own weakness”.

At that exact moment the guy comes back and instead of sitting at his table he sits down next to Julie. In his low rumble he says, “You’re a fucking idiot”.

Michael, stands up and says “who are you talking to”?

“Both of you. You for staying with this bastard and you… You for… well continuing to breathe”.

The guy holds out his hand to Julie and Julie puts her hand in it. “Come with me”. They get up and walk away from the table.

Michael sits back down, or perhaps slumps is more like it. He’s shell shocked. And he almost doesn’t notice when the waitress comes back a moment later with the bill and it has five coffees on it. Michael grabs the waitress’ wrist and holds her back. “I told her she’d leave me. I told her!”

“Then maybe that’s why she did”.

Until you’re sure no more tears can possibly come out. And then you rest. And of course more come. You’re helpless to the ongoing pain but there is nothing more that you can do. This is that thing you need to be able to do, that no man practices with his friends, but defines a relationship.

That one day my four little children… whoops I don’t have any children.

But I did have a dream the other day which was pretty odd. I was dreaming about track racing, more specifically I was dreaming about the four hundred meters race. Now in Formula 1 racing there is a specific thing that happens if it rains, you still go out and race but you use different tires. Obviously this situation was weighing on my mind at the time of this dream, as I noticed that it was raining at the track. And just as I wondered what they do in the running races when there is a wet race then I heard the commentator explaining that exact thing. This is what I heard:

“Well the race has been declared officially wet. So we are expecting that all of the racers will have gone for their wet trainer. The wet training shoe has spikes in it and also has been warmed so that it displaces more water than a usual cross shoe. But what’s interesting today is that only three out of the four racers is using their allotted dog.”

Yes that’s right, “dog”. As I looked down at the track I could see a set of dogs lying on the blocks of three of the racers, but not the fourth. I carried on listening:

“Yes, three of the competitors are racing as usual with dogs on their stocks, but not the racer in lane four. There are obvious advantages to having a dog on a wet track, especially fluffy dogs like these, they tend to soak up all of the water on the start line. But of course there are disadvantages, first some runners prefer to not have to stand on either side of the dog as they feel this unduly slows them as they start running. And of course, as Kriss Akabusi found to his chagrin back in the late eighties your start dog can also bite”.

It was at this point I woke up. And the only thing that I can add right now is that I suddenly realised a few hours later that the dream didn’t make sense. I mean of course it doesn’t actually make sense, but it doesn’t even make sense in it’s own internal logic. If you were going to get a furry dog to lie on your starting blocks before the start of a race wouldn’t you get them to move out of the way just at the last minute? Rather than standing on either side of the dog when basically you’d still be standing on the wet?

“Hi, I’m your new next door neighbor,” I pointed to where next door was for dramatic effect.
It was only now that I looked up at my neighbor and realised what she looked like. She was young, blonde and pretty and was wearing a negligee* which left literally one thing to the imagination, her left arm. Her arm was bandaged, mummy style, from her nape to the tips of her fingers.
She saw me staring at her arm and seemed about to explain what had happened when I said, “please don’t explain it. Otherwise you really will leave nothing to the imagination”.
She looked back at me with that quizzical look that some people look at me with and said, “I bet you’re good with knobs”.
“I beg your pardon”, I seemed, suddenly, to say.
“Well,” she said coquettishly, “I didn’t answer the door, you opened it. And this door hasn’t opened by human force since the early eighties. We use the back for access”.
I realised she was playing with me, and I decided not to play along.
“Now look here”, I said, while I was pointing at a crack in the door, “I didn’t force entry”.
“I know,” she replied, “you look innocent enough”.
“I just wanted to borrow a bowl of sugar,” I had even brought the bowl, and as if to prove the point I brandished it at the appropriate moment in the sentence.
“Oh,” she said in that disappointed way that some people are terribly practiced at. It was as though, all of a sudden, I was the thirtieth person that day who had ambled past wanting sugar, when moments before she had genuinely thought it all a ruse.
“Do you have a picture of your wife on you?” she asked naturally.
Naturally, as an unmarried gentleman I did not, and I said so, “Sorry I don’t”.
“Who, may I ask bought you that china if not your wife?”
“Oh it was my mother, years ago, she’s dead now of course”.
“Oh a mothers boy, looking for a replacement”.

And with that she grabbed hold of my bowl and said, “well lets see where this take us”.

* negligently as it was pretty cold that morning.

instead of being a short story is a video – it’s my first upload to YouTube and I made it for my Formula One blog. But I think you can enjoy it even if you don’t know anything about Formula One:

Last time we left Simon he was about to poison all of the cheese on the moon. If you need to refresh your memory then please check out: Moon Miners.

Simon had announced at a large meeting of all of the leading mice that to save the moon they needed to re-establish the aristocracy. That the mice he had brought to this meeting deserved to be treated better than all of the other mice (to this he had great applause they all thought so too). But how would they be able to show to the other mice that they were better than them (at this he got muted grumbling about it had been his idea in the first place to tell everyone about the cheese)? He told them that he had finally decided to tell them the last secret the prince had told him before he died it was a secret so amazing that it would mean a way to re-establish the aristocracy. There was a way, he told them, to get to the centre of the moon and that when they got there they would have access to the most fantastic fresh cheese in the world, the cheese that they would find there would make normal moon cheese seem flat and tasteless and that with help from all of them they could have exclusive access to this cheese.

They agreed so rapidly that Simon thought it might even be a trap, but it wasn’t. These powerful mice had been feeling so silly of late that they had been no better than a common mouse that they were ready to do anything to be able to prove they were better. They were completely desperate to re-establish their superiority.

So off they set and started digging, it was tough work, and these mice had never really done a days work in their lives so keeping them motivated was hard at first. But after a short while the cheese taste had improved so dramatically that the greedy mice were rushing to try and get back to the front of the digging party.

Simon bided his time, he knew that once they reached the fondue centre of the moon then he would be ready, but until that time he would simply have to keep up the pretence.

Then finally, the big day came with a squeal of delight one of the mice had struck liquid cheese and it had oozed out all over his whiskers. They all kept digging around as Simon instructed until there was a wide opening, and Simon called out, “Bring the carrying barrels”. They brought down the barrels of poison from the surface which Simon had told them were barrels for transporting the cheese up (he told them that they were reinforced to deal with the heat which is why they were so heavy). As they were set down on to a specially constructed platform which Simon had built himself he turned to the other mice around him and said, “You are my brothers, all of you but you are not friends of me or the moon”. This place that was once so good has been destroyed by us all, and now one act of vandalism by me must restore the balance. And with this, before they could do anything about it, he pulled a special rope and all of the barrels went rolling straight into the centre of the moon. Each one melting in the sheer heat of the centre and realising its deadly poison.

“I have poisoned the cheese, and although the cheese grows slowly the poison will not, within two days all of the moon will be poisoned, and within hours it will be too risky to take a bite. You must all go back to your old ways of eating grain and working for a living. There is nothing you can do now to stop it, the moon will be saved and if you ask me why I did it I did it for our children.” And with that Simon jumped into the molten cheese and instantly died.