ankylosing meaning bond or join, and spondylitis meaning of the bone or spine. That half explains the cracks and clicks, the clockwork of my joints and discs, the ratchet of my hips. I’m fossilising – every time I rest I let the gristle knit, weave, mesh. My dear, my skeleton will set like biscuit overnight, like glass, like ice, and you can...Learn More

Heard the one about the guy from Heaton Mersey? Wife at home, lover in Hyde, mistress in Newton-le-Willows and two pretty girls in the top grade at Werneth prep. Well, he was late and he had a good car so he snubbed the police warning-light and tried to finesse the last six miles of moorland blizzard, and the story goes he was stuck within...Learn More

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀put dogs on the list of difficult things to lose. Those dogs ditched on the North York Moors or the Sussex Downs or hurled like bags of sand from rented cars have followed their noses to market towns and bounced like balls into their owners' arms. I heard one story of a dog that swam to the English coast from the Isle of Man, and...Learn More

The weather in the window this morning is snow, unseasonal singular flakes, a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up for a whole generation – that crew whose survival was always the stuff of minor miracle, who came ashore in orange-crate coracles, fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at...Learn More

‘Which of these films was Dirk Bogarde not in? One hundredweight of bauxite makes how much aluminium? How many tales in The Decameron?’ General Studies, the upper sixth, a doddle, a cinch for anyone with an ounce of common sense or a calculator with a memory feature. Having galloped through but not caring enough to check or double-check, I was...Learn More

Forget the long, smouldering afternoon. It is this moment when the ball scoots off the edge of the bat; upwards, backwards, falling seemingly beyond him yet he reaches and picks it out of its loop like an apple from a branch, the first of the season....Learn More

Above the tree line and below the fog I watched two men on the opposite slope hauling wooden poles and slabs of dressed stone from the foot of the hill towards the top. They didn’t stall – just lifted, carried, dropped. I watched for an hour or thereabouts, way off, but close enough in a straight line to bundle them over with a big shout. Away...Learn More

They set about him with a knife and fork, I heard, and spooned it out. Dunlop, dimpled, perfectly hard. It bounced on stone but not on softer ground – they made a note of that. They slit the skin – a leathery, rubbery, eyelid thing – and further in, three miles of gut or string, elastic. Inside that, a pouch or sac of pearl-white balm or gloss,...Learn More