Category: My Stories

Some of these have been published in vlogs before and some have been in competitions. Some have even been placed. They are here to make my collection complete, as well as encourage me to do more ones which I haven’t even thought of yet, as well as get out the ones I’m often turning over in my mind.

Otherwise Engaged (Short story by me for Daily Telegraph Creative Writing Competition in 2008)

The "confusion of tongues" by Gustav...
Old Peleg, preaching

 The Lonely Terrorist sat on a riverside bench in a suburb of New York where he had been commanded to undertake the Engagement, nursing the ancient flask containing the next step for human history, which God had given him.

Dr Samuel Otherwise was near the end of a distinguished career in the sort of science journalists don’t get to tell the half of and most they write is wrong.

Samuel had long since given up expecting anyone else to have any understanding of his work such of it that wasn’t classified anyway – or his wider ideas and beliefs. At best anyone would take it as a joke, but having totally alienated his university friends, he became overwhelmed by ennui early in life as to explaining the Plan of God with rational arguments; everyone’s false premises were so deeply engrained he could do nothing. He could not enable them to see things as God sees them, so insistent were they in seeing things as men do, applying human value judgements to everything, even the brightest and best could not place themselves outside the space-time continuum and perceive the mind of God. Continue reading “Otherwise Engaged (Short story by me for Daily Telegraph Creative Writing Competition in 2008)” →

A Mediterranean Morning of Misunderstanding (short story in the style of P.G.Wodehouse)

This was another of my entries to the Daily Telegraph Short Story Competition that made it to the Top Six, but didn’t win – I never did. It seems to have been removed maybe on suspicions that P.G. Wodehouse‘s estate might have something to say about me borrowing his characters and putting them to work again 80 years later. But I expect that it will be safe in a readership as small as this blog now is to share it with you, and I’ve been saving it up a bit. As ever there was a limit to the number of words and certain words like Diplodocus and Ginger Beer Plant had to be used in it – there were about five of these words that had to feature somewhere, I can’t remember them all now and My.Telegraph has been through too much of a transformation for me to be able to access that one now. Here goes, enjoy…

I awoke from dreams of performing “Burlington Bertie from Bow” to a packed music hall populated entirely by an audience of Bow Street magistrates of the Sir Watkyn Bassett ilk and kidney – you know, the sort that would fain and gladly hand yours truly down a short sharp sentence of fourteen days inside of one of Her Majesty’s decreed stately pleasure domes, as the fellow said, without the option, to the voice of what at first seemed to be a distant harpy eagle shrieking after its hapless prey, “Bertie! Bertie! Wake up, you cowperian sluggard! It’s already half past ten, you lazy, glassy-eyed nephew of mine, come and get your breakfast before it all goes cold!” Continue reading “A Mediterranean Morning of Misunderstanding (short story in the style of P.G.Wodehouse)” →

My Daily Telegraph Christmas 2007 Creative Writing Competition Entry

This item was first published in the website of the Daily Telegraph – as I have a space in its blog section. In fact, it’s still there. They are also still doing the creative writing competition which I entered a few times and ended up in the top six out of twenty or thirty entrants about half the times I did it. Including this one, the first one I ever did, back in Christmas 2007, which appealed to the judges although intentionally written in broken English. It addresses the cross-European culture that was emerging in some British firms that had been employing many Polish migrant workers. This is less topical today now that half of them have gone back to Poland and the remainder are more assimilated into British ways by now, but at the time the piece seemed quite topical and people liked it. Continue reading “My Daily Telegraph Christmas 2007 Creative Writing Competition Entry” →