The phone rang in the hall, but it wasn’t for him. It never was now, Graham thought, and froze momentarily, holding his hand over the receiver. He felt a tremor of disquiet run over him as the thought of a blank future intruded itself. Then he quickly pushed the thought away,

I was sitting on a bench by the pond in the park with a sandwich, feeling like an old man with time to kill and no better way to do it. It was a good place to come to if you needed to get out of the office for half an hour, needing fresh air and some sanity.

London

Forget Alaska. North Korea Might Soon Be Able to Nuke New York.

Kim Jon Ung was in a good temper. He’d just a very large and delicious lunch of freshly caught lobster and crayfish, with French fries and malty beer, after a busy morning

THE CHIEF FOREST RANGER was an exhausted woman. Her deeply lined face was streaked with black ash, and she mopped her streaming forehead with a blackened handkerchief.

“Hi, Audrey. I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said quietly, putting a hand on Audrey’s arm. “You

Well, there was Jean off Fancy Goods. She was little more than a schoolgirl really, sweet and naive, but I was 19 and very grown up. We'd been to the Gaumont together to see Breakfast at Tiffanys, and I told her she looked a bit like Audrey

Fancy coming for a beer?

Not for me, I’ve got to run

Come and have a swift one here!

Oh, all right, but just the one.

Thank you – could I have a half?

You know Matt and Loz and Suzie?

We’re all having a

He’d very nearly thrown it away along the rest of the junk in his letterbox. An offer to paint his house exterior for half price? Not much use when you lived in a third floor flatlet in a shared apartment block. A cruise brochure from a travel company he and Dorothy

Now I find that being old is no worse than I feared
I might live in a country that’s kinder
I’ll wear baggy pink shorts and I’ll grow a white beard
And, just sometimes, go out on a blinder

And when I occasionally still have to fly
I

I must get up for a pee again; it’s the second time tonight
The loo is down the corridor, and I daren’t put on the light.
And the floor’s cold and the pipes sing and the washbasin is shaking
There’s a wet pool on the loo floor, and my patience close to

Somewhere in the sun baked land of Provence, between the obstinately snow- capped Alps and the sparkling blue Mediterranean, stands a large rocky outcrop three kilometres inland from the busy coast.

The hill which juts out so starkly from the alluvial plain

“Well, that seemed to go all right,” said the young curate to the vicar, easing off his clerical garment into something more comfortable, and checking his long hair in the vestry mirror.

The vicar nodded. He was a florid faced older man, reaching behind himself