The First Word Blog

I had a lot on my mind and when that happens I know that I won’t get anything written. The only cure I know is to go out and bring some paper and my trusty fountain pen and find somewhere different to write. On this occasion I took a bus into Newcastle and after walking around a bit found a cafe and purchased a BLT and a Mocha. (more…)

He lay in bed reading a book but found he couldn’t concentrate. The bath was taking a long time to fill and she was humming tuneless to herself as she was taking a pee. After what seemed an age the toilet finally flushed and moments later he heard her lowering herself inch by inch into the bath making tantalisingly suggestive noises. The water must be as hot as she could bear it and he imagined her face flushed and pink.  He found himself fantasising about her outrageously and he felt a little guilty about it.

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It was November 1994. Sitting at the junction I listened to the gentle purr of the VW Golf’s engine and I felt a deep sense of calm. Traffic was light and the next car that passed was also a VW the same colour as mine. Something registered in another part of my brain about this car. I noticed the driver first and as I looked at him we recognised each other and then I saw you. It is an image etched in my mind as you were wearing that long black coat that your father had given you. You had complained it smelled of mothballs. Had your father bought it for your mother? You looked pale your expression fixed as if you were in pain. I could not tell if you had seen me or not. (more…)

I am looking into your eyes and I see the eyes I looked into so long ago (more…)

A first for the site as a link to an article about Okinawan Glassware appears in the New York Times.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/the-tea-bag-basks-in-its-moment-to-simmer/index.html?hp

I am searching for the source of the feeling you gave me and moved me to tears. The individual notes can be notated and are there for anyone to read in black and white. Your timing can be timed and found to be either slow or fast. The pattern of your voice can be mapped and analysed from every angle for pitch, volume, cadence, and other innumerable qualities but there is nowhere in the melody that gives me the answer. Can colours be expressed by numbers or the subtleties of thought by a machine or the power the music has to stir feelings by a mere theory. (more…)

I was met as I came in the door by a woman with a name badge who remembered my name.  She took my card and I sat down and waited for my name to be called.  I looked around there was a woman in her early twenties staring at the wall with her hand inside her shirt absent mindedly adjusting her bra strap oblivious to the hormone charged  youths oggling her casually exposed cleavage.    (more…)

The water was as hot as he could bear it to be and he deliberately tilted his head from side to side to fill his ears with water and lay quite still with his head immersed.  He had missed baths and this is what he liked to do in them.  He closed his eyes and relaxed in the darkness letting it wash over him in waves.  The thought comforted and caressed him. 

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It was a new start.  He must have walked past that boarded up house a hundred times and not noticed it.  The front garden had a high wall with a substantial iron gate and the bushes must have been ten foot high with only a small gap between them through which to glimpse the front door. (more…)

 Will Sutton was a second year philosophy student who knew he was in a considerable amount of debt.  He woke up in the mornings and worried how he was going to eat, as he ate his meagre breakfast of cornflakes with barely a splash of milk.  He worried in the shower how he was going to pay the rent until the end of term.  His parents were coming to visit him today and he would probably have to explain to them why, despite the fact he had a part time job, that he constantly asked them to send him money.  His parents, though not poor, were not wealthy people and already gave their son a sizeable allowance each month that should have been more than enough for him to live on.  It was therefore a puzzle to them why he constantly pleaded poverty and begged them for more.  They had decided to visit him, determined to try to get to the bottom of the matter, and fairly firm in their resolve that enough was enough.

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It was a cold wet morning and the rain drummed mercilessly on the little skylight in her office letting in a small dribble of natural daylight.  She was one of the lucky ones as the other archivists had desks between the endless shelves stacked with university records under fluorescent tubes.  Flooding was a constant worry here in the basement when it rained.  She was the veteran of two floods one of which had reached her door the result of a leaky roof.  She used to tell people that she kept an aqualung in the bottom of her filing cabinet and few realised that in fact this was true and not a joke at all.

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Chapter One

One postcard then another

I first encountered the Cinema Sartre about two weeks after my partner disappeared.  When I say disappeared I mean that we had breakfast together as usual before I left for work and that was the last time I ever saw her, but I know that I had killed her.   (more…)

The spider had bitten her on her right gluteus maximus.  The initial bite had left two small red puncture wounds that soon turned angry red.  Shortly after being bitten the toxic enzymes, and in particular hemotoxins, in the injected venom began to spread destroying the lining of the smaller blood vessels and allowing blood to seep into the soft tissues  surrounding the bite, producing local haemorrhaging, the area became black in stark contrast to the creamy whiteness of her skin becoming sensitive and tender to the touch.  He gently probed her bruised skin softly with his finger tips as she stood naked and vulnerable trembling slightly as she allowed him to perpetrate this intimate act upon her body.  (more…)

 We were playing that game though I don’t think either of us made a conscious decision to start it.  You just said ‘look at that hamster shaped cloud’ and I said ‘it looks more like a raccoon’ and you said I had no idea what a raccoon looked like and I said ‘probably not like a hamster’ and so on.  And you then said ‘hey there’s a hole in the clouds just like a heart’ and I snapped it on my mobile.  I’m sure you’ve played this kind of game many times.  We sat for a while quitely watching the ever changing cloudscape move across the sky.  Suddenly I said ‘look there’s a dragon’, and there it was the most perfect cloud dragon you could ever imagine stretched out across the sky as far as you could see.  It reached out its claws to grasp at the sun and then in a few seconds it lost its form completely but for a second or two it was the perfect dragon.  (more…)

For the love of Debbie

There was a moment in my life when I felt lost and at that precise moment I found Debbie and something clicked.  We were both in the 6^th form at school but she was a year older.  She was pretty, cool, intelligent, so I was more than happy she wanted to hang out with me.  She didn’t care what anyone thought so hanging out with me wasn’t a problem even though I was a year younger.  She lived for the moment and seemed to understand me and accept me.  We liked the same music and she had a part time job working as a cloakroom assistant in a nightclub which seemed so interesting to me at the time.  We did crazy things like playing guitar in the school corridor and bunked off together to go to the park to smoke and talk about anything.  I wrote poems about her, but never told her they were about her, and even composed songs inspired by her.  I wrote long love letters trying to explain how I felt about her but never sent them.  She was the cause of more than a few restless nights. (more…)