Archive for February 2020

One of the most dangerous things about driving in a Canadian winter isn’t the black ice (although that is dangerous) or the freezing rain (although that is dangerous too), it’s running out of windshield wiper fluid. In the right conditions, the salt that gets sprayed on the road becomes a mist, which crusts the glass…

I’d been married only two years – and then I was in a room with the dead uncle. Well, the uncle-in-law. It was the first time I’d seen a dead person. In my community back in England, the dead are hidden, put in a box and then slid away behind a curtain. They are barely…

The best night of the year was when Father Christmas came to my street. Never has a truck looked so magical, transformed by lights and music into CHRISTMAS – and all the excitement that meant to a little boy in his pajamas. I’d watch from the living room window and then open the front door…

Mr Redgrave was the headmaster of my first school. His face was crumpled, he smoked cigars, and his office had a scratchy carpet the colour of a kingfisher. A visit to this room and its fuggy air usually meant only one thing: you were in trouble. That was not a place I wanted to be.…

I never knew if I was being hazed or if this was how it was. At the end of the 90s, I did editing shifts on a big Sunday newspaper. I was a hamster in a cage 22 floors up London’s Canary Wharf tower, waiting for a pellet to drop down a chute. The pellet…

When the newspaper came out last week, I realized we’d left my name off an article. All those wonderful words written by Anon. This year, through a series of (un)fortunate circumstances, I find myself back in the newspaper world. These days I’m writing and editing and checking and selling … and melting ice outside the…

One day when I was about seven years old, our next-door neighbour put a boat on his front lawn. There it sat, marooned with – most critically – its propeller-end sticking out into our driveway. What was it doing there? I have no idea – except it caused much discussion around our kitchen table. (Mind…

I fear I was my violin teacher’s worst nightmare: a scratchy, screechy, stinky teenager who never picked up his instrument between Tuesdays. “Did you practice this week?” she would ask. “Yes,” I would say. But we both knew the truth. It’s not that I didn’t like the violin. Indeed, I was something of a classical…

One Christmas, when I was six years old, I had a massive – existential – argument with my parents. I was sobbing on a stool in the kitchen while the turkey was roasting and the Brussels sprouts boiling. I was tear-shooting upset at the injustice and indignity of a fight I deserved to win. From…

I first heard of Margaret Thatcher when I was in the Downing Primary School playground and someone referred to her as an “old bag.” I didn’t know who she was, but I worked out that it wasn’t good to be an “old bag,” which was worse than being a “new bag,” but probably not as…

When I was six, I wanted to be an elevator operator. There was excitement in buttons, sending cabled box to basement and roof. (I graduated to escalators, hitting the emergency stop in Debenhams, pushing shoppers into a Christmas Eve avalanche.) My teen years coincided with the “loadsamoney” 80s, when loud boys in wide jackets got…