Short Stuff

Jimmy Belcher held the rodent up and looked him in the beady eye.  “Well, Homer, I reckon we’re going to make the cover of TIME magazine.”  The creature blinked. Is there, Jimmy pondered, a parallel universe in which rats use humans for experiments?  He’d actually become quite fond of the little creatures. Some of them,…

Tucked away down a side alley in a sleepy rural town nearby is a small hardware emporium of the old-fashioned kind.  Stock is displayed apparently randomly from floor to ceiling, with garden implements, tools, pots and pans and all manner of domestic paraphernalia jostling for space on the ancient wooden shelves.  If you are British…

A few months ago on a bright, sunny but chilly Sunday morning, we had a visitor. Outside the glass patio doors that lead from our dining kitchen to the garden, there is a small area of wooden decking.  And on that morning on the decking, we had a visitor, a wild dog fox. It seems that in…

In 1937, master tailor Isaac Bartelewski left his home in the Sudetenland and settled with his wife and son in London, where he soon established a reputation as the best bespoke tailor in the Mile End Road. Isaac worked long hours but every morning he took a tea break in Jacko’s tearoom.  In those days…

This is a true story.   The incident occurred quite recently, in France where I live.  Let me share with you the experience I had immediately following an operation.  It was the first of two which I needed to rid me of something nasty inside me.  The surgeon used an endoscope, the tube thingy with some…