"Oh, hello. You’re new."
"Yes, I thought it was time to, uh, try to. To take steps."
"Well, you’re in the right place, steps are what we take! But we’ll get to that. Have you got yourself a drink?"
Category Archives: Written
Stuff that I have actually written – stories, reviews, that sort of thing.
Away, To Me.
It’s National Poetry Day, for once it’s the actual day for this country so I’m not just using another nation’s day as an excuse. I wasn’t intending to write a poem, but this almost came out spontaneously as a response to an email, so I thought I’d better scrub it, put it here and reply more sensibly. I’m not saying this is the definitive guide to child-rearing, incidentally. Just a facet of how I see it.
Ritual Sacrifice
Drown me in this awful boredom
Stretch my skin across my desk
Let it dry to leather
Over rubbed-blank keyboard sweat
Games – a general post
A collection of my MostlyFilm articles on videogames.
A loose trilogy:
On sex (and sexism).
On difficulty – casual and hardcore settings.
On loyalty.
Separately, but carrying through a lot of the same sorts of thoughts, on GTA and Saints Row.
The Dragonborn returns, after about a year…
The Dragonborn returns to Skyrim, having been distracted by other worlds and challenges.
Continue reading The Dragonborn returns, after about a year…
A Night Walk
He’d been out across the Thames a couple of times, at night in his bare feet. Padding near-silently over the erratic wavelets, just to see if he could still do it. It came to him the second time that it might just be a dream; it was probably a dream, it was a dream when he was a child and he played out there, running under the bridges to hide, and wandering past the moored ships, touching their massive sides with his fingertips, wondering how they stayed afloat.
Cold War Diplomacy
It had been cold for as long as any of us could remember, but memory is short when you’re a child. Four months of bitter winter felt like four years; imprisoned in duffle coats and bobble hats, playgrounds icy, gloomy battlegrounds where we fought with the very concept of fun.
It was 1986 and we were ten. Well, Martin and I were ten – Peter and his twin sister Dawn were both nine, and the distinction was powerful. They would be ten in the summer, but the summer was a lifetime away. Dawn was, as these things go, taller than all of us already so we grudgingly let her play in our gang. That, and Peter’s Mum said we had to.
Light work
Snarling, savage
Scream and leap on your desk
Thrash blindly at the cord
To the mouse that keeps you
Tethered,
Bought, brought close,
A wild thing
Dolled in toil.
Continue reading Light work
On English-ish
This actually is because I read a Cracked article about why English makes no sense, and the comments berating it as ugly and broken, difficult and clumsy.
Silencer
A lost parade
Drifts
Down a silent street
As empty houses,
Eyes bulging with damp-fattened wood,
Drink its drying whistles.