everyday, everywhere
SMALL THINGS
Yesterday,
I found a pound coin
in a coat pocket.
Its scratched silver rim
caught the kitchen light
as I turned it between my fingers.
Not enough
to change my life.
Just enough
to make me feel
chosen.
I carried it all day,
its cool weight
against my palm,
a quiet talisman.
Strange.
How happiness arrives
in such a small disguise.
Like a dog dropping a damp tennis ball
at your feet,
mud flecking your shoes,
tail drumming the grass.
Like a stripe of amber sunlight
threading through a split fence board,
warming the splintered arm of a paint-peeled garden chair
left tilted beneath an overgrown rosebush.
Like a forgotten pound coin
wedged behind a torn seam,
nestled among lint and old bus-ticket fibres,
waiting
for the exact hand that would find it.
THE VERSION OF ME THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN
Somewhere,
there’s a version of me
who remembers passwords,
sleeps eight hours,
and drinks enough water.
She owns matching furniture.
Probably does yoga.
Answers texts
on time.
I think about her sometimes.
Not with jealousy.
With curiosity.
Like glimpsing a woman
through the steamed window of the last carriage,
her face layered with the orange blink of platform displays,
a cardboard coffee cup balanced against a notebook
as the train slides past graffiti-dark retaining walls.
Wondering if she ever thinks
about me.
DRAFTS
I wrote conversations
you never heard.
Most unfolded
while loading the dishwasher,
plates clinking
in warm, slippery hands.
A few surfaced
in supermarket queues,
beneath fluorescent lights
and the sharp beep of scanners.
One stretched across three junctions
on the A52,
tyres whispering over wet tarmac.
In those versions,
I was articulate.
Calm.
Brilliant, even.
You apologised.
I forgave you.
Everyone learned something.
Instead,
I bought bread,
forgot what I needed,
and drove home,
the yeasty scent of a still-warm loaf
fogging the car with the comfort of a bakery at dusk.
The dishwasher still waited.
Life rarely follows
the better script.
CHARACTER BUILDING
Every few weeks,
my brain returns
to Year Nine.
A school assembly.
A packed hall,
rows of plastic chairs
creaking beneath restless bodies.
And me,
calling the headteacher
“Dad.”
Confidently.
Through a microphone.
The silence that followed
was so complete
I could hear
the heating pipes
ticking and knocking behind the walls
like loose scaffolding shifting in a winter wind.
Twenty years later,
I still lose arguments
to that memory.
Character building,
they call it.
I think humiliation
deserves the title.
STILL THERE
The park seems smaller now.
The swings hang lower,
their chains rattling faintly.
The hill less impressive.
Even the trees
look surprised,
branches reaching over cracked paths
I barely recognise.
I walked through recently
and everything had changed.
New benches.
New paths.
Fresh paint in the air,
catching at the back of my throat.
Yet somehow,
I still knew exactly
where I’d hidden
a Mars Bar wrapper
in 1999.
That’s the strange thing
about places.
They keep versions of us
we’ve misplaced.
Like the pale silhouette left on wallpaper
after a glow-in-the-dark solar system is peeled away,
dust gathered at the edges,
tiny pinholes from drawing pins still visible,
holding the shape
of what once mattered,
waiting
for us to return.
TINY TRIANGLES
Nobody taught me.
At least, I don’t remember a lesson.
Yet every crisp packet ends the same way:
folded once, then again,
then shaped into a neat little triangle.
A piece of geometry after lunch.
I caught myself doing it at thirty-five
and suddenly saw my grandad’s hands.
Not his face.
Not his voice.
Just his hands.
Funny what survives.
Not the important things.
Just the tang of vinegar and seasoning,
habit pressed into muscle,
crisp packet triangles,
patterns carried through generations,
still waiting in my hands.
And once that scent arrives,
the folds begin to ease apart,
and the past opens with them.
Some memories don’t announce themselves
with dates or stories.
They arrive through the senses first,
quietly unlocking what was tucked away
until a single smell
can place a vanished hand beside your own.
SALT & VINEGAR
Some recollections arrive
folded inside a smell.
The smell arrives before remembrance,
before thought,
before I know what’s happening.
Salt and vinegar.
A gust of sea air.
And suddenly I’m twelve,
carrying chips across a promenade
while gulls patrol overhead
like organised criminals.
My fingers are greasy.
My mum is shouting something,
and the wind steals half of it.
I don’t care.
Summer stretches ahead,
still creased from being folded away,
waiting to be opened.
Time hasn’t learnt to hurry yet.
Nobody has mentioned mortgages,
hospital appointments,
or grief.
Just chips and sea,
the smell on my hands,
a voice carried off by the wind,
and enough sunlight
to believe everything lasts.
Of course, it doesn’t.
But the mind keeps
a few crystals of seasoning,
storing them away,
tucking afternoons into the folds.
The years change shape,
but somehow the keeping remains.
And perhaps that’s where
our sense of permanence begins:
not in what actually lasts,
but in what memory preserves,
holding one bright afternoon
against the darkening tide.