Hugo Williams

I was waiting outside my local 24hr Photoprint Services, all unsuspecting of the fate shuffling towards me on the mini-lab auto-printer. I was flicking through the usual haul of barely recognisable ‘Memories in Colour’,

when I found myself face to face with something altogether nearer the truth and a wave of inexpressible sadness, or gladness, swept over me. I realised too late I...

A last visit to the long-abandoned ‘Gosses’ on Harold Macmillan’s Birch Grove estate, soon to be levelled as part of the Birch Grove Golf Course.

I apologise to the driver for the branches closing in, almost bringing us to a standstill. He doesn’t seem to mind. ‘I’m like you,’ he tells me, as we move aside a tree blown across the drive by the storm.

...

Remember porters? Weatherbeaten old boys with watery blue eyes who were never around when you wanted them? You had to find one before you could go anywhere in 1953. It was part of saying goodbye. ‘Quick, darling, run and find a porter, while I get your ticket. I’ll meet you at the barrier ...’

I run off across the station forecourt in a series of sudden...

Everyone screwing up their eyes as if they can’t quite make us out – Jim with his hair fully restored, Johnny with the Simoniz duster, polishing the Jowett Javelin to extinction as long ago as 1951.

There’s no such person as Anne, but Gar is still there, looking quite like her old self again, and Mr Burns, none the worse for New Zealand,...

Jim: No perfumes, nurse. These oils drown my head with their clamour of marriages and mourning, their oozy lava nibbled at by flies. My hair is no bunch of flowers stuck in a vase, exuding forgetfulness. It laps my body in hot smells, as if some animal breathed on me. I lie here stiff with horror at its caresses, while lions watch the listless wreckage of my innocence drop down through my...