First Proving A puffball lump of dough kneaded warm like flesh swells in the bowl, drugs our lungs with yeast, pops little bubbles to keep us hooked promises a feast of crust parcelling a whiteness that fluffs against our tongues, then trails a...

      Blue We roll up our trousers and wade into the city river, down a sloping bank of cool mud which soothes our cracked feet, the water now up to our waists, now over our heads, down into a valley of silt like the hull of a giant wrecked boat...

      Nativity Play Wattle Park Primary School, 1969 I’m a koala in the play. I get to hide inside the papier mâché koala head Mum made. My ears are cotton wool. In here, it’s hot and smells of glue and newsprint. Eyes peek through two holes, the rest...

      To the Occupier I have been leaving ghosts in every house for six years, which makes six houses – seven if you count my temporary tenancy in your affection. Nine houses if you count the ones I lived in where I had no right to do so. Arguably...

      Fullwoods End (Roseville, West Midlands) Subversion of a name: you may be led to picture foxglove strand and windmill sail. The proper truth’s one more ‘Dunroamin’ vale where, way ahead of snow, the trees play dead. A no-place, linking Bilston’s...

      The Remote Controlled Car A prized possession of a toy-starved childhood: one of the first remote controlled cars, chrome still gleaming, Dan Dare curves, tucked up in time-capsule coffin from the 1950's. It appeared by accident, landing from...

      Leaf On the new-mown playing field, summer-yellowed and ragged, but glistening in the autumn morning, a horse-dung gobbet amid the straw slithered grassily into his glance which focused uncertainties of glancing smoky as rainfall and caught in the...

      One for sorrow St Valentine’s Day and now it is we who are falling one by one all around in spring sunshine is the glitter of a magpie’s eye he fixes me from his perch on the half-wrecked shed auguring this week’s sorrow fresh in black and white...

      The Non-Banjo Player If I had a father who was a virtuoso on the banjo, I’d be playing bluegrass now. But he died before he had a chance to teach me anything. So, instead, I learned from this dark hole in my life. Wrote poetry. Plunkety plunk...