He had pulled thousands of pints waiting for it to happen, each topped off with an upward glance.  The screws parted from their threads by its summer undulations, the ceiling fan had finally worked itself loose.  Down it came, slicing off the head of the captain of the darts team.

The school bully drove a two-inch nail through his finger.  He laughed as he held aloft the injured digit, with which the nail had formed a perfect right angle.  Later that term he lifted me off the floor by the neck.  I hammered his nuts with my knee and ran.

Who’s the god of beer? Prisoner asks.  Not Bacchus – he’s the god of wine, says Telegram.  Would it be Ceres?  Push remembers an asteroid of that name.  Fatboy wagers that there are pools of ale on its dark side.  Telegram says that we should check it out.  So we did.

Like you, the cameraman is trying not to disrupt the flow of life.  He frames a picture, pans away, closes in again.  He finds and tracks you.  His art is in his patience, his freezing fingers. Though you seek to avoid his lens, deflect his focus, he’ll never lose you.

At the Whittington, waiting for an ECG.  Two collections of ghost stories are the only available reading matter for all those fluttering hearts.  I have Bleak House with me, but my attention wanders.  I try to think I am nothing, and for a moment, I succeed: I cease to exist.

The silver car flips off the road, landing upside down on the pavement.  By the time I reach the scene, a crowd has gathered.  The driver’s seat is empty.  Of the surrounding people, none look like they own a Porsche; no-one wears the face of someone who has cheated death.

Neither drove, and the house was never left unoccupied.  July was wet.  To bring their hoods together and simply kiss was soon frustrating.  The church was off-road, surrounded by wheat fields.  There they first made love, on the vestry’s Persian rug, watched over by a stone angel with broken wings.

I don’t remember looking at people on tube trains when I was a child. Instead my eyes followed the cabling in the tunnel alongside, which was sometimes purple, sometimes brown, but more often thick with dirt. Now I surreptitiously search every face for something I myself am unwilling to display.

I met with a fox.  We stared each other out as the yellow moon rose over the one-time domain of the Surrey Union Hunt.  Bored, the fox blinked first, then turned and pattered away.  It obviously thought me a ridiculous, domesticated animal.  I went home and put the rubbish out.