Stories aren’t emotions, aren’t ideas, aren’t people and places: stories are just a series of words on a page, placed in a certain order, separated by various grammatical signposts we call punctuation. Less than that, they are a jumble of twenty-six different abstract shapes we call letters, jammed together into discrete bundles. It’s amazing therefore how certain words in a particular order can elicit a strong emotional respons, how a good story becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. Tom’s Midnight Garden is a good story. I supposed it must have been since I remembered significant portions of it from a single reading in my childhood, but these were only fragmentary and vague, and it was not until I finished it for the second time last night, maybe a decade after my first reading, that I realised how good it is, how nearly perfect even, it is.

Superficially, Tom’s Midnight Garden is a story about a boy, Tom, who is forced by his brother’s outbreak of measles at the start of the summer holiday, to stay with his aunt and uncle in their small city flat. Philippa Pearce wrote the book in 1958, and it is set around about then though, like all the best books, it is timeless. The only reason a reader would know the book was set in the late fifties / early sixties rather than at any other time, if they did not know when it was written, is from certain events near its end, and from Tom in the second line on the first page being said to have “looked his good-bye at the garden, and raged that he had to leave it.” Obviously this is a time when children were more inclined to play outside, to ‘make their own fun’; a time before videogames, or even widespread television, when being shut up inside a small flat for hours on end was torture rather than a preference.

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Jack suffocates

She had a commitment to magic, Tim thought, as he watched Gemma brush her hair; a commitment to glitter and sparkle, to pretty clothes, and looking pretty, and to the manufacture of pretty pictures. In his own way, he too was committed to fantasy and fabrication. They had little else in common, but that suited them. “We’re not going to be boyfriend and girlfriend, you know,” she had said several weeks before. “I know,” he replied. “I haven’t got time for a boyfriend; it just complicates things.” Instead they had sex, animal and meaningless, regularly, at weekends usually.

It was Saturday morning. Her hair had recently been the colour of candy floss, and before that, shocking pink, but had since faded to the bleached milky hue of evening clouds. Several strands of it clung to the brush. She turned.

“Are you still here?”

It was a joke.

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I suppose this is a sequel to my October post.

I got back from Nottingham today, after chilling out and eating my family’s food for a few days. Been cooking with pumpkins a lot lately: Me and my friend Chloe made two pumpkin pies on Saturday, though weren’t sure if we’d done it right or not, since neither of us had ever tasted pumpkin pie before. They were pretty good though, in my opinion.

Today, I used another quarter of the big pumpkin we used for the pie to make soup. Again, I’ve never made soup before, and didn’t have any recipe, so I thought it worked surprisingly well with my combination of onion, pumpkin, and mooli. I’d post pictures if I’d taken any.

I guess that’s not really a lot, nor is it that interesting, but I am becoming a fan of pumpkins.
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As usual I’m getting sloppy with updates again, but then, since my second-to-last post (my last one being something of a cop-out anyway), I’ve started uni again, and apparently this year they actually expect us to do work. A little at least. It’s not too bad: I’m doing a 50% dissertation, which means that 50% of my final degree comes for a 10,000 word essay I have until April to complete, and the other half comes from an 8,000 word prose project, of which I’ve already written the first 4,000 words of the first draft (more on that in a minute).

I’d be lying if I said I’d been devoting myself entirely to uni work and that’s the reason I haven’t updated, at least partially. Other primary influences are, to a small extent my job, which remains amazing, because a) there’s very few customers, and, unless they ask for wine recommendations, are generally low maintenance and b) I work with some pretty cool people who I have both opportunity and inclination to converse with at length.

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“Michelle!” Jonathan said, recognising her immediately as she stood on his doorstep, the ten years separating this from their last meeting having left her face virtually untouched, save for the delicate lines flowering at the corners of her eyes, the tan darkening her skin, and the intangible shroud of maturity a decade’s experience had draped about her.

“I can’t stay long, I’m afraid, but I couldn’t leave again without calling in to see you. It’s not a bad time, is it?”

Jonathan said it was not, invited her in, asked her how she was, if he could get her a drink, apologised for being in his pyjamas and dressing gown. He felt again nervous and excited in her presence, as if those feelings had been lying dormant all these years. He had thought never to see her again. He made tea, led her through to the living room where his daughter sat playing with wooden blocks.

“Hi there,” Michelle said kneeling in front of the child, “what’s your name?”

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