Postcards from Kronk - the second collection of daily stories. (2025)

The empty bottle of MD 20/20 and an abandoned pogo stick at the edge of Beachy Head seemed too obvious to Inspector Montague. He examined the stick, the rubber bottom of it appeared to be in pristine condition, without a scuff or a scrape, that together with fact that the helpful car park attendant who'd discovered the body looked mysteriously like a fairly well known television actor was enough to raise doubts.

It took Annie eighteen minutes to reach the hospital but she didn’t remember a single one. Upon arriving she’d been quickly taken to a small side room and given a hot drink. No one had thought to ask if she was thirsty but she was grateful for the small show of kindness however unnecessary. The man looked asleep. His hand felt too cold to be alive although the monitor and nurses told her otherwise. It wouldn’t be long though; there was no chance of recovery. For a little over an hour she held onto him so that he wouldn’t be alone. Outside as the world began to wake up, indistinct traffic sounds growing louder, the gaps between the blinds brighter, the man stopped breathing. She held his hand for a few minutes longer and then folded it across his chest and pressed the button to summon the nurse. He was the first dead person she had seen and I had shocked her, how easily it happens. To slip from life into death seemed no more than stumbling on a kerb.

About a week after college finished I decided to visit Alison in Leeds, I called her up and we made arrangements for me to visit the following weekend. This was to be my first journey north of Peterborough, where my cousins lived and where I was dragged to every other Christmas.  So a week later I found myself stepping down from an intercity train nervous but excited.  A taxi pulled up outside the train station and wound its window down, I read out Alisons address and the man inside nodded and unlocked the back door. As we made our way through the city I watched the road signs become progressively more ominous, Sheepscar, Mean Wood, The North was all I'd been told it would be. After half an hour and less money than I'd feared we arrived at Alisons house, she met me at the door and introduced me to her family, her mum, dad and younger brother, Rory. I shook hands with her parents and nodded towards the brother.  " How d' you find us then Howard ? " Her fathe...

Oliver held aloft the pigtails, next to him Steven carried the diary whilst Dominic clasped his hands tightly together in front of him, like he'd caught a grasshopper or butterfly. " What's that you got ? " Dominic raises his finger to his lips and smiles. " Ok, put them in the box and leave ", Isaac dismisses them, I leave shortly after without staying to inspect the haul, I want their souls, or a finger or something big, something worth clasping tight, Dominic may be the youngest but as the only one not in full time employment, he could make more of an effort. My money's on more finger nails.

In the summer of 2009 you couldn't open a paper in Glasgow without reading of the argument between Bernard 'Banjo' Bolland and Tommy West. Blowup Banjo and WST1, the two greatest Scottish musicologists, the poster boys of  B Boy science in the early eighties. They argued in public, on twitter, on the television, radio, web chats and phone in's. It'd started when West was named as a supporter of the campaign to ban loud music in shops that sell tartan and Banjo, when asked for a comment called the campaign retrogressive and parochial. They traded insults and arguments for weeks, each larger and more ridiculous than the previous,West claimed tartan was organic and took on the form of the environment it was subjected to, so loud music would shorten and weaken the fibres, Banjo countered by saying if anything rock music would strengthen the fabric and if West really thought loud music was dangerous then maybe he shouldn't have spent the summer in NYC in 1979....

Sporting a black eye and an arrangement of plasters suspiciously shaped like a swastika on his forehead William Norris stood before the assembled media in the travel lodge coffee garden, today was the day he'd draw a line under the recent scandals and turn his campaign around. This time next month he will be president.

Yesterday the galleries became our battlefields - self harming crowds at the expressionist print makers, sit ins at the fluxus installation and spontaneous stop the war demonstrations at the Paul Nash retrospective. Whilst I was visiting the Sol le Witt show and ended up with an urge to colour in a sheet of graph paper very neatly, my children, unfortunately, were seeing the new Chapman Brothers exhibition and consequently got arrested. Next time humanity is touched by artists I hope the Daily Mail serialize Fahrenheit 451 and we burn down their offices.