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

For the last twenty miles we walked far quicker but also in near silence, the air a stench of bad feeling. Grays revelation that the trailer we'd been hauling up the mountain was just sludge hadn't gone down well at all. We're at the end of our endurance, feet blistered, lips chapped, muscles ready to fall away from our bones and all trying our best to keep going despite the weather; the cold, the damp and despite the fact that for four days we'd been dragging a trailer of sludge for no apparent reason other than to ' make it more of a challenge'. If this were an old Hammer film the final scene would see Gray sinking into the biscuit coloured sludge, big red letters spelling out The End seconds after his grasping hand disappears forever.  We left the trailer back there, abandoned it once he told us the truth. If I close my eyes I can hear the soundtrack to this film, it's being played on an eighties synth, probably...

She cooked me pork and mustard and I knew, as she was from Irish stock, my granddad would love her. Relationships have been built on firmer footings but it worked for a while, we went to the coast and I bought her hats, she liked to hold hands and then one day I told her I wanted to try dahl and couscous. She moved to Bolton. Heed Me.

We need to become our enemy and we have a plan to do so. But first the rationale for you all . If we imagine the history of warfare drawn as a proximity arc; in ancient times man needed to get up close and personal to fight , the distance between opposing sides minimal. Then arrows and spears made more space less safe as the distances grew wider. Mechanical weaponry such as guns and later missiles widened the divide further still and this trajectory reached its zenith in the 1970's with the star wars program; opposing satellite controlled weapons of mass destruction holding the world in an equilibrium of uneasy peace, the distance larger than the earth itself. Since then, the so called war on terror and conflicts in increasingly inhospitable lands mankind has been forced once again closer and closer to each other in order to fight and kill one another. Our arc contracts, and now, if we consider the suicide bombers of modern day our proximity arc has...

As I sat there, tears streaming down my face, Uncle Barry punching the wall and Dezzie off searching the churchyard for relatives I read the text again. We are sorry your wife is face mean, this was not your beautiful intended. If you wait we shall reimburse you soon, in many years as we have been illegling. Thank you for your continued custom. Papa always said you get what you pay for. My Kids smile and tell me everything is going to be ok and they are right, sunlight breaks through the clouds and I am a panther again, on the prowl.

Moving house I find an envelope from many years ago. On it are words I can recite by heart. "When I get stuck in a place or a situation I dislike I dissolve into a clear liquid and seep away, finding my escape through the tiniest of gaps" They are written on scraps of sodden paper left in Uncle Morris' Lab, I am five and know I shouldn't be there but I gingerly pick them up and run upstairs to my Mum. She's been crying and we walk outside where we lay the paper on the ground to dry. As we sit there she explains that sometimes people feel trapped and we wait until Uncle Morris arrives. When he finally emerges from the house I get a big hug and he tells me that he loves me and Mum. I pocket the scraps of paper and read them later under the bedclothes with the help of my dictionary. I remember saying to myself, when I grow up I'll never go somewhere I don't like. And today I am moving to Mansfield.

The hours spent training a stag to goose step now seem a waste of time Donald thinks as he fills in a Millets application form. She was right after all, how annoying.

The latest hole to appear is the shape of bowling pin, about a foot across at its base, widening slightly to 18 " before narrowing and forming a neatly turned head 4 '6 high. If you stand on one side and look through the gap you can see the edge of the co-op , part of a bus shelter and the common ground behind both, in the distance an enclosed MUGA, Multi Use Games Area, which iss rarely used for games at all, well not sporting ones anyway. If you stand the other side, you can see number 37 and a bit of a street lamp. When these events were first reported it was naturally assumed to be the work of students or artists, the precision of the beer bottle and claw hammer seemed impossible to arise naturally. But when the third section of wall, part of the library, began to crumble whilst a wedding party posed for photographs outside, at least 14 different videos showed the wall crumbling away, nibbled until the shape of a capital T was created. There are now unreported ...