Fun Size Magrs

She crept in through a broken fence.  On Summer nights she'd sit in the long grass of our garden and only her eyes were visible. I'd watch her through the kitchen window but if I tried to open the door she'd bolt through a gap in the panels and disappear. When we first came back to South Shields we lived on an estate not far from the coast. We had a small council house with a constantly shifting population of neighbours. Some people moved on quite quickly and sometimes they left things behind.  It wasn't long after we moved in that I noticed the small black and white cat. She would stare at the windows, almost as if she was sizing up the new arrivals. We didn't know if she belonged to anyone but she looked thin and bedraggled. She'd obviously been living outdoors for a while. To begin with, we'd leave food - just some pieces of cooked ham or chicken - in the garden and close the kitchen door. Our visitor was too timid to eat if we weren't safely locked a...

Once upon a time I wanted to be a writer.  I'd written hundreds of Radio Adverts, I'd taken a couple of courses in Creative Writing (ha ha ha ha) but I wanted to be a PROPER writer. To be fair, most of the copywriters and commercial producers I worked with had similar aims - they were paying their bills writing adverts but they really wanted to be novelists, filmmakers or poets. I wanted to write about things that had happened to me. I'd been really struggling and I was just starting to get help for my Mental Health problems.  I'd read a couple of self-help books about mental health recovery and they all seemed a bit... unrealistic.  Like a lot of self help books they seemed a bit fanciful - as if you could just improve your health and wellbeing by writing a list, saying nice things about yourself in front of a mirror or ' choosing ' to be happy. Putting my thoughts down on paper seemed like a better idea than keeping them in my head. It became a way to cop...

I used to think I was on a TV show.  When I was 8 some teenagers grabbed me and smashed raw eggs over my head. I was walking to school and it was a completely random event.  I suppose I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But I thought it was proof that my life was a TV show.  As I ran home crying and screaming I expected to see Jeremy Beadle appear with a microphone and a camera crew.  I always watched far too much telly.  S ometimes it was the only way I could cope. I'd seen programmes like Candid Camera and Game For a Laugh, so m aybe my life was part of a Saturday night show about people doing daft stunts? Otherwise, how could things like the 'eggs-on-the-head' incident happen? Who takes eggs out of the house just to smash them on a little kid’s head?  A couple of months after that a bird shat on my head. First thing in morning, just after I'd set off for school, a hard lump of bird shite smacked onto the top of my head.  Onc...