Neurotic Literature

Derek Smawk was an easy man to loathe. A squat figure with a pinched face, his track record prior to election had shown him entirely unsuited to the role of a public servant. Lazy, incompetent and a congenital liar, his all-round unattractiveness was matched by a kind of bullish incoherence when he spoke in public, as if he didn't really think his audience merited the effort to make actual sense.

It's the first rule of the internet, isn't it? Be careful what you put out there: once online, it's there for everyone to see, for the rest of eternity.

Yet here we all are, spaffing our thoughts all over social media, distributing our photographs whether mundane or indecorous, and generally putting every last bit of our personal lives out there on blogs, vlogs, tweets, tiktoks, snapchats, instas and, er, podcasts.

(This is entirel...

This is a story about Derek, the mole who didn't like digging.

He liked all kinds of other things. Digging just happened to be a thing he did not like.

Which might have been fine, except that he was a mole. And being a mole meant that certain things were expected of him.

Digging, for example.

But Derek was a very obstinate mole.

Listen to the whole story to see how that works out for him. (Though there is a small clue in the title....

It wasn't Timothy Jenkins' fault. If nobody explains to you that content is intended only for a teenage, female audience, a juvenile reader will assume that it is all part of the rich pageant of literature, a glass held up to the lives of others in the way that is a feature of all fiction.

The publishers should have made it clearer, probably. But they would no doubt argue that it was an issue of branding. That any prolific and best...

It's a tough business, writing.

All those hours, days, years even, of sweat and toil, writing and rewriting to turn out something heartfelt, original and possibly even brilliant, only to discover that you have merely completed the first leg of a far more arduous journey, one that will probably end with your finely wrought prose being discarded and read by nobody.

Take this podcast, for instance. Blimmin' ages, it takes. The writing...

"You know what I reckon? They're so up against it, right, with the state of the hospitals and underfunding and so on, that they don't know who's in for what. So they do everything on everyone to be on the safe side."

You will, no doubt, have your own views on the state of the NHS and the reasons (calculated or otherwise) for its 14 years (coincidental or otherwise) of neglect and underfunding. Do feel free to bang some pots and pan...

Folklore tells of a town where everyone was a mathematician. Each person was an expert, whether in arithmetic, algebra, geometry or topology; thanks to this expertise, measurements were always very precisely measured, definitions very precisely defined and costs very precisely calculated. 

Yet, as a mathematician called Simplex discovered, just because people think they've got everything worked out, doesn't mean they won't find the...

Shame.

Most of us experience it. A few of us are burdened with it in unusually (and, some would say, unfairly) high quantities. Whilst religious and political authorities have at times encouraged shame as a means of self-control (or, frankly, a way of ensuring that fun things feel less fun), these days it is generally felt that shame is a bad thing - that negative self-evaluation can stunt our ability to make progress, can be a mot...

It's a wonderful thing, a school. A place that allows you to learn, to be taught concepts that enable you to move beyond your experience, a place to develop skills and knowledge, and to grow as a person.

But what is even more wonderful is a school where you are allowed to live as well. A school with your own bed, where you can go to sleep with your head full of learning, and wake up ready to carry on being educated. Every night a s...

Wax on, wax off.

They didn't make films in the 80s. They made movies – enchanted windows of wish-fulfilment, in which impossibly attractive characters, subtly highlighted by golden sunlight or the opulent colours of fairgrounds and amusement arcades, led us into adventures that were worlds away from our humdrum classrooms and playgrounds.

Wax on, wax off.

Their appeal might be baffling to everyone who has grown up with the sterile ...

It is surprising how much discomfort people are prepared to put up with when the cause it out of sight: surveys suggest that three in four men don't go to the doctor when suffering pain or illness, even when it might be life threatening. Arthur Westrip was very much one of the three-in-four men.

Perhaps if he had been in possession of a partner, somebody in a position to nag him or at least to see how painful the skin behind his ...

Had it been a continuous noise, that would not have been a problem. Lucy could have gone to sleep with a constant rumble, or a low hum, or even a regular trickle of water. But it wasn't any of those things. Or rather, it was all of them, but mixed up and unpredictable, as though the radiator was trying to say something.

Even the way the radiator looked was frightening. It was a huge old thing crouching at the side of the room; no...

We all have them. Those memories which resurface again and again, the petty resentments that every adult clings onto, which rankle with the same vibrancy each time we relive them.

But what if, instead of merely reliving them, we could change them?

George Goode has been given the opportunity to try. To go back and fix the things he said, or left unsaid, as well as the things he did or didn't do that he wishes he hadn't, or indee...

A long time ago, it was made out of paper. Patterned paper or coloured paper. And it was put on walls.

It didn't sound like anything. You saw it, but you didn't hear it. Of course, that was very distracting, but it was a long time ago and the people were primitive.

As for sounds, they had to make those themselves, with things carved from wood, or made from metal. Even with their voices.

It is common knowledge that, before wal...

Alice Jenkins was not having an unusually trying day, though the litany of things she generally had to deal with might elicit more than a little sympathy. After all, apart from handling her own busy lifestyle, she also had to organise the lives of her three children and husband. Many people will have experienced similar burdens.

Not many people, however, will be able to identify quite so easily with what happened next. Because, wh...

To what lengths are fathers prepared to go in order to keep their daughters safe and pure? Some quite extreme ones, it turns out.

This is a story about a humble baker (although he isn't that humble) who realises that his precious daughter (let's call her Jennifer) is desired by all of the young men in the village (yes, all of them) and who, knowing enough about local boys to see the invidious position in which this might put her,...

It ought to be a good, old-fashioned catch-up over a pint. Two old friends, a slightly noisy pub, average ale. Nothing special, but it's the company that matters, isn't it? The chance to exchange news, ask after godchildren, and reminisce about old times.

Maybe it doesn't happen as often as you would like. Maybe you run out of things to say sooner than you used to. That's fine, though, and to be expected; life moves slower when y...