Hugo Williams

You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I was a hot property once upon a time to my sponsors, Johnson and Johnson Baby Oil.

I reached the final of the 1980 World Powerboat Championship – myself, Lucy Manners, Werner Panic and the rest.

I was going for the record of no hours, no minutes, no seconds and I reckoned I was in with a chance.

I was dancing the Self-Portrait along inside...

Ten, no, five seconds after coming all over the place too soon,

I was lying there wondering where to put the line-breaks in.

Trying to persuade about fifteen Creative Writing students (Poetry) to put more images into their work, I was fiddling in my pocket with an old contraceptive packet, put there at the start of the course and long since forgotten about.

If you...

At six the cup of tea is set down. How the cup of tea is set down. Quietly, or with suppressed fury. Jim looks at the face of his wife sleeping and decides to be horrible. The bathroom was cold. He forgot to put on the fire.

He crosses to the window in a rage and draws the curtains back. How the curtains are drawn back. Gently but firmly, or practically ripped from their hooks? Jim thinks her...

Jim: No perfumes, nurse. These oils drown my head with their clamour of marriages and mourning, their oozy lava nibbled at by flies. My hair is no bunch of flowers stuck in a vase, exuding forgetfulness. It laps my body in hot smells, as if some animal breathed on me. I lie here stiff with horror at its caresses, while lions watch the listless wreckage of my innocence drop down through my...

Everyone screwing up their eyes as if they can’t quite make us out – Jim with his hair fully restored, Johnny with the Simoniz duster, polishing the Jowett Javelin to extinction as long ago as 1951.

There’s no such person as Anne, but Gar is still there, looking quite like her old self again, and Mr Burns, none the worse for New Zealand,...