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“... 1 Above our beds the little wooden shelf with one support was like a crucifix offering up its hairbrush, Bible, family photograph for trial by mockery. We lay in its shadow on summer nights, denying everything, hearing only the impossible high catches for the older boys, their famous surnames calling them to glory. 2 Why did we take the bed-making competition so seriously? We were only nine ...”

“... My Chances As I grew warmer and the bus went over the bumps, I let my mind wander further and further, checking my scowl in the window of the bus against my chances of bending her over that table, the arm of that chair. When she answered the door in her low-cut dress I forgot what it was I was going to do to her. I gave her a kiss and asked if she was ready to go out, checking my smile in the mirror in the hall against my chances of being liked ...”

“... Faith After we broke up and agreed not to call or write for at least a year, I found myself drawn for a little comfort and cheer not so much to the top shelf of W.H. Smith with its flesh-tinted offers of doom and gloom, as the bra and knicker counter of Marks & Spencer, where row upon row of carefully labelled dream-tatters in chocolate and dusky peach seemed to encourage a humorous approach and faith in a providing world ...”

“... Old Boy Our lesson is really idiotic today, as if Mr Ray has forgotten everything he ever knew about the Reformation and is making it up as he goes along. I feel like pointing out where he’s going astray, but I’m frightened he’ll hold up some of my grey hair and accuse me of cheating. How embarrassing if I turned out to be wrong after all and Mr Ray was right ...”

“... The Age of Steam Remember porters? Weatherbeaten old boys with watery blue eyes who were never around when you wanted them? You had to find one before you could go anywhere in 1953. It was part of saying goodbye. ‘Quick, darling, run and find a porter, while I get your ticket. I’ll meet you at the barrier ...’ I run off across the station forecourt in a series of sudden dashes, panicky knight moves which leave my head spinning as I glance over my shoulder at my trunk ...”

“... 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 the yellow buoys, nice dry water ahead, when I started picking up some nonsense from my old rival Renato Salvadori, the knitwear salesman from Lake Como, appearing for Martini ...”

“... Trivia It might have been the word for sulking in animals, Juliette Lewis, Joan of Arc, the smell of television lingering in the morning like a quarrel. It might have been an airedale scratching at your door, papier-mâché heads, a cloud no bigger than ... It might have been blue satin, Peter Stuyvesant Gold, Deep Heat, umbrella pines, familiar two-note calls repeated at intervals, a lifeguard’s upraised hand ...”

“... Early Morning Swim Every year now you make your face a little fainter in its vellum photo-frame, as if you were washing off your make-up with a towel and catching the last train home. You have forgotten how to storm and shout about the place, but not how to gaze abstractedly over our shoulders into this room that is not your room any more. What do you see that we don’t see? Why don’t you mind if we are late coming down to breakfast, or we don’t ring up as much as we should? At this distance, your voice grows fainter on the line, your words harder to catch ...”

“... All the Cowboys’ Horses I was trying to remember who shouted out ‘Wakey Wakey!’ Was it Arthur Askey? I couldn’t understand how Kay Kendall and Denholm Elliot slipped through my fingers. Even my favourite biscuits melted on the tip of my tongue. A prayer went missing, as if I wouldn’t be needing it again. A head full of memorabilia and I couldn’t remember the name of the man who wrote ‘Stardust’, the woman who played ‘The Poor People of Paris’ on her ‘Other Piano ...”

“... All Right I’m lying awake somewhere between the double yellow light of the Dimplex thermostat and the winking eye of the fax, making the journey across town, past all the stations in North London, going over Bishop’s Bridge, entering the badlands. I hear your giggles as I hit the bumps in the curved section of Westbourne Park Road. I see the crack of light in your curtains when I stop at the lights on the corner of Ladbroke Grove ...”

“... I just follow, if I can.                                  Hugh Williams March Well, here we are in our Tropical Kit – shirts and shorts and little black toques, looking like a lot of hikers or cyclists with dead bluebells on the handlebars. It seems we have at last discovered a place where it is impossible to spend ...”

“... 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 room is too hot and throws the window up ...”

“... Jim returns to his favourite Carnaby St boutique circa 1966 and nods his shaggy head. ‘Hi, Barry! Hi, Stu! Got the new flares in yet?’ The two Goths behind the counter in Plastic Passion have heard about people like Jim. One of them looks out a pair of tangerine elephant loons left over from his father’s ‘Chocolate Taxi’ scene and throws them to Jim as a joke ...”

“... Wrong Shoes I was eight when I set out into the world wearing a grey flannel suit. I had my own suitcase. I thought it was going to be fun. I wasn’t listening. when everything was explained to us in the Library, so the first night I didn’t have any sheets. The headmaster’s wife told me to think of the timetable as a game of ‘Battleships’. She found me wandering about upstairs wearing the wrong shoes ...”

“... If I’m Early Every other day I follow the route of the Midland Railway to where it cuts through St Pancras Old Church Cemetery. I might go into the church and heave a sigh or two before continuing via a gate set in the cemetery wall to the Mary Rankin Wing of St Pancras Hospital. As a young man, Thomas Hardy supervised the removal of bodies from part of the cemetery to make way for the trains ...”