I’ve gone grey. Not just a few stubborn little stragglers that have quietly infiltrated my parting while I wasn’t paying attention. Not a full head o...
I try to avoid public toilets like the plague. Too many inconsistencies. Too many surprises. There’s usually a lack of toilet paper, for one. Or wo...
I’ve cried only a handful of times at work. Which surprises me, actually. Not because I enjoy the job. Quite the opposite. Some mornings, the mere...
I’ve always been a bit of a lone ranger. Not because I particularly wanted to be. It just seemed to happen that way. Even as a child, I found it har...
The day starts like any other. I’m out on my round, pushing my garish red HTC through the streets, delivering the nation’s birthday cards, bills, Amaz...
The world is going blind. Not in a metaphorical sense. We crossed that bridge years ago. No, this is actual blindness. A disease is spreading acros...
I wake floating on the ocean. Sunlight warms my face. Waves gently lift and lower my body. Maya stands beside me. Smiling. “Good girl.” The phra...
The heat hits me the second I step off the plane. Not the gentle sort of warmth that occasionally graces Britain for three and a half minutes each Jul...
I don’t know why I’m standing in this church. Okay… that’s not strictly true. I know exactly why I’m standing in this church. I’m here because this ...
My husband and I always wanted to go into business together. Admittedly, this wasn’t the kind of business venture I had in mind. We sell organs. Fro...
Mat has been made redundant. Now, before anyone starts lighting candles and playing violins, he’s still very much alive. He’s simply lost his job. ...
I work in a women’s high-security prison. This isn’t one of those girls-behaving-badly situations. This isn’t shoplifting, tax fraud, or somebody gett...
There’s something wrong with Alex. Something I can’t quite place. His whole aura has darkened around him. The usual sparkle that follows him everywhe...
Another day, another shift under my belt And I’m so desperate to shed these fluorescent shackles that I start undressing on the walk home. Not even m...
I’m in the park. Minding my own business, lost in the pages of my book. Not good lost. Just lost in general. I’ve been staring at the same paragrap...
One thing that really irks me about being a postie, among an already extensive catalogue of grievances, is the sheer stupidity of some customers. I’m ...
Weird things have been happening. It starts with the masks. Those hideously frightening masks my husband has collected over the years from his travel...
I put the key in the lock and let myself into my Uncle John’s flat. A place I know well now. The ritual rarely changes. I make his breakfast, check...
I’m in a shopping mall. At least, I think I am. There’s something slightly off about it, though I can’t quite place my finger on it. Nothing is bro...
I hear that familiar ringing in my ears. Not a physical sound as we know it. More like an internal alarm ricocheting through my soul. It arrives wi...
I know my husband has a secret. I don’t know what it is exactly, but something is definitely off. For months now, he’s been sneaking around the hous...
I’m sleepwalking my way through another shift. Slotting letters into pigeon holes. Second class. First class. Large letters. Bills. Catalogues. Fin...
NEWSFLASH. Naomi Campbell has been filmed attacking pigeons. The footage is being shown on every television channel simultaneously. I sit frozen on...
It begins with a message. Not just any message. A message from Selena Gomez. Naturally, my first thought is that this is complete and utter bollocks...
“I need to go to London tomorrow,” Mat says casually. It’s not unusual. In fact, it’s entirely usual. Mat goes to London every week. Has done for y...
I’ve made a colossal mistake. A total fuck up. Sex. In a car. With a stranger. Not my husband. A stranger. Now, before anybody starts clutching ...
Ash has come to visit. Unfortunately, Ash has not come alone. She’s brought all seven of her sons with her. Yup. All seven. Within seconds of arriv...
I’m having a naughty dream. Semi-lucid. I know what I’m doing and I know it’s wrong. But technically, it isn’t cheating, right? Sleeping with anoth...
I seem to have travelled back in time. Alex is eleven again, sitting beside me in his school uniform, staring out of the car window with the grim expr...
I’m sitting in one of those old-school American diners that only seem to exist in films, fever dreams, and the final moments before shit starts to get ...
For one brief, beautiful moment, I genuinely believe I’m going to sleep peacefully tonight. An adorable little delusion, as it happens. Mat’s away in...
Royal Mail have recently escalated their stalker antics to levels that feel less public service and more low-budget dystopian thriller. If it wasn’t b...
It’s been a while since I’ve caught up with Tony. A good eight months at least, maybe longer. Long enough for seasons to change twice over and for li...
I love true crime. Obsessively so. Far too much, probably. There’s something deeply comforting about sitting safely under a blanket while listening ...
Imagine a world in which your thoughts and beliefs alone create the very fabric of reality. You want a matcha latte without so much as lifting a kettl...
I don’t know why I’m always the chosen one. I can barely look after myself, let alone tropical fish. But little Sue insists I’m the right person to t...
It starts, as many of my worst decisions do, with me sitting at my kitchen table writing a letter to a stranger. Not an email. Not a text. Not one of ...
The first thing I notice is the bed. Not the darkness. Not the room itself. The bed. It moves beneath me with a slow, seasick wobble, like I’m lying...
It never ceases to amaze me who the subconscious comes dragging, half-drowned and coughing, from the depths at three in the morning. People I haven’t ...
I genuinely don’t know how I end up in this position. And I mean that in the most literal, spiritually humiliating sense possible. One minute I’m sor...
My hair has grown to catastrophic lengths. Not in a long, flowing Rapunzel-esque sort of way either. Nothing remotely glamorous. No mysterious woodl...
I don’t know what quite led me to these circumstances. This sudden, catastrophic shift in career paths. One minute I’m battling letterboxes and rowdy ...
I am soaked to the skin. Not mildly damp. Not “caught in a shower” wet. I mean absolutely saturated. Rain lashes sideways across the pavement as I...
There are many things I hate about being a postie. Working in the pissing down rain. Vertical letterboxes designed by people who have clearly never s...
It’s happening again. That all-too-familiar vibration begins deep inside my body, low and electrical, like live wires twitching beneath my skin. It r...
The first thing I do every morning now is check my pockets. Not for keys. Not for my phone. For wealth. Because in modern Britain, a person can sur...
The waiting room smells faintly of antiseptic and borrowed fear. The sort that burns the inside of your nostrils and makes you suddenly aware that eve...
The sea is trying to kill me. Not in the poetic, “life is drowning me” Instagrammable way people post beneath black-and-white selfies after three days...
“Have you seen my phone?” I ask Mat. He’s standing in the kitchen wearing the expression of a man who has either committed light treason or booked us ...
For a moment, I just stand there staring at the peeling paintwork, unable to steady my breathing. Because I thought she was okay. God, I really thou...
I haven’t seen my daughter in a while. This isn’t unusual. She has her own life now. Twenty-one. Independent. Busy. Existing in that strange orbit ...
I’m at a salon. Not my salon. I don’t have a salon. I’m the sort of person who cuts her own fringe at 11pm with kitchen scissors and spends three week...
We’re halfway through the woods when I decide — against better judgment, but entirely in character — to bring up the afterlife. It’s one of those soft...
I don’t arrive back in secondary school. I’m deployed there. Dropped — without briefing — into the same stale corridors where the walls sweat Lynx Af...
It starts, as all nightmares do, somewhere offensively mundane. The depot. Fluorescent lights flicker out of habit, not enthusiasm. The air smells fa...
I live in a gated compound. They don’t call it a cult — not officially. It’s dressed up as something softer, something seductive. A concept wrapped in...
“Richard’s bagged himself a job.” Charlotte says it so casually it almost slides past me — a harmless sentence wearing the disguise of something ordin...
I hate the dentist. No. Hate is too weak a word. I loathe the dentist. Loathe it with every trembling tooth in my head, and every twitching nerve end...
This wasn’t part of my plan. You have to understand that. There was no mission briefing. No emotional warm-up. No gentle psychological stretching befo...
My husband is practically vibrating with pre–car boot sale enthusiasm. This, in itself, is deeply unsettling. In real life, he wouldn’t be caught dea...
Apparently my social life is thriving in my dreams. It’s a shame I hate people. I’ve been invited to a house party. Not someone’s house party. Jus...
The rumours have started again. They don’t arrive gently, or with any sense of proportion. They never do. They seep — under doors, through vents, ...
It starts with a sound that isn’t there. No scrunch. No crisp, decisive collapse of plastic crushed into submission — that semi-orgasmic full stop th...
Mat and I decide — against instinct, logic, and the gentle pull of our sofa — to crawl out from under our rock and re-enter society. There’s a new bar...
I smell it before I see it. Not the comforting, vaguely edible kind — toast left a moment too long, or a rogue fish finger committing quiet suicide in...
I’m sitting on a plastic chair that has, over time and through sheer compliance, moulded itself perfectly to my arse. It hugs me in a way no chair shou...
For reasons entirely and suspiciously unbeknown to me — no interview process, no background checks, no gentle easing into the role — I have been entrus...
I’ve been invited to a dinner party. I don’t know who invited me. There was no invite in the post, no conversation — just a creeping conviction that ...
It’s been a week since Pickle arrived. Seven days of chaos. Seven days of noise. Seven days of what can only be described as a hostile takeover — sma...
I seem to be living in my Kia Venga. Not using it. Not sleeping in it. Living in it. Properly living. I don’t know how I got here. There’s no defini...
I’m in the woods. Night has settled in properly now — not the soft, forgiving kind that tucks you in and calls it day, but the thick, suffocating sort...
Mat is beaming. Not just smiling — beaming like a man moments away from committing a crime. The kind of grin that suggests something is brewing inter...
I forget to set my trusty alarm. This is not a small thing. This is the thing. The spine of the morning. The quiet, dependable 6:00 a.m. that holds e...
I’m back there again — that place I just can’t seem to escape, no matter how many exits I imagine. Work. Of course I am. Because apparently even my ...
It’s happening again. That rattling inside my skull — as if someone’s poured a box of screws into my brain and given it a good shake. Then it builds...
Three and a half years. Three and a half years of silence so complete it has settled into my bones, calcified there, hard and unmoving. Not a word e...
We bring him home in a box that is far too small to contain the sheer volume of chaos he is clearly preparing to implode upon our world. Pickle. Tin...
I wake to two hairy balls thrusting in my face. Ginger. Fluffy. Meticulously clean. Monkey’s balls. My cat, you filthy bastards. He’s mid-grooming...
6:00 a.m. on the dot. Not 5.59. Not 6.01. 6.00 a.m. Exactly. The time my body normally slaps me awake like it’s got someplace better to be. I lie...
Al — my colleague, and professional over-talker — fills the van like expanding foam, seeping into every gap, setting solid, leaving no space for a sing...
It’s my husband’s 40th birthday. A milestone, apparently. A celebration. Another decade under the belt. Though, if you ask my mother-in-law, it’s ...
There’s a van at work that everyone prays they don’t get handed the keys to. Aptly christened The Popemobile. Because, well… it looks just like that....
I’m standing at the ATM, mouth agape. I blink so hard I nearly give myself whiplash. A firm squint of the eyes. Are my eyes deceiving moi? I lean i...
I get the sense I’m living in America now. Not just visiting. Not merely passing through. A bona fide Yankee. Somewhere like Manhattan, or at leas...
Most days, I feel like a human buckaroo. You remember the game. That twitchy, nerve-fraying donkey with its hollow plastic stare, waiting — daring you...
It takes me a while to drift off. My mind is wild with thoughts — loud, cluttered, restless — as though the universe has hijacked my amygdala and is w...
I don’t know why I’m here. I’m standing in front of a door I don’t recognise, in a building that feels unfamiliar in that hollow, dreamlike way — as i...
I hear it before I feel it. That familiar, skull-rattling buzz — a low, invasive vibration that starts somewhere behind my eyes and drills its way out...
“I hate exams.” “I know,” my brain replies, with the dwindling patience of something that has long since stopped trying to fix me. “I really hate ex...
I don’t quite know how it happened. One minute I’m wrestling soggy envelopes into stubborn letterboxes, dodging territorial Jack Russells with a sixth...
I’m walking through a city I don’t recognise. That’s the first problem. The second is that no one else seems to notice. People move around me with t...
It’s very much that kind of Sunday. The kind that feels like it’s been dragged straight out of lockdown and plonked, cack-handedly, into the present. ...
Same drudgery, different day. I’m out on delivery, the world reduced to envelopes, front doors, and the slow erosion of my will to live. The postie ba...
I don’t remember becoming an artist. There was no montage. No tortured phase involving cigarettes, heartbreak, and a muse named Luca who spoke only in...
Phoebe was always the one. The one you kept half an eye on even when she was asleep — as if rebellion might leak out of her pores, slip under her door...
I return home from another soul-crushing day on the postie grind, feeling somewhat dishevelled, fluorescent fabric clinging to me like a sartorial sin ...
Some ghosts rattle chains. Others wear a Royal Mail uniform two sizes too tight, scanning in like they’ve always belonged. Dionne. Of course it’s Di...
After a long, borderline soul-eroding, dignity-stripping pursuit of finding a cat, we finally found him. Pickle. You’d think acquiring a small, mildl...
Kylie texts me out of the blue. No warning. No build-up. Just — ping. A ghost clearing its throat. We haven’t spoken in three and a half years. Not ...
“Mandy, I’m home.” The words land like a warm hand pressed flat on my chest — grounding, familiar — and just like that, something inside me unclenches...
Dream Journal Ultimate
