Category: Uncategorized
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81: GARDEN CARNAGE
WARNING! STRONG(ISH) STUFF! INCLUDES DESCRIPTIONS OF GARDEN WILDLIFE COMING TO A STICKY END! (DESPITE OUR BEST EFFORTS TO PREVENT THIS!). Our garden is an amazing thing; particularly after having lived with a postage-stamp-sized patio in London, for years and years. Our countryside garden is large and long (I don’t feel too boastful saying that, because…
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80: 50
It’s July 18th 2022. I’ve been quietly dreading this day. In exactly six months’ time, I’ll be fifty years old. I’m half a year away from being half a century. There’s no upside to this. I mean… fifty. How can this be happening? I’m still a man-child! What’s there to look forward to, to turning…
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79: WORRYING
I’m having drinks in Clerkenwell, with the staff of the film production company at which I’m working. It’s nice! We’re in Clerkenwell Green by the Three Kings pub, next to the impressive edifice that is St. James’ Church. The sun’s out and the place is full of young media types living it up. I feel…
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78: JOURNAL
A couple of days ago, I finished writing the journal (or the part of it)* I kept throughout Lizzie’s brush with cancer… from summer 2021 to summer 2022. I’m incredibly excited to have finished it! After all, what started off as a distraction to help me keep my sanity, in dark times, has now turned…
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77: CEREAL
It’s morning and I’m looking through the cupboard in the kitchen, where we keep the breakfast cereal. Plain corn flakes. Plain multigrain hoops. Plain Rice Krispies. Plain Weetabix. Quakers Oat Cereal (ugh). Quakers Oat Muesli with Seeds and Nuts (double ugh). Where the HELL are the chocolate Crispy Minis? Or the Crunchy Nut Clusters? Or…
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76: MOVIE
Lizzie and I are in the sitting room, talking about who the stars would be, if they ever made a movie of Stop Telling Me I’m Brave. ‘I think Maggie Gyllenhaal should play me,’ says Lizzie. Her resemblance to the actress (of Secretary and Dark Knight fame) has been remarked upon in the past, so…
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AND OTHER STORIES
I’m back! Or, I should say, Stop Telling Me I’m Brave is back! So, the plan is I’m going to continue putting up new posts every week or so, for the foreseeable future, until I crack up and give up (or until you do, dear reader). As I said in the last post (called ‘The…
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THE LAST POST
OK, I’m pretty sure I’m not the first blogger to call their last post THE LAST POST. But I couldn’t resist! (If I could work out how to have the plaintive bugle notes of the actual Last Post play, when you click on this post, I would. But I can’t, because I’m a tech-idiot). …
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75: THE ACTUAL PROPER END
It’s mid-March and it’s been a beautiful, sunny spring day… with some of the crispness of autumn, but without the dread of winter which begins to grow once you get older (particularly if you’ve recently moved to the countryside – into an old draughty house). It’s now seven-thirty and it’s getting darker – the clocks…
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74: NOT THE END
The previous post (‘Relapse?’) was written in June 2022… a month or two after I completed the rest of this journal. The original ending to the journal – written back in March 2022 – is next and is called ‘The Actual Proper End’ (so you don’t get it mixed up with any earlier endings you…
P. D. Clifton 