P. D. Clifton

‘Piers?’ ‘Piers?’ I hear Lizzie’s faint voice and stumble back into consciousness. ‘What time is it?’ ‘Two thirty,’ whispers Lizzie. It’s indeed two thirty in the morning (I see on my iPhone) and Lizzie’s woken me up because she’s feeling sick. Very sick. She also has a bad pain in the middle of her abdomen.…

I’m sitting in the garden with my Mum. The large trees in front of us are swaying and swishing peacefully. My Mum loves sitting in our garden. And I’m glad she does – it assuages some of the guilt I feel about encouraging her to move up to the Midlands to be near us (she’s…

‘Where does this go?’ ‘Where does THIS go?’ ‘WHERE DOES THIS GO?’ Lizzie has asked Jake to empty the dishwasher… and now, every time Jake takes something out of the dishwasher to put away, he loudly asks: ‘WHERE DOES THIS GO?’ He’s also taking out one thing at a time, so it’s taking ages. ‘WHERE…

It’s first thing in the morning and I’m stumbling, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen. Lizzie is already there, standing at the kitchen table. In front of her is some kind of large, extraordinary contraption. Motors are whirring away inside it, causing coloured liquids to shoot along pipes sticking out of the thing at various angles. ‘Morning…

I’m walking through our local town on Saturday morning, having dropped Annie off at football training. There’s a festival going on in the centre of town. There are endless festivals in this place. Literary festivals, food festivals, river festivals, you name it. Festivals are obviously a big money-spinner for the town. Me and the kids…

We’re on our daily walk and Lizzie is telling me about the first job interview she’s had, post-chemo. It’s to do concept-work on a new historical television drama. Sounds glamorous, doesn’t it? It is glamorous – compared to my shit-shovelling job on the boring side of film production. ‘The lady I had the interview with…

That evening, I clamber desperately into bed, my cold not feeling an iota better. At least Lizzie has stopped mocking me. My dry cough has gotten worse. It’s from my throat, not my chest, so on the plus side that suggests it isn’t Covid (and I’ve continued to test negative for that). I cough, heavingly,…

For two years (since the start of 2020, when this crazy epidemic got going in the UK), I haven’t had a cold, flu – nothing. And I’ve still been lucky enough to avoid Covid, the whole time, too. Of course, this has largely been due to the fact that I’ve been wearing a facemask everywhere.…

It’s our lunchtime walk over the fields with Cedric. The weather has cooled down, after a hot few days, and Lizzie and I have resorted to wearing multiple jumpers (each) again. Around us, in the fields, float the hundreds of mysterious white tubes planted by the Heart of England Trust – each containing a twig-like…

We’re in the kitchen and Lizzie is telling me about the brother of one of her best friends, who’s just had a TIA – in other words, a mini-stroke. ‘Poor guy,’ I say. ‘How old is he?’ The only other person I know who had TIAs was Lizzie’s father, who died a couple of years…