On the first day of my first post-COVID holiday, on a Greek island, I got the post-COVID ‘super cold’. I’d booked the trip nine months earlier, and it was to be my first overseas trip in over two years, my second beach holiday ever. I did not grow up with…
Bubble bath
Wandering through a community fete, held in a small, locally tended garden in the more middle-class zone of my very mixed neighbourhood, I spotted a boy standing behind a little table. To my child-free eyes, he could’ve been anywhere from eight to fourteen. On the table—his wares, I assumed—were a…
The smiling dog and its friendly man
Walking back from my ballet class, I came upon a man and a dog, approaching me from the opposite direction. The dog, a large black and white mongrel, seemed to smile at me, and I smiled back. Its owner, a middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing an anorak, smiled…