Category: Real stories and lifestyle

• He’d Written the Same Three Words in Every Anniversary Card for Nineteen Years

  The card aisle in the big Tesco at Handforth is arranged by occasion, and Graham has known exactly where to stand in it since about 2008. Past the birthdays, past the new babies, past the sympathy ones nobody lingers at. Anniversary cards are at the far end near the wrapping paper, and there are two…

• Everyone Thought the Allotment Was Keeping Him Sane. They Were Half Right.

  There’s a fortnight every September when an allotment makes a man look like a genius. The beans come all at once, the tomatoes finally turn, and Graham, 57, from Chesterfield, walks up the hill most evenings to plot 12 with a carrier bag and a legitimate reason to be out of the house. His wife…

• The Back-to-School List Had One Item She Couldn’t Write Down

  The list went up on the fridge on the first of August, the way it does every year. School shoes. Shin pads for the eldest. A pencil case in a very particular shade of purple, because there had been tears about this before and nobody in the house wanted a repeat. Name tapes, because Rachel…

• She Loves Her Kids. She’s Still Been Crossing Off the Days Until September.

  There’s a calendar stuck to the side of Rachel’s fridge in Nottingham, the kind with a column for every member of the family. Swimming on Mondays. Dan’s five-a-side on Wednesdays. And on Thursday the 3rd of September, in her own column, a small pencil star. No word next to it. Just a star. If you…

• He Sat on the Drive for Twenty Minutes. Nobody Inside Noticed He Was Late.

  The bags had been in the hall for an hour. The cool box was still on the kitchen floor, half-melted and leaking onto the tiles. Ian was in the driveway, in the car, engine off, keys in his hand. He’d been there twenty minutes. Nobody had come out. That’s the part he kept turning over…

• They Deleted Their Profiles and Went Back to Trying. Three Members on What Happened Next.

  Every week, a handful of members close their accounts. Some have met someone and don’t need us anymore. A few have been caught. But there’s a third group, and they’re the ones nobody writes about: the people who delete because they’ve decided to give the marriage one more proper go. And then, sometimes months later,…

• She’s Played the Same Eleven-Second Voice Note Forty-One Times

  There’s a voice note on Nicola’s phone that lasts eleven seconds. She’s played it forty-one times. She knows the number because her phone told her, in that breezy way phones do, that she’d spent the better part of eight minutes that week listening to one man say one fairly ordinary thing about a car park.…

• She Kept the Train Ticket in Her Coat Pocket All Winter

  The ticket is creased now, soft at the corners the way paper goes when it’s been handled too many times. Macclesfield to Manchester Piccadilly, off-peak return, a Thursday in November. Rachel could have thrown it away eight months ago. She hasn’t. And somewhere around February she stopped pretending she was going to. She found it…

• She Always Said She Didn’t Want Pudding. She’d Been Lying for Twenty Years.

  Diane had a script, and she’d long since forgotten she was reading from one. The waiter would come round with the dessert menu, and before he’d even finished the sentence, she’d hear herself say it. “Oh, none for me. I’ll just steal a bit of his.” Graham would order the sticky toffee, she’d take the…