Leave Means Leave Episode 5

‘Hello.’ Odd how light and pleasant his voice could sound; no wonder everyone thought he was so lovely. Michelle wasn’t fooled though: she stood her ground and folded her arms.

‘Thought I might find you here.’ Still pleasant, just two friends passing the time of day. A couple went by with their dog, didn’t even glance over.

Anna stood rooted to the pavement, willing one of the staff to come out of the shelter. She reached for her phone and he took a step nearer.

‘Don’t come any closer.’ Anna’s voice was husky but defiant; Michelle took her arm in solidarity.

‘Or what?’ He was still smiling pleasantly but the menace was creeping into his voice.

‘I’m going to phone someone,’ she warned.

‘I really wouldn’t.’ He took another step forward, pulled a cricket bat from behind and held it in both hands like a batsman taking a full toss.

Now or never. She screamed at the top of her voice and ran out into the road, causing a car to stand on the brakes – then she grabbed Michelle’s arm and charged past him to the shelter, hammering on the door as if her life depended on it.

Eve came, took in the situation and ushered them inside, saying to him calmly, ‘I’m calling the police. Right now. We’ve got you on CCTV: don’t come back.’

‘Well done hen!’ Michelle was full of admiration but all Anna could do was collapse into a chair, her breath going like a steam train. ‘Is he gone?’ She could barely get the words out.

Phone to her ear, Eve scanned the screen. ‘He’s getting into his car.’

‘He could just wait round the corner.’

‘You need to be careful when you go out. Take your alarm.’

‘I can’t believe how easily he found me.’

‘You’d be amazed, we’ve had guys from all over – Scotland, Cornwall, even France and Spain. They come to get their property back.’

Anna stared.

‘Tha’s wha’ we are tae them.’ Michelle laughed mirthlessly. ‘Property. Like a wee purse tha’s been stolen.’

Anna started laughing, she hardly knew why. Eve put down the phone and they ended up falling about like idiots, all three of them in the office. But the decision was made now, in the chambers of her heart, in the corpuscles of her blood, in the silent cells of the bone. No going back. End of story.

Fiction Serial: Leave Means Leave Part 4

Sometimes he was so tender… when she thought of his tenderness her bones ached. But they remembered their brokenness too, and she clenched her jaw. She could go to London – he’d never find her there. She could change her name, do her hair differently, even learn to walk differently! Stand tall, step out, walk firmly on the earth. Just a slight catch of the knee from where it hit the coffee table…

Another knock on the door: Eve’s face again. ‘This is Michelle.’ A fierce-looking young woman emerged from behind Eve’s back. ‘I’m next door, okay hen? Ye want anythin’, gie me a call OK?’ Anna nodded and tried for a smile but it didn’t matter – they knew what she was feeling. They all knew.

Soon as he realised she wasn’t coming back, he’d find a replacement. By the time I get to London… that’s what he did, soon as he lost something. He’d find some sad neglected kid and like a fat spider he’d reach out and grab her.

Going to the shops, feet dragging, dark glasses, timing herself in case she took too long (Who did you meet? Don’t lie to me! Who did you talk to?) If she said ‘one of the neighbours’ he’d demand to know which one and then he’d go up to them all nice and friendly, ask how they were and casually say, Anna mentioned you’d had a chat yesterday. He’s such a lovely man, your fella! They all said. Anna would nod and try to smile. Hiding it was the worst thing – but she couldn’t tell anyone.

Evenings in the shelter they all gathered out the back to smoke (Anna didn’t smoke but it helped her fit in) and swap stories. She was shocked by the way they accepted violence but then she heard herself joining in. Broke my arm in three places. Had to keep going to different hospitals. Shoved me down the stairs, held my hand over the gas, put my face in the oven, held my head under water… the endless, banal litany of domestic violence. The women were all on a short fuse and fights would break out over nothing, over a pair of tights or a hairbrush – then there’d be a sudden tenderness, everyone huddled in the kitchen listening to each other’s stories, nodding sadly.

I thought if I took it, if I never fought back…

I thought once I’d been to hospital…

I thought once I’d called an ambulance…

I said I’d never go back…

I thought, I thought…

Some days the universe seemed to speak to her, leave little messages in graffiti or slogans written on coffee-cups. Be your best self. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Always be yourself unless you can be a unicorn.

Leave means leave.

She’d given up so much for him; her degree, her hobbies, her friends… what had he given up? He talked of sacrifices but the sacrifices were all hers. He talked of hard work but round the house he did nothing; truth be told. He couldn’t fix the boiler but was too mean to pay for a plumber so for months she’d had to boil the kettle and take cold showers. He wouldn’t let her pay for a plumber either, said it made him feel emasculated.

The idea of going to London made her feel faint. For ten years this town had been her world; they’d never taken holidays because he’d say we need to save money. But what were they saving for? Then he’d say anyway, what’ve they got abroad that we haven’t? He didn’t want her having her own passport, that was the truth of it. Then as usual, having it both ways, he said England was so boring it wasn’t worth holidaying here either. Wouldn’t let her learn to drive so she had to get the bus to work…

Work! She could do better than that miserable office. Go back to college, finish her degree. Move down South… little by little the plans were hatching. And then the next day coming back from the shop with Michelle she saw his car sitting just outside the hostel, engine running. Before she could run indoors he’d climbed out to stand between her and the shelter.

Sad News

I won’t be posting anything for a while except the fiction serial as my mother in law is coming to the end of her life. Hope you enjoy the serial.

Kirk out

Kirk out

Fiction Serial: Leave Means Leave Part 3

She told her story and showed the bruises to a WPC, they called social services and a woman came to take Anna to a shelter. She looked at Anna’s tiny bag. ‘Want to go back for your things? An officer can go with you.’

Anna shook her head. Leave means leave. No going back. She sat like a hostage in the back of the unmarked car and when they got to the shelter she was welcomed by a brisk, hard-faced woman called Eve.

By the time I get to Phoenix… the song had run on in her mind all day, altering the words to suit the story. By the time I get to the station, he’ll be in a meeting. By the time I get to the shelter he’ll be having lunch, by the time I’m eating dinner he’ll be coming home. She shut her eyes and sat on the bed in her tiny room. There wasn’t space to swing a cat but she didn’t care – it was her space. A video played along with the song: he’ll be swinging his car into the street, he’ll be spotting the car in His space, he’ll be cursing and yelling; he’ll be threatening to call the police. He’ll be thinking about smashing the windscreen but resisting the temptation because smashing the windscreen is Visible Damage and he never causes visible damage. He’ll be storming into the house primed to have a go at me because it’s My Fault, he’ll be running upstairs yelling my name, shouting Where are you? then he’ll thunder downstairs and see the note and – what? Her leaving him, actually leaving him, is so unthinkable she can’t guess what he’ll do. Will he scream? Yell? Jump up and down? Smash up the kitchen? Maybe he’ll laugh when he reads the note… he’ll sit down and pull open a beer, put his feet up and stick the telly on, wait for me to walk back in with my tail between my legs. And by the time I go to bed… It occurred to her in all this that according to Einstein there was no such thing as by the time I, no such thing as simultaneity. She’d been meaning to pursue her studies before He came along.

Her brain was a dead thing coming back to life. With him she’d had to hide it because he didn’t like clever women. Any female pundit always got him yelling at the TV: Smart bitch, clever clogs, snotty cow! She’d go and busy herself in the kitchen, staving off the inevitable.

No more now. No more covering up, no more hiding away, no more fending off his rages. Vistas of possibility opened up. She could go back to college, finish the course he’d interrupted. An interruption, that’s all he was, a hiatus. All her words were coming back; they settled on her shoulders like birds come home to roost.

But next minute the ground was falling away, she was spinning away from the world like a nightmarish bout of nausea. She clutched at the bed to stop herself falling. What was she thinking? How would she cope? She’d never been away from him this long, not since the very beginning. As soon as they got together he’d said I have to see you every day now. She’d felt so special back then, there was nothing he wouldn’t do to make her happy. A panic engulfed her, the earth seemed to break away from under her feet and she was falling, feet and arms flailing, reaching out for the nearest thing… she grabbed the pillow and clutched it to her stomach, breathing hard, trying to get a grip on herself, feeling nauseous like that time with the unlit gas. She’d never make it. Without him, she was nothing. Sometimes when she’d threatened to leave he’d beg so pathetically her heart would break and she’d sit on his lap, sobbing and smoothing his hair. Next day he’d be worse.

Eve put her head round the door. ‘Settling in all right?’ Anna nodded. The face didn’t look convinced but the head nodded and vanished.

Please leave a comment.

Kirk out

Fiction Serial: Leave Means Leave Part 2

Yet still she stayed, living from day to day in a kind of limbo, the decision made and unmade a hundred times a day. What if the miscarriage was her fault? What if it was her punishment for not telling him? What if she got pregnant again? What if that made him worse? She packed bags and unpacked them again, keeping the essentials to hand but never quite taking them out of the door. And then that day, the day of the black Ford, without even thinking about it the decision was made. The margin was perilously small, large parts of her mind were wavering still but she ignored them. The die was cast; she was leaving. Pack a bag, write a note, walk out the door. Easy as ABC.

She wrote the note in haste lest her hand should betray her, not even bothering with punctuation. Im leaving goodbye. Three words; they seemed so small and inadequate – but that summed up their years together. She was never enough for him, always fell short, always made him angry – well, no more. She locked the door and as a final, no-going-back gesture pushed the key through the letterbox. The car was still there in His space, the sticker flashing from the rear: LEAVE MEANS LEAVE. She took it as a sign.

Deep in her bag she kept the one thing she had of the lost child, a photo from the scan. To give her strength she took it out and looked at it once more; the two round forms of head and body, the tiny white marks of its just-forming bones. Feeling the grinding fractures in her forearms she’d fiercely promised the unknown child that no-one would ever harm a single one of those tiny bones. No baby would ever be his. No. The no sounded in the bone, hollow and resonant; it was a decision taken in the very marrow. No going back.

In any case, she reasoned – as though broken bones weren’t reason enough – there was hardly room even for her in that place, let alone a baby. His stuff was everywhere and he didn’t like her tidying. Knew where everything was. Got cross if she moved things. It was his flat, wasn’t it; he paid the rent, didn’t he? Didn’t he have any rights? And so on. She felt tired just thinking of it. And with a baby on the way they’d have had to move anyway – and would he even have been glad? Probably, not glad to be a father but glad because a baby would be another tie keeping her with him, another reason for her not to leave. She put the photo away and headed for the police station.

Comments welcome

Kirk out

New Fiction Serial – Leave Means Leave

I’ve decided to take a leaf out of Beetleypete’s book (https://beetleypete.com/) and have a fiction serial once in a while. Some time ago I started a series of stories based on Brexit mantras and I got as far as writing three stories. They were called Leave Means Leave, Take Back Control and No Hard Border. I guess the time has gone for them to be published commercially so I thought I’d upload them here. The first one’s Leave Means Leave – I hope you enjoy it.

Leave Means Leave

She’d first noticed it when opening the curtains: a black Ford sitting at a stubborn angle outside their house, no driver in sight. But facing the wrong way! You could hardly miss the No Entry signs at the top but even supposing you did you’d still have to slalom past the bollards risking substantial damage to your bodywork in the process. Joyriding? A car chase? Her imagination spiralled.

After work the car was still there, now sporting a square yellow reprimand stuck to the windscreen, a little gift from the traffic warden. They were very vigilant round here, though in His view they weren’t vigilant enough. The penalty notice would only slightly mitigate the Ford’s most heinous crime: that it was sitting in His space. If it was still there later that would spell trouble – mostly for her.

Anna had to squeeze round it to get indoors and in so doing noticed saw a bumper sticker, black letters on a Union Jack proclaiming LEAVE MEANS LEAVE. She felt suddenly faint and rushed indoors, locking the door behind her.

She had tried so many times to leave but it was so hard, like coming off heroin; the bruises fade but the craving reaches right down into the bone. He does this because he loves you. He loves you so much – that’s why it hurts so much. Love hurts.

It was her fault, always her fault. She provoked him. If anyone noticed she made excuses: He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s always sorry, he doesn’t mean it, not really. In her heart she knew fine well (sometimes her mother’s Scots surfaced) that he would never change, but in the end decisions were made in the bone. The head said one thing but the marrow spoke a deeper, stronger tongue.

It was the baby that woke her up. For the first time in her life she was afraid for someone else; those tiny bones growing inside her were those of another being, one she was determined to keep safe. So, miscarriage or not (and that wasn’t Him, she hadn’t even told him yet) the decision was made. She was leaving.

Yet still she stayed, living from day to day in a kind of limbo, the decision made and unmade a hundred times a day. What if the miscarriage was her fault? What if it was her punishment for not telling him? What if she got pregnant again? What if that made him worse? She packed bags and unpacked them again, keeping the essentials to hand but never quite taking them out of the door. And then that day, the day of the black Ford, without even thinking about it the decision was made. The margin was perilously small, large parts of her mind were wavering still but she ignored them. The die was cast; she was leaving. Pack a bag, write a note, walk out the door. Easy as ABC.

She wrote the note in haste lest her hand should betray her, not even bothering with punctuation. Im leaving goodbye. Three words; they seemed so small and inadequate – but that summed up their years together. She was never enough for him, always fell short, always made him angry – well, no more. She locked the door and as a final, no-going-back gesture pushed the key through the letterbox. The car was still there in His space, the sticker flashing from the rear: LEAVE MEANS LEAVE. She took it as a sign.

Deep in her bag she kept the one thing she had of the lost child, a photo from the scan. To give her strength she took it out and looked at it once more; the two round forms of head and body, the tiny white marks of its just-forming bones. Feeling the grinding fractures in her forearms she’d fiercely promised the unknown child that no-one would ever harm a single one of those tiny bones. No baby would ever be his. No. The no sounded in the bone, hollow and resonant; it was a decision taken in the very marrow. No going back.

Let me know what you think. Episode 2 coming soon.

Kirk out

Goodnight Sweetheart

I’m currently working my way through all six series of ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ starring Nicholas Lyndhurst and devised by Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran. Gary Sparrow, a TV repair man in the ’90s married to the go-getting Yvonne, discovers by accident that he can travel back in time to the 1940’s. He finds himself in a wartime pub and after the initial bafflement gets to know people, explaining his weird clothes and outlandish expressions by saying he’s spent time in America. He returns home with no intention of going back there but is drawn by his attraction to Phoebe whose father runs the pub. Thereafter each episode finds him dividing his life between wartime London and the 1990’s. There’s lots of humour here arising from the time difference but what makes the series so good is its inventiveness. Gary needs a confidant and finds one in his friend Ron who, very handily, is a printer and supplies Gary with wartime five pound notes. Gary’s cover story for Phoebe is his secret war work (he’s a spy, though he can’t talk about it) and once he opens a 1940s memorabilia shop his cover story for Yvonne is that he has to go to trade fairs.

This could easily have been a series about a man who is discontented with his feminist wife and prefers someone more biddable in the 1940’s, but it’s much more subtle than that – and anyway, Phoebe’s no pushover. It could easily be a story of someone very pleased with himself that he’s managed to get away with bigamy, but it’s not that either: Gary is tormented by guilt and unable to give up either of his wives. When Phoebe falls pregnant he almost chooses to stay in the past but he can’t give Yvonne up.

Nicholas Lyndhurst won awards for this two years running as the nation’s favourite comedy performer, and deservedly so. He’s a terrific comic actor and no-one can do slow reactions like him – see his performance in Only Fools and Horses as the ‘plonker’ Rodney who always gets it wrong. The series ends with the war and with Gary having to stay in the 1940’s but there’s a coda in 2016 with a one-off episode called ‘Many Happy Returns’ when he manages to come back to the present day. It’s on Britbox right now so have a look if you haven’t seen it, and if you have it’s a great nostalgia-fest – in more ways than one.

I’ve been doing a bit of time travel myself in a literary sense with a series of stories about a time portal. The main character works for a company that can bring famous people here from the past. They can only come for a day and their memories are wiped as they go back so that nothing in the past is changed (this was Gary Sparrow’s problem.) The main character’s area of expertise is literature; she’s hosted Dickens, George Orwell and C S Lewis among others, but something nearly always goes wrong. She longs for Jane Austen but never gets her, and is lumbered with Stalin after mentioning her history A Level. One of these stories, ‘George Orwell is Better than War-Warwell’ (geddit?) has been published in Stand magazine and I hope to publish others soon.

https://standmagazine.org/

Kirk out

On the Polarisation of Debate

It’s good to have comments; they can be very stimulating and sometimes a conversation can lead into another post – like this one on the polarisation of debate around the transgender issue. This has now become a form of trench warfare with armies dug in on both sides firing guns at each other across a bleak no-man’s-land. In this environment, even sticking your head above ground can be very dangerous.

Let me say at once that it is not trans people I have a problem with. I’ve met a few and I try to be respectful of their preferred names and pronouns and to treat them the same as anyone else. But to accept a person is not the same as accepting an agenda, a bill of rights, if you will, about that person – and it’s this ‘bill of rights’ which is causing so much hassle. The debate has become polarised politically too: people on the left have lined up in favour of the whole LGBTQ (or ‘quiltbag’ if you prefer) agenda and vilify anyone who questions it is labelled transphobic. Meanwhile those of us with a problem are likely to find that our only allies are on the political right: I was offered the opportunity to give an interview to the Daily Telegraph but I declined because I don’t want to be a part of their culture wars. I don’t agree with the self-ID law recently passed in Scotland but I totally disagree with the UK government’s decision to block it, because they are doing so for all the wrong reasons.

Recently I watched a trans woman being interviewed by Owen Jones (sorry I can’t find the video). She said that it wasn’t just outright abuse which hurt her but when ‘nice, middle-class people’ started asking ‘what is a woman?’ I can understand that that might seem a tad personal but in general if we can’t even ask questions without being labelled a TERF then what hope is there? The very essence of what it means to be female is caught up in this debate, and simply repeating the mantra ‘trans women are women too’ is not going to help our understanding. The nature of femaleness is profoundly affected by this and it’s quite valid to want to debate it, particularly in Scotland where self-ID seems wide open to abuse.

I expect I’ve said this before, but we have had decades of debate on other issues, for example racism, feminism, gay rights and disability rights. Those debates are still ongoing. They haven’t always been respectful and I regret that, but we’ve had them – and out of these debates society as a whole has arrived at an agreed position, much of which has been enshrined in legislation. I realise this is a gross oversimplification but the point is that this situation arose out of debate. People were able to ask such questions as ‘are women able to do most things that men can do?’ (spoiler alert: we’re already doing them) without being vilified as a beyond-the-pale misogynist. Yes, I know we haven’t eradicated misogyny any more than racism or homophobia but these things are now publicly unacceptable – and that is a position which arose out of sustained public debate. With the trans issue, on the other hand, I feel that the T has simply been stuck on the end of LGB without any debate at all. I’m not sure I would have expressed myself the way JK Rowling did but she had a perfect right to ask the questions that she did; they are legitimate subjects for debate – but instead of having those questions answered she has been vilified and subjected to death threats. It’s quite scary.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53002557

Apart from having an effect on ‘cis’ women this agenda impacts on other groups. I don’t think most people have realised this yet, least of all Owen Jones, but if straight partners like me are being told that ‘sexuality is fluid’ what does that mean for gay rights? As far as I’m aware one of the main planks of gay rights is the belief that sexuality is not a choice. Being gay isn’t a choice; being straight isn’t a choice. Yet I have effectively been told that I can go from a straight relationship to a gay one without losing anything because I ‘fell in love with a person, not a gender.’ But what does this mean? Are gay people going to be told that they can now be in a straight relationship? How’s that going to work? These are questions that need asking. We need – please god – to have a proper debate. It is perfectly legitimate to ask questions such as ‘what is a woman?’ or ‘how do trans rights affect all-female spaces?’ It’s legitimate to be concerned about what happens when those self-identifying as female are allowed access to all-women spaces. It’s legitimate to be concerned about prisons, changing rooms and sports. But when I look around all I see are people on opposite sides slinging mud at each other. And the government isn’t helping one little bit.

Do please comment but make it respectful.

Kirk out

PS what do you think about the new colours? Are they hard to read? Is black and white better?

The Trans Woman’s Wife

About a thousand years ago I wrote a play called The Trans Woman’s Wife, about my experiences of being married to someone with gender dysphoria. ‘What is it like when your husband doesn’t have another woman but is another woman?’ was the strapline (at least I think that’s what they call it but that might only be for films.) I can’t remember if I sent it to the BBC – I probably didn’t because I don’t think it’s ready yet and in any case opportunities for new writers are shrinking year on year faster than the government’s moral compass. Writersroom is virtually the only place to submit and their windows are only open for a short period every year. However I have just found a site called Upload where you can send them anything at all, so I’ll probably give that a try.

I am trying to practice non-attachment to results in this regard and finding it extraordinarily difficult. Non-attachment is a yoga practice (also a Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist and probably Christian idea too) where you try to detach yourself from the fruits of your efforts. Nowadays we tend to judge our efforts purely by the outcome but yoga says that the effort is its own reward. This sounds like something my Grandma used to say and I found it very annoying because I want the rewards. I want them badly. Don’t we all? But I can see the point, because if you’re happy with what you’ve done it doesn’t matter what others think; you’re not tossed about on the winds of public opinion.

I’ve only really attempted radio plays because I don’t think I’d be much good at the stage variety. I have a good ear for sound and dialogue but I don’t have a sense of ‘the theatre’ – of the space people perform in and what something looks like on stage. So I’ll leave that palm to Alan Bennett and carry on doing what I’m doing.

SPOILER ALERT Speaking of Bennett, we went to the cinema at the weekend to see ‘Alleluia’, a film about a geriatric ward based on an AB play. This was enthralling to watch with a great cast including Judi Dench, Jennifer Saunders, Russell Tovey and Derek Jacobi. The Bethlehem ward, known affectionately as The Beth, is under threat of closure from a government which doesn’t see the value of caring (sound familiar?) The place seems idyllic; caring and supportive with all-inclusive activities such as singing and games. It made me yearn for a time when people had the time to care. But all is not as it seems; the nursing sister played by Saunders, is quietly bumping off some of the patients by injecting morphine when they get too old. Judi Dench’s character, unwilling to take part in a TV programme that’s being compiled, is given a tablet to record her own views. In the process she accidentally records the sister injecting the morphine – and everything becomes unravelled. It’s a story of murder but what stuck with me was the caring of the staff – even the nursing sister – and the fact that they had the time to do it. Jennifer Saunders was a revelation in this straight role and though there were massive stars in the cast there was never a sense of there being starring roles. Everyone was more or less equal and everyone had a voice. It made me nostalgic.

I think I’ll send the radio play to Upload. That’s if I can get it into a PFD format; it seems particularly resistant to assuming that shape just at the moment.

If anyone would like to read the play please comment below and I’ll attach it. NB please note that copyright has been legally established – not that any of my readers would dream of passing my work off as their own. Just saying…

Kirk out

Wild? We’re Absolutely Livid!

Now this is what I call a proper documentary. Intelligent, unintrusive commentary, no inane chatter, very little done to camera and no incessant recaps. I refer of course to last night’s Wild Isles, David Attenborough’s latest (and last?) docuseries. It’s lovely to see a work on Britain for a change and as ever the photography is stunning. The ‘how we did it’ section at the end shows just how much work goes into a few minutes of film. This is utter dedication and love and it puts some so-called documentaries to shame.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0f0t5dp/wild-isles?seriesId=p0f0t893

There’s controversy about the last episode, though, in which he talks about how much damage we are doing to the environment. This is reportedly going to be streaming on iplayer rather than broadcast live, and some people suspect that the BBC has once again caved in to pressure from right-wing Tories on this.

There’s a theme emerging here, what with the Gary Lineker fiasco, though that seems to have been resolved now; the BBC have reinstated him following the disaster of Saturday night’s football coverage, given how much support Lineker got from colleagues and players.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2023/mar/13/gary-lineker-match-of-the-day-bbc-return-live

This was very heartening to see, and the more it happens the more the government seems out of step with its own people. Amazing how we didn’t hear a word about free speech from the usual quarters; makes you wonder whether, had he tweeted in support of the government, he would have been disciplined in the same way. It looks very black (or blue.)

I could, if I allowed myself, get angry on a regular basis. I try not to because it’s not good for my health and it doesn’t achieve anything – but I must say the government works very hard to rile me; between interfering with the BBC and Rishi Sunak’s ridiculous swimming pool (never mind that he’s paying for it, what about the carbon emissions? Bastard bastard bastard!!!! Deep breaths, deep breaths… it is very hard to stay calm these days. I’ve just been round the supermarket and noted how many prices have gone up yet again – after paying £20 for a miniscule amount of petrol which would have cost me a fiver just a couple of years back. So yes, no wonder when I think of Wild Isles I want to say ‘wild? We’re absolutely livid!’

Word of the day: skimpulse – when you suddenly put something back on the shelf because you’re worried you can’t afford it.

Kirk out