A Small Relief There is a moment I know all too well. Someone says something obviously stupid. A person from whom I expected more disappoints me. Some service, institution or machine I have relied on suddenly fails to do what it is supposed to do. My reaction is usually almost…

I don’t know whether someone told me this or I read it somewhere, but tonight one of those wise-sounding phrases has been spinning around in my head – the kind of thing you’d proudly serve up at a dinner table. It goes like this: “Nothing ages you faster than fulfilled dreams.”…

“No,” said the Girl, and there was a familiar note in her voice. Painfully familiar. “No parking!” “Keep off the grass!” “Occupied!” “Oh, come on,” thought the Boy – who by now wasn’t really a boy anymore, but a short-cropped, greying little man. “It was ‘no’ the other day, too,…

In a house filled with broken toys and forgotten dreams, nine-year-old Anne — called Firecurl for the wild red hair she cannot tame — stumbles into a game far older, and far more dangerous, than it first appears. When a strange model landscape bewitches her and a storm of anger…