Author: Geoffrey David West

“Gotcha!” We were touching, chest-to-chest. I could smell his sweat. The whites of his eyes and the ebony black of his skin were an inch away from my face. And I was scared stiff. I knew beyond any doubt, that I was a few seconds away from death or serious injury. This was in 1962….

Tales of a large black ghostly hound have been reported for centuries from all around the British Isles. However ‘Black Shuck’, also known as the ‘Spectre Hound’ or the ‘Hound of Hell’, the huge wild dog that portends disaster to anyone who sees it, is specific to parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, especially in coastal…

“You’ve won a million pounds.” “Are you sure?”

“I cut off my husband’s penis. But then of course you know that.” “But you’re sorry about it?”

“May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back…” “Thanks,” I told the woman who was sitting in the shop doorway, a cheap sleeping bag crushed up beneath her.

I stood in the queue with all the other down-and-outs, wondering whether the food tasted as awful as it looked. It was a pretty dispiriting scene: a large church hall, stinking of unwashed bodies and misery. We shuffled forwards slowly, coughing, burping and grunting to each other.

“I killed my wife,” said the man sitting opposite me in the cable car. “Excuse me?” I answered, bemused, thinking I’d misheard him.

Working as an ‘extra’ on films can be fun, and years ago I tried my hand at it. It was an unusual film, and the director was an unusual person. He was an over-the-top American, and it was a story about a Scottish village that was taken over by lunatics. Walter J. Harrison insisted on…

A chainsaw is a marvellous tool – or as my adopted Australian friends would call it ‘A bonza bit of gear’. It can slice through huge tree trunks like butter, and let me tell you you won’t want to grab an axe ever again once you’ve used one of those little beauties. See, I was…

When my wife died I was lost. We’d been married for thirty years, and when I retired we spent most of our time together. Over the past few years we hadn’t bothered with friends much, just did our own thing, went away for weekends, pottered around the house and the garden. She was so much…