Geoffrey David West

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…

“Why are you sending him home?” said the gushing lady TV presenter. “He’s got this dodgy looking penis. I just don’t like the look of it.”

I fell in love for the first time when I was ninety-three years old. Ridiculous as it may sound, it’s true. I met the woman I fell in love with, Molly, in hospital, in the cardiac critical care ward, where we were both being held after undergoing heart attacks, which we’d successfully, putatively recovered from.