1
A tabby was sleeping by four ripening peaches as its feeder asked: do Jesuits make the best writers?
‘Your eyes are moist’.
I am not a Jesuit.
‘You are not Naphta the author of The Magic Mountain?
Was he a Catholic like Blair?
‘By the church is a grey telecoms cabinet on which the village name has been sprayed’.
It was in the summer of ’85 I stayed there for a few weeks.
‘With the PM at Chequers?’
We slept downstairs in a dormitory with bars on the windows.
‘Did you discuss welfare with the Premier?’
They deducted hotel charges from my benefit to pay for the bed and food.
‘There couldn’t have been a lot left over’.
Just enough to pay the taxman.
2
The moggie yawned beside a pile of A5 notebooks.
I was a journalist during the Falklands War.
‘Because of your nose for a story?’
The magazine claimed I couldn’t spell the prophet motive.
‘They were correct’.
How do you spell it?
‘The write weigh’.
I think you are being sarcastic like Jonathan Swift.
‘Did you hear the one about two Irishmen who went to the Motor Show and spent the whole day walking around the car park?’
3
The vet said pussy had hyperthyroidism.
Revising my fiction is too difficult, I would rather sign up for a theology course with the University of Dublin. Answer me this: is the Bible the word of God or is it just a book of stories?
‘I wish I knew. All I can say is that we lie to ourselves about an afterlife’.
That’s a load of crap. I know there is an astral plane. I visited it when an Argentine Exocet sank the Sheffield.
Can you tell me where the toilet is?
The golden one for the chosen?
I don’t care if its just a bucket I’m dying to have a slash.
Like Gulliver why don’t you reign over the tiny men and women?
I can’t do it while you’re watching. Do you mind turning your back and putting your fingers in your ears.
4
The vet gave the feline something for her kidneys. I don’t think she’s got long left before she joins her sister.
What are you doing at that keyboard?
‘I am rewriting 1984 for the radio’.
Will it have a happy ending?
‘That’s for you to find out not for me to tell’.
Stephen Sharp likes Stephen May’s article. Stephen Sharp is a paranoid schizophrenic who doesn’t quite agree with all the words Mr May writes about mad people. He was locked up in a lunatic asylum for setting off the fire alarm in the Houses of Parliament. The number of words in his story is 406. The number of words in this bio is 63.
