Description

ALL THE THINGS I WROTE BEFORE I WROTE THE THING I ALWAYS WANTED TO WRITE

Eight picaresque ballads of life in the East Midlands – and sometimes beyond – by mild mannered anarchist & writer Martin Costello.

The elder boys carried the old sofa to the end of the pier, and the family set it up looking outward across the water so that they might catch an early sight of the ferry. They took turns on the watch through the long late afternoon, the children happily amusing themselves on the pier, under the pier, behind the sofa, in the mud, in the shallows, in the empty car park, on the roof of the ticket hut, up and down the ferry lane, along the grassy dunes of the strand, on the smooth round rocks of the tide wall and around the skirts of the mother Bidna to her passing amusement and then impatience and then amusement again. As evening threatened, a dog-walker from the lane helpfully called out that there would be no ferries that day, on account of the coming storm.

The story the author had always been trying to write is not included in this collection but happily is now complete after 22 years of editing.