ISOBEL had known that living in her old childhood home would bring back memories. However, she never expected so many, or for them to be so vivid. Sometimes, in the last minutes before waking, she ima

TOM! What are you doing here?” I stopped gazing at the empty space in the centre of the table, to throw myself into my fiancé’s arms. “You’re not supposed to be here until tonight,” I told him. “I dec

“Between you and me …”

IRIS walked slowly to the front door of her Victorian villa in Fairley, a sleepy Sussex village. It had begun, she fumed silently – the “invasion” of her home. Of course, she’d been expecting it. Her

DAD’S THE WORD Joe Swash (left) spoke to ...

ONE OF THE MOST GRIMLY FUNNY POEMS OF the past century is Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” with its opening salvo about how our parents invariably mess us up. Larkin used a saltier word for “mess,