Until Kathleen Bryson piece nothing interested me. Even that was patchy. The pieces read more like extracts than completed pieces. The most common main character is a 3rd person male who is perceptive enough to see the social conventions that others seem unconscious of, yet follows them all the same. Nicolas Baines' piece is the best example, the character stuck in a job - "The to-do list is the Magna Carta of every professional procrastinator; a pathetically superficial attempt to give structure to one's existence". I liked "Walker of Dogs" by Gwyneth Kelly , "The Tale of Lena-Jane" by Clematis Delany (about how an orphan daughter deals with the ghost of her father who kills himself each day - "she watched a woman light a bedraggled cigarette by the half-hearted shelter of a rain-blacked wall ... She didn't glance to the rectory nestled in the garden to he left, so she didn't see the vicar's anxious, round face watching her pass and chewing sadly on a hobnob, flecks of biscuit at the sides of his mouth"), and "Bud, Rose, Thorn" by Lucy Smith (spooky - "but the antibodies of my conscious thoughts broke up this dark seed as soon as it surfaced, and with it fled a faint, questing stirring")
"Solipsistically armed, she stared to basket the goods" (p.94) has a typo, at least.
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