The Rail's Tale

“Mummy, look: cute!”

“No, sweetheart, that’s a moorhen.”

I’m a water rail actually, and that’s the sort of nonsense I have to put up with every day.

Not yesterday, though; yesterday was a whole different canal of carp. It’s never good when the boy from the barge is around. What was it last week? Oh yes: Hans casting a net for froglets and sticklebacks. A bird’s gonna starve at this rate. Anyway, yesterday he’d found an old tyre, tied it round the branch of the oak and was swinging from it. 

“An accident waiting to happen,” I said to Mr. Rail. He wasn’t listening; too busy watching Mrs Mallard squabbling with other Mrs. Mallard.

Eventually, Hans got bored, started throwing the tyre around, and that’s when it happened. Out of nowhere this great big rubber ring looped through the air.

“Duck!” he shouted. Old Mallard, floating around aimlessly, did just that: head straight under water, missing all the action. The tyre flew across the reeds and crashed into Mrs. Swan’s nest. Well, you can imagine the kerfuffle; feathers, reeds, rushes. Mr. Swan got a right cob on and chased the boy off, while Mrs. Swan tried to save what she could. It was all in vain. I’ve never seen anyone look quite so distraught. The Swans flew off towards, er … well, that way. They’ve not been back since.

This morning, I found one of their eggs, still warm in the morning sun. I didn’t know what to do; it was too big for me to sit on. Mr. Rail help me scoop it up the bank into Mrs. Mallard’s nest. She’s always talking about fostering community spirit, so it makes sense. She’s not the brightest bird around here either, so she probably won’t even notice.

A prequel to The Ugly Duckling, written for the Watford Writers group May 2025.

Image and text Copyright 2025.

The Book of Apologies: The Heartbreaker

 

The Heartbreaker

I had my first crush at the tender age of four. Laura Barton was the privileged one. She didn’t know. And who would have expected that anyway? Girls just didn’t fancy girls at the time, apparently. We used to walk home from school together. Well, from the playground to the school gates together, because once we got to the school gates we were inevitably absorbed into the melee of mothers waiting to collect their little darlings. I don’t really know if my feelings were reciprocated - subsequent history suggests this highly unlikely - but I seem to remember that we held hands along the way. I didn’t carry her bag for her, though; that would have just been weird. But then, I could only just manage to carry mine, so maybe the thought didn’t enter either of our heads. It didn’t enter mine, and maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong since. 

I don’t know how long this crush lasted, but it can’t have been that long because by the age of five I had discovered football and by the age of seven was getting distraught at the fact that Stacey Ashton was moving to Nottingham. All the boys loved Stacey Ashton, it must be pointed out, and my distress was never going to be noticed. But her leaving left a hole in my life that could only be replaced by thinking about somebody else.

I used to think about somebody else on a regular basis; not ever having a definite somebody else made it easier. I discovered my mum and dad’s record collection at an early age, and quickly learned the words to all the Beatles’ songs. We didn’t have a car, and with the railway station five minutes walk away we made ample use of the train. We travelled to stay with my cousins in various parts of the country taking full advantage of British Rail’s remaining network, and I spent a fair proportion of these journeys stood by the doors singing Beatles songs, engrossed in my own little daydream and waking out of it only to allow puzzled-looking grown ups to get into the toilet. My mum had made the mistake of telling me that the Beatles had sung a song on a train in the film ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Given that by now I was the fifth Beatle, I had to act out the role I would have assumed in the film had I been around at the time. I spent the whole trip to Leamington Spa singing similarly. And all the time I was singing, it was for the benefit of that somebody else.

Now somewhere along the family history line I missed out on the ‘talking to people you fancy is easy’ gene. Maybe it is this missing gene in science-minded people that has prompted research into genetic engineering. In artistic people I suppose it has just given rise to thousands of songs about unrequited love. The lack of the gene in my own peculiar genetic makeup was evident before I had reached the age of ten. It should have been easy, on the face of it, because what would be suspicious about two girls having a conversation. Nobody would bat an eyelid or cast an aspersion. But heaven help me if the truth got out; the horror, the public shaming, the stigma; I couldn’t risk it. So I didn’t.

Unfortunately Daisy Elphick did not comprehend the rather obvious implications of my tying her ponytail to the back of her chair. Neither did the teacher. It was the oldest trick in the book, and she should have known that the act represented not a desire to hurt or injure, but an indication that I was completely smitten. I didn’t see the funny side when I spent the next playtime stuck in the classroom. And neither did Sarah Lyons realise the exact intentions behind my gift of five rubber pencil-tops; the bendy character things you stick on the top of your pencil to stop you chewing the wood. Such a gift was supposed to be the pinnacle of romance (well, it was the best I could come up with at the time). Still, lucky for me she didn’t tell her boyfriend, who was the most influential boy in the school and I was hoping he might take me to watch Villa play one day. [Incidentally, being a coward has its advantages: the ability to run very quickly helped my cross-country running career at big school a short time later].

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though: to suggest that would be misleading. I plucked up enough courage at Sunday School to ask Simone if I could kiss her hand and she duly obliged. And I remember a quite lengthy game of kiss-chase with Paula who lived across the road when the house next-door-but-one was still a building site. And, as clear as the day is long, the crestfallen face of Shirley Wilson when I told her I didn’t want to go to the pictures with her remains firmly lodged in my childhood recollections. She and Kathleen Shaw were standing by the sinks in the cloakroom, washing out the paint pots and brushes we’d been using. I was drying my hands having just rinsed out the glue pots. Maybe it was the vapours from the glue that did it, but out of the blue came Shirley’s rather clumsy and vague suggestion that I may want to go out somewhere with her. We were only eight or nine so I can see now how brave a move this must have been. However her socks were a greyish white instead of proper white, so the snobby reply (“No.”) was delivered with the sensitivity you could expect from an eight year old not used to being propositioned. This wasn’t to be the last proposition I would receive, either. 

Many years later, after a number of awkward advances towards the apples of my eye had been thwarted with implications of bargepoles thrown in for good measure, it happened again. This time I was older and wiser, if not a little merry with festive spirits purchased at the pub down the road. ‘Twas a Christmas holiday evening, the air crisp and chilly, and two

mid-teenage girls sat on the wall at the corner of our street awaiting the last bus home. It being a leap year, one of the pair leapt down from the wall, kissed me on the cheek and asked me to marry her. Instantly thrown by such an intimate advance, I lied, said sorry but I had a girlfriend already and made my way home. Being in my late teens, such assertiveness from women was what I was banking on: why should I have to take all the risks? But I suppose it was inevitable that the familiar yellow streak in me should reappear, and the next evening when I walked past at exactly the same time there were no women in sight.

The first proper girlfriend I had was Jennifer Oldham. We got together after several ‘chance’ meetings, conjured up by one or the other of us without the other ever guessing the intent behind the coincidences. In the end it was down to a mutual friend to grasp the nettle and tell it like it was. Eventually we met under agreed circumstances. From the start I wasn’t convinced our mutual friend had got the right lass, but I went with the flow regardless. I was sixteen at the time. We walked round the school grounds. We walked into town. We walked through the park. On Valentine’s Day I had a family ‘do’ and she was working, so we went out the next night: I booked us tickets for the theatre (Shakespeare’s ‘A Comedy of Errors’). Whilst I waited for her outside the market hall I was groped by one of a drunken group of men who then slapped me hard across the cheek, bloodying my nose in the process. 

When Jennifer arrived she thanked me for the card I had sent. I then gave her the card I had bought her, which I hadn’t sent because I didn’t know her address. One of my closer friends confessed a week later. One week and a day later Jennifer asked if we could just be friends, and … well, you can guess what happened next. I concluded that our mutual friend must indeed have got the wrong lass, because Jennifer and Fiona lasted months rather than the two and a half weeks that we had lasted. I didn’t even hold her hand, you know: I didn’t have the confidence to try. Pathetic, really, but such is life.

I was single for quite a long time after that. Ten years, to be precise. I learned to shrug off the nudging neighbours and the gossip-hungry aunts of the family who were all desperate for me to find someone to settle down with. I thought this might be Serena. We met at a conference for social workers and she admired my Housemartins pin badge. Serena wasn’t a social worker.  She was in a much better job, with much better prospects, was well-educated and seemed to come from a good family. Appearances aren’t everything though. After we’d been going out for six months she got kicked out of her flat. She had been defaulting on the rent, it transpired - God knows where the money went, but it certainly wasn’t on me. Obviously there was more to it than just that, though I never properly worked out what. We lived together for a month while I helped her find a place of her own. I had flatmates and exams to think about, and she needed independence and to keep her job. 

Eventually Serena found a room in a shared house down by the river, an old townhouse that had three floors, an attic and a converted basement. She quickly developed new friendships, but also  developed a drinking problem that took us as far as the local casualty unit. Serena found new pleasure in the attentions of men old enough to be her dad, in the joys of red wine, and in having nothing much to do during the day other than drink, be merry, think dark thoughts, and sleep. 

After one binge Serena locked herself in the bathroom with a bunch of razor blades, a bottle of Paul Masson and a couple of packets of Paracetamol, screaming for her long lost mother. She screamed for five hours until four in the morning when I eventually realised that no matter what I said no difference was being made, that she might now have swallowed her stash, and I called the ambulance. When we got to Casualty she got out of the ambulance, threw up on the paramedic, punched a nurse, said she thought I was on her side, and then swore at me as I followed her all the way home. When she eventually woke up in the late morning, I suggested things may not be working out. Not the best of timing, but I didn’t want to go the same way. Serena swore at me, again and started throwing every single bit of furniture in her room at me. I beat my retreat, with further missiles raining down from the third storey window out of which she was leaning. It went quiet for a day or two. Then the malicious and threatening phone calls. The blokes she was hanging out with knew people (apparently) and she knew where I lived (definitely). Fearing GBH I phoned in sick, posted my resignation to the council, and left town for good. 

Six weeks later I bumped into one of the men she had befriended. I had to do a double-take - why would he be in the village after all? - and thought I might have been able to duck out of sight. I crossed the road but it was too late; he’d seen me. We talked, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. He even gave me a fiver to pay for the carafe of wine Serena had downed that night. It came in useful; not for wine, because I haven’t had a drink since that evening, but there was a new record out that I wanted to buy. He told me that Serena was pregnant, which came as something of a surprise, the sort of surprise that feels like a ten-ton-truck hitting you (I would imagine). He also told me that he thought the only reason Serena had ended up pregnant was because I had broken her heart. I’d had to do it for my own sanity of course, but for this, Serena, I am sorry.

Text and images copyright John Hartley 2025

The Book of Apologies: The Hair Puller

The playground was fun. At first it was just a great big square of tarmac, with a grass edge. At the opposite end of the playground to the classroom were grass mountains, which backed onto one of the old farms. Another farm provided the right hand border. We weren’t allowed on the grass mountains; not until the summer when we were then given permission to move from the knee-shredding gravel and onto the softer, more natural surface. Of course, by the time summer arrived we were older. Even a matter of a few months helped us realise that these grass mountains were nothing more than landscaped bumps. Not that we knew the word ‘landscape’ at that age. We did know the word ‘bump’ though; every time one of us poor young souls tripped over the shoelaces we could not yet tie, we would be treated to tea and sympathy (but without the tea) from the teacher on duty.

“Oh,” they would sigh, “have you bumped your knee?” or whichever part of our tiny anatomies it was. Of course we had: how else would you account for the blood and grit mound on the offending body part. We hadn’t learned sarcasm at that age, either, so would make do with a tearful grunt to the affirmative. These injuries led us towards the first meaningful play I can remember. Richard and myself would hurtle up to the far end of the playground from the classroom as fast as we could. Louise, who was in the year above us, wore her coat undone, with her arms out of the sleeves, and just the hood over her head to keep the garment in place. She wanted to be a nurse. Richard and I would take it in turns to invent an injury, which the young nurse could then treat. This was play at its most innocent. We were treated to concern and affection from Louise. Louise made playtimes something to look forward to: forward beyond the packet of potato puffs that would come with a free football card inside, the quarter pint bottle of milk that was always too warm to enjoy and the promise of ten minutes away from learning. I didn't want to learn. I wanted to play.

Within two years though we were moved up the school, into what was known as the middle building, being as it was the middle of three buildings. The middle building had its own playground. This was called the middle playground, being as it was the middle of three playgrounds. Here we were faced with older boys and girls who were inevitably bigger, stronger, louder and in charge of the playground. Playing football on the netball courts at playtime was the only way to mix. In the summer we were allowed to go onto the playing fields if it hadn’t been raining. Despite geography, it never seemed to be raining in those early summers.

It was on these playing fields that I made the fastest sprint of 100 yards possibly ever witnessed. Being June, the weather had been rather warm, and as we merrily played at lunchtime we were too engrossed to notice the storm brewing ahead. Nobody noticed the first flash of lightning. No one except me. It wasn’t even a flash: it lasted too long. I saw it from the far end of the field and immediately raced to the school end, where the dinner ladies were sitting on deckchairs making sure nobody maimed themselves on the goalposts. At this stage I still wasn’t completely at ease with the concept of thunder and lightning. I was only eight. By the time I had made it to the school end, the flash was still decorating the slate grey sky behind me. In a state of complete panic I pointed to the fork, which must have spread out across at least three miles on the horizon, and urged the dinner ladies to get us all inside, quick. Even at that tender age I

was worried that someone would get killed. Amazingly, the dinner ladies laughed off my concerns and told me not to be silly. (It wasn’t raining, so why go to all the effort of packing everything up?) After what had seemed like an age, the air was filled with the most tremendous rumble. Everyone bar no one - except the dinner ladies of course - screamed like they had never screamed before. That was nearly two hundred school children, a noise great enough to drown out the thunder. Only the threat of mass panic (as opposed to my solitary panic) prompted the dinnerladies into action, and we were immediately invited to return to our classrooms to read old copies of the ‘Beano’ and ‘Whizzer and Chips’, or to “draw a nice picture”. The storm lasted the whole afternoon and people not far away from the school were killed by the lightning. I hoped that had taught the dinnerladies a lesson in doubting my storm-spotting credentials. It certainly rained that afternoon too; it rained so hard the old mill a mile away disappeared, prompting some of us with more active imaginations to suggest it was a ghost mill. 

After a few years we again moved, this time to the upper playground. Here we had much more space for football. At the far end of the playground was a narrow blue iron gate, which was padlocked. Through the rails of the gate we could see the outside world. The outside world looked like a good place to be; the view from the wrong side of the walls (the school side) was of the village cricket pitch and the Rec; a slide, a roundabout and three swings. This was accompanied by a mass of lush, green grass and the vicarage wall, daubed with the message “Sex Pistols Rule U.K.” along with a letter ‘A’ in a circle. It was by these gates that we used to wait for the coach to take us for the weekly trip to the swimming pool (except for those with verrucas on their feet).

It was by these gates that I let slip my best friend Richard’s biggest secret: he fancied Sarah. He divulged his information whilst we were on the school trip to the Isle of Man. I swore myself to secrecy, but in the heat of a petty disagreement I chose to forget the concept of loyalty. For this I would apologise, but he got exact and immediate revenge by letting slip my biggest ‘secret’ (he’d been teasing me that I fancied Kevin at the time, though the truth of the matter was I’d only let it be known that my crush’s name began with a ‘K’) and the complete and utter embarrassment I endured was, I believe, punishment enough. At least he came out of the incident with dignity, and admitted his feelings. I backtracked instantly, denied all knowledge of the revelations, and wished I had never opened my big mouth. Never again would I divulge the deepest thoughts of a fragile heart. Well, not until the next time…

It was in the middle playground, however, that I faced my biggest shame. This was even an even bigger shaming than when I was pulled out of assembly for talking. I was only telling someone in front of me to shut up, because they were talking when they shouldn’t have been. Unfortunately, by being such a goody-goody, I too was talking when I shouldn’t have been, and it was me who got spotted. I was hauled to the front of the hall and given two great wallops by our corporal-punishment-favouring headmaster. I wet myself and pleaded to go to the toilet. I had only been trying to help. I wouldn’t ever learn. 

No, the biggest shame stemmed from the middle playground, at morning playtime. Fresh from that warm quarter pint of milk and the packet of crisps (although by now we had moved away from those packets with free football trading cards in them), a group of us played by the red brick wall that stood five feet tall and separated the playground from the classrooms. There must have been about ten of us, boys and girls, and we were playing tag. Darting around and weaving through each other’s random routes, avoiding whoever was ‘it’. By the law of averages, it ultimately became my turn to be ‘it’, and I leaped around trying to make enough contact with someone else to be free again. I got Paul. Which was fine, except that when Paul left the moment of contact, a wadge of his hair remained entangled in my fingers. I don’t know how it got there. Well, I do: I worked it out eventually. Obviously Paul was in a bit of pain, and I didn’t know what to do apart from say ‘I didn’t do it on purpose’; I didn’t. The game continued. Paul disappeared.

A few minutes later I found myself being pulled from the playground by my own hair, which was in the firm grip of the deputy head, Mr. Whelan. The new hall (which was the assembly hall, the gym and the dinner hall all in one) through which I was marched seemed much longer than usual and the corridor to the staff room much quieter. I think I panicked; I felt nauseous, as though I had just swallowed the contents of the stagnant pond into which I had fallen two years previously. When I fell into the pond (not deep, but very cold on account of it being covered in ice) I just got told I had been stupid and not to expect any sympathy. This time my protestations of innocence fell on deaf ears, and I was sentenced to a whole month’s ban from the playground. Technically, I suppose I wasn’t innocent: that I pulled out that hair was beyond all doubt. I did feel a little aggrieved, however, that the intent (or lack of it) was never brought into Mr. Whelan’s kangaroo court.

Despite my punishment (and it was some punishment: four weeks solitary confinement, nothing to do but write lines and complete extra maths work), I still feel a sense of injustice. However, that cannot compete with the pain that Paul must have felt when his follicles parted company with his scalp. For this pain, Paul,  I am sorry.

Text and images copyright John Hartley 2025

The Book of Apologies: The Collector

 

The Collector

Going to my grandmother’s house was always something of an adventure. Not just because of where she lived, which was - or at least felt like it was - in the middle of nowhere. To reach her house we would get in dad’s car which rattled its way down winding oak-lined lanes behind which flat farmland stretched out to the coast and the sand plains of Southport, across an unmanned level crossing (which always carried with it an added sense of trepidation as there were no barriers, just a clanging bell and flashing lights to alert us to impending collision with a train full of daytrippers), down a narrow, twisty slope to cross a weir that would flood occasionally, then back up, then past a windmill or two before arriving at her cottage.

No, the adventure was more about what we would find when we got to her house. Technically, I suppose these days she would be classed as a hoarder, but the house was never like those you see on the television with rooms piled high with pointless peripherals, rotting food, a sock that has neither been worn nor washed since the 1950s, half a rat … There was order in my grandmother’s house. Loads of stuff, yes, piles and piles of it, but at least it was in order, and there was a definite point to it. My cousins described her as “eccentric”, which is possibly a gentle way of describing someone who is losing the plot. Grandmother wasn’t losing the plot, but neither was she conventional.

My grandmother was an avid reader, and bought books by the dozen. She kept the books on an array of different bookshelves, which lined every wall in every room except the kitchen, all higgledy-piggledy as there was no planning to the storage - she would just run out of space, visit a local jumble sale, and buy the biggest available bookcase they had on offer. To look at the bookshelves was a visual nightmare. There was no colour co-ordination, no thought to height or thickness and the impact this might have on the overall aesthetic. Not even any logical categorisation; it looked as though these hundreds, thousands of books were just randomly dumped, symptoms of a chaotic mind. 

However, this was not true. Indeed, my grandmother had a very specific logic. The logic started in the upstairs bedroom that had once been the bedroom of my dad (but, also, her own bedroom as a child), then next to it was that of his sister when she was born, then next to that their brother when he arrived, then winding along the landing and into the hall, into the front ‘sitting’ room, the dining room, then the back ‘living’ room before ending in the hall. Moving clockwise around each room from the doorway, the shelves contained every single book my grandmother had bought in chronological order of purchase. This was her logic: the books, she said, were her life story. You could pick a book at random and she would be able to tell you how old she was when she bought it, where she had bought it (with 90% accuracy) and what was going on in her world and the wider world at the time she bought it.

It wasn’t just books she kept though. In the now redundant bedrooms were piled high dozens and dozens of cardboard boxes, all containing collections of things that were important to her. The prized collection of Readers Digest could be found in several boxes stacked neatly in one corner, carefully positioned to create cardboard corridors within the room that were sturdy enough to not topple; across the gangway another stack containing every single copy of the Radio Times she had bought. Another box or six might contain postcards from places she had visited and holidayed at. Others still contained letters from cousins, friends, people she had met on holiday, some girl she had struck up a conversation with in the queue for an ice cream at Camber Sands in the 1920s … All of this, she said, was her life; her memories, prompts for when the day came that she lost her marbles and couldn’t remember anything. 

I suppose it was inevitable then that my dad would inherit this gene, although thankfully my grandfather’s DNA managed to dilute it somewhat. Dad’s collections were more manageable, and possibly sufficiently socially acceptable enough to not have him marked as ‘eccentric’ or, as his mother would say without any hint of irony, “one of those weirdos”. He collected cigarette cards even though he didn’t smoke, of footballers and cricketers and, perhaps not surprisingly given the copious amounts of tea drunk in our family, the cards that came in packets of Brooke Bond tea. It helped that Mr. Prince, who lived across the back street from us, had a job in the packing factory for them and he was able to secure the collection books and the odd bundle of cards to support the habit. 

Mum didn’t mind this level of collecting. She could see there was a point to it, and because the collections were all properly housed and cared for and, perhaps significantly, could fit together in boxes that could go up in the loft, out of sight. She didn’t mind either that Dad tried to pass down the love of collecting to me. He tried with stamps, but I really couldn’t be doing with those irritating bits of adhesive plastic that folded back on themselves to mount a small square of perforated paper which had what might be a lovely picture on it obliterated by a dirty black postmark into a book that told me that what I had just held was of valuable historical interest. The first set of stamps of Elizabeth II’s reign? Excuse me whilst I stifle a yawn. He tried with coins too, but they just made my hands feel grubby and it was difficult to keep them in any order. Sometimes I would get out the huge old coffee tin in which he kept them and empty it out onto the carpet - usually when Mum wasn’t there so she wouldn’t see the mess I made on the carpet; there were still rogue coffee grounds in the tin after thirty years - then sort them into chronological order, or country of origin. I would have to be very bored to do that though.

I did, however, begin to collect stickers when I got older. I must have been in my early teens when Smash Hits launched a sticker collection. They were probably inspired by the Panini football stickers that the boys at school collected although, much as I loved football, it was difficult for a girl to get engaged in the swap system for duplicates. I always knew I was getting mugged off; even though I knew that the rarity value of a Trevor Francis was worth at least four Raith Rovers double player stickers, I’d only ever be allowed to swap on a one-for-one basis. Consequently my collections were always incomplete and I remained unfulfilled. With the Smash Hits stickers I was at least able to trade on a level playing field, as both boys and girls were collecting them. This included my older cousin, Lucinda.

Lucinda was Dad’s sister’s eldest daughter, and despite Dad being the eldest of the siblings I was the youngest of the cousins. Lucinda was four years older than me, and was not unknown to pull rank if she needed to. One spring - it must have been Easter - we went to stay with them in their big house in the Yorkshire Dales. My collection of stickers was almost complete. So too was Lucinda’s. I think she had five left to get, whilst I had twenty one. At the back of the sticker book was an address you could write off to to get any stickers you were missing, by sending a postal order or a cheque. However you were limited to a maximum of, well, it must have been twenty; I suggested you could write off with two different names but Lucinda said they would check the address and you would just lose your money. 

Thinking about it now, I seem to remember she had said that after we had looked through each others’ swaps, and she knew she had one of the stickers I was missing whilst I had all five of her ‘want’s. Which meant she could complete her collection there and then and I would have to wait. I thought the exchange would be easy, not least because she would be getting five stickers and only surrendering one of her own duplicates. I watched as Lucinda gleefully peeled off Nik Kershaw, the left half of the Thompson Twins, Chaka Khan, Howard Jones, then a Spandau Ballet full band sticker, and placed them with relish into her sticker book before closing it with a slam of satisfaction and dancing around the room cheering her completist success. I waited for the celebrations to subside, before gently enquiring if I could have her Johnny Marr sticker, the one I needed to take me to the twenty-left threshold and the only one I needed that she had in her duplicates.

It was almost as if I had asked her to defecate and eat her own bodily creation warmed up in custard. Good god no, she said, I couldn’t have that. I didn’t like the Smiths, she said (I did, but that was clearly beside the point) and anyway she had promised it to Sean Graham from church who said he would take her to McDonalds if she let him have it and it would be unChristian of her to go back on a promise. I felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach. I felt as though I had been betrayed, which was also unChristian. Lucinda maintained that she never agreed that I could have the sticker, and that she thought I was happy to just let her have my swaps because I didn't need them. I considered telling Dad, but he would just have had a row with his sister and then the whole weekend would have been ruined for everyone, not just me. 

Not that the weekend was ruined for me - that sounds a bit over-dramatic. It has stuck with me for a long time though, and not because I didn’t get the sticker. Because I did get the sticker. When we were packing up to leave at the end of the weekend, I was duly dispatched back upstairs to check I hadn’t left anything behind. It turned out I had … I decided I had left behind a sticker of Johnny Marr, one I must have left somewhere towards the middle of a five-centimetre-high pile of Lucinda’s swaps. I slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans, and when I got home I stuck it carefully in its rightful place between Morrissey and Andy Rourke, before making a note of the remaining twenty vacant slots, getting Mum to write a cheque and posting off to secure my own completion.

I didn’t quite feel the same elation as displayed by Lucinda when the stickers arrived, and the final sticker placement left me feeling somewhat empty. In a later phone call I remember Dad telling Mum that Lucinda had been really angry with me because some boy called Sean had dumped her for Andrea Smith and it was because I had stolen one of her stickers. Mum said she must be mistaken, because she knew she had written a cheque when I sent off for the last few stickers to complete my book. I am not sorry that taking the sticker meant Lucinda didn’t get to go out with Sean. She knew the deal, and as far as I can see (and still do; sorry if you’re reading this Lucinda - I love you and you’ve been a great cousin over the years, but, come on - YOU KNEW!) she reneged on it. However, I stooped to her level of deviousness and acted in a way that could be described as unChristian, and for that I am sorry.

Text and images copyright John Hartley 2025

 

The Book of Apologies: Notes from an Apologist

 

Notes from an Apologist

Regrets, sang Frank Sinatra; he’d had a few, but not enough to mention. Edith Piaf had none whatsoever. Sorry seemed to be the hardest word for Elton John meanwhile, although I bet he’s never had a crack at pronouncing that really long Welsh village name. If he had, it would put things into perspective for him I’m sure. I know all of this because I grew up with these records, played frequently on the old Dansette my mum and dad had in the living room.

The word ‘apology’ hasn’t always meant the same as ‘sorry’. It could be argued that it often still doesn’t … The Old English word sarig included in its meanings expressions of grief, sadness or sorrow. ‘Regret’ meanwhile has its origins in Old French, with similar meanings. The word ‘apology’ has its roots in Greek, with a literal translation being along the lines of ‘away from speech’ and was more a defence of what others might believe to be wrong rather than an admission of fallibility from the perpetrator.

We all make mistakes. It is part of the human anatomy. That statement in itself might be a mistake. I am not a scientist, psychiatrist, psychologist or any other person with similar expertise. I’m just an administrator in the sort of office you walk past every day without even noticing. However, it is a statement made in good faith. Should I say ‘sorry’ if I am wrong? I don’t know. I’ll let you decide. I can however offer my apologies.

What you will find in these pages are the stories of an assembly of apologists. I have been unable to find a collective noun for people who want to say ‘sorry’. Perhaps a church of apologists might be better, given that the whole point of going to church is to catch up on the latest gossip and have a nice cup of coffee and moan about the vicar’s sermon. Sorry, I mean to repent one’s sins. I apologise. The tales beyond this introduction were sourced from responses to an advert I wrote on a postcard and popped in the window of the post office up the road. I paid £1.20 for the privilege of having it there for a month alongside adverts for a Man With A Van, a clarinet for sale, a cleaner available five mornings per week who could provide references and a clean bill of health, and a couple of other adverts which seemed to indicate less salubrious professions. 

That is a lie. Actually, all of the above paragraph is a lie. A deliberate lie, at that. They are my tales, my stories; my apologies. I don’t claim to be perfect, far from it. Unlike Madame Piaf,  I have regrets, and unlike Old Blue Eyes there are many more than I care to mention in these pages. 

I hope you enjoy these stories. If not, then …

Alex x

Text and images copyright John Hartley 2025