fleece

On the same morning the local paper ran a story about a German bus-driver convicted of penetrating two golden retrievers, Kevin Miller chewed his toast thoughtfully and wiped his buttery finger…

In Dublin you can get a cappuccino two minutes from anywhere, says the girl on the travel show. I bet you can get a blowjob two minutes from anywhere also, in old Dublin town. But this is the l…

At the top of Baldwin Street Dunedin, there’s an enormous man lying in bed, in the drizzling rain. At the moment he’s satellited by four regular sized people, and to keep him dry they’ve built …

They hurled obscenities at the sun.
Shit! Godammit!
Get the fuck out of my sky!
they demanded.
We can’t have lens flare
on national television.
Viewers have expectations.

But before t…

At about half-past midnight, David Gannon leaned out over the rail from the top of the pedestrian ramp that provided access to the platform of Tyrell Street Station. To anyone watching, he migh…

You can’t figure out what’s wrong with a marriage by pulling it apart and looking at all the pieces. You’ll never get it back together again. Kate and I spent an entire summer deconstructing ou…

The other day my sister confessed to me that she no longer says fuck in front of the dog, due to the slim possibility that it’s the reincarnation of a dead relative.

I told her to stop being…

My friend Debbie says getting divorced is like finding yourself washed up on the world’s ugliest beach. Every aspect of your life becomes the shell of something so distasteful you wonder why Go…

I’ve just added "learning to eat with chopsticks" to the list of 100 things I don’t want to do before I die.

Also, I no longer want to go to Anchorage. Not without you. I’d rather potter aro…

Today, you will punch a skeleton.

That level of detail would renew my faith in horoscopes.

Sagittarius: Through a panto horse-head you’ll nibble at the finger-food as best you can, but …

For three weeks I wore the underpants of the undead.

This is what happened.

Before Christmas, the man who lives next door to me got sick. Cancer. When he was too ill to stay at home, he w…

“How did you get that scar?”

“I was hit by a dog?”

“You mean attacked?”

“No, hit. In the head. By a Chihuahua. When I was eight.”

“Stop it.”

“It’s true. We were on the way to the…

It begins at the station on a Monday morning. An overly full carriage of white-collar soup has been upturned all over the platform, in the form of a petulant rush-hour crowd too big for its…

Smile.

Shake.

Kiss.

Smile.

Find a new partner and do it again. This dance is called catch-up-with-everyone. You have to do it with each person in the room before you’re allowe…

To get from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus to the Temple of Artemis, the man rides a 12-speed bicycle. For three days, he pedals into a light breeze up and down the hills of an ancient Hittite …