Short Stories to Entertain

What would the world have done without cherries? That first bite. That immediate hint of things to come. That’s the thing, isn’t it, the exhilaration of the first bite of anything. The way the mind unscrambles, races to understand what is happening. The outpouring of emotion or the realisation that things just might be about to change. But that bite of the cherry goes hand in hand with taking the plunge. It’s so hard to achieve the first without embracing the second.  Take starting a relationship. Someone attracts you. What’s the immediate question? Are they attracted to you? To find out you buy a carton of cherries, pick one, take a bite, take the plunge and hope for the best. It’s universal. Everyone gets one chance, one bite. Sure you can have a second nibble at the same fruit but… failure the first time doesn’t make the second chance any easier. In short, if a cherry appears in your radar, sharpen your teeth, open wide and take as big a bite as possible then dive headfirst and ...

D onald Dunkerson, known within his tight circle as   The Grand Old Master,   resembled how you might imagine Doctor Foster might look, perhaps after the huge bunch of miles and many days or even weeks it took him to finally achieve one of the most rain drenched and futile journeys of all time. And incidentally Donald lived in Gloucester and is, or at least had been, a doctor which eminently qualified him to recognise that being drenched at one in the morning could adversely affect someone approaching their ninetieth birthday. It is easy to assume that his saturated condition was due to some fairly tedious and persistent rainfall but that is not the case - the three firemen who extracted him from the well can attest to that.   Donald or Don as his neighbours called him or simply Dunkers as he was known all those years ago at boarding school where he learnt, more than anything else, to vigorously defend food, probably represented one of the last products of a bygone age. T...