New desk, you carry a weight of hope and expectation equal to the heaviness of your solid, aged oak body. You’re not supposed to be here, in this corner of my basement study-cum-recreation room. My mind’s eye pictured you up in the bright and airy attic, next to the big window that gazes Cyclops-like over the plains of Worcestershire and next door’s garden. In winter, that room puckers with cold; in summer, it pants with heat. Yet in its physical location atop my teetering 4-storey house, there lies an appealing, cerebral elevation which, I felt sure, would infuse me each time I sat down at you to write, on those many, many days when the words are a sticky jumble in my brain and, the more I try to unpick them, the more gluey my fingers become. No, you weren’t supposed to be here, in this dark, viewless corner by the downstairs bathroom-cum-laundry-room, in the basement that is cold all year round (in summer, deliciously so). As I type now, the washing machine chunters and whines behind the pulled-to door. [...]

It occurs to me that the relationship I have with my dog, Bella, is akin to the faintly exasperated affection of a too-long-married couple. Frequently, she regards me with a disdain more appropriate to on-the-turn milk. For much of the day, she appears indifferent to my existence, her interest in me being chiefly a by-product of breakfast and dinnertime, or a need to empty her bladder. Our evenings are a mildly cantankerous contest for supremacy on the sofa, her arsenal of bony leg-pokes and pungent farts pitted against my increasingly irritable sighs, shuffles, and muttered curses. She snores like a donkey, switches allegiance in a blink to anyone who will feed her and/or rub her belly, and only ever has a wash under duress. I’m certainly not one of those owners who finds all their dog’s foibles charming. She can be downright maddening, can Bella. On walks, I am sometimes driven to distraction by her frenzied purloining of dog poop and other dubious products of nature’s pantry, and her insistence that she must walk on the inside of the pavement [...]

This blog is dedicated to my Grandad, so I’d like you to meet him. He was a proper, old-fashioned grandad: slightly egg-shaped, with braces and a flat cap, two smart beige coats (one for winter, one for summer), and shoes polished to a squeak. His diet consisted mainly of things fried in lard and dished up with Grandma’s chewy mashed potato, supplemented with lurid little cakes wrapped in marzipan, jam tarts, Bourbon biscuits, mint humbugs, treacle sponge with lumpen custard, Cadbury’s Bournville chocolate… Unsurprisingly, I never met my Grandad’s real teeth: both he and Grandma sported full sets of dentures whose constant grinding and clacking seemed to convey annoyance at their confinement within those particular oral cavities. Like every old person I knew, Grandad also drank cup after cup of tea, which he never could sup without slurping. That was the only trait of his that I found vexing. His pensioner’s life was tethered to routines as predictable as the tides, with Grandma as the sturdy little vessel that kept him afloat and a wing-backed fireside chair as his anchor. [...]