A Life More Ordinary

Running backwards, forwards and sideways in time.

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Writer. 52 years old with a tendency to overthink and overshare. Likes to create worlds and people. Dad. Survivor. Rubbish at writing bio entries.

  • Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale

     We left Teignmouth after Mum and Dad separated, although I’m not too sure of the hows and the whys involved in moving out of the town. In fact, thinking about it, it must have been a little while after the split that we moved because more stuff happened before we made our way out to Ideford, but there is time enough for those stories in other parts of this blog.

    In my head, I’ve settled more or less for the summer of 1982 being the time that we arrived in the little village that holds a very special place in my heart. The Falklands War was drawing to a close as Captain Sensible was about to top the charts with Happy Talk, although I don’t believe that the two events are related. It would be quite the claim for Raymond Burns, the punk founder of The Damned, if that were the case, although his foray into British politics with the creation of the Blah Party in September 2006 would at the very least suggest that he had more than just a passing interest in the affairs of state.

    Elsewhere, ABC’s The Lexicon of Love, the fourth best-selling album of the year, reached number one in the UK charts. The hugely enjoyable televisual extravaganza, ‘It’s a Knockout’, aired its final episode, as did the mysteriously terrifying Sapphire and Steel. Gandhi won eight Academy awards including Best Picture and in the World Cup, England were eliminated at the second group stage following a goalless draw with a Spain side who had earlier lost in the group stages to Northern Ireland, courtesy of a late Gerry Armstrong goal. The Mary Rose, flagship of Henry VIII was raised from the Solent while Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ was published, a book that I would eventually read and enjoy immensely.

    I hope that the residents of Ideford will forgive me if I describe the village as unremarkable. It’s about four miles out of Teignmouth, up over the golf course and beyond, down narrow, twisting roads that are hellish to drive along and pretty much in the middle of nowhere. In the early to mid-eighties, during our time there, Ideford contained a pub (The Royal Oak, which is still there), a post office that looked suspiciously like somebody’s house that now looks exactly like somebody’s house and is no longer a post office and a garage that fixed cars but didn’t sell anything (to the best of my knowledge). There were a couple of phone boxes and the remaining one was doubling up as a marvellous book exchange on my last trip back. And a church. As in there was also a church, the phone box wasn’t purporting to be a place of worship, I suspect it’s a tad trickier to contact a higher power than hoping they’ll accept a reverse charge call.

    We lived at number one, Church Road. The first of a row of eight houses (two blocks of four) on a hill that, surprisingly enough, overlooked the church. Being in the end house had its advantages; we had an enormous garden that surrounded the three unattached sides of the house. At the front, there was a small-ish lawn with a beautiful Chinese Lantern tree in the corner. Looking outward from the house to the left of the lawn was a vast expanse of about 25-30 metres where we built a couple of fishponds, the largest of which would leak during the summer, so we would regularly have to refill it by carrying a huge stew pan full of water from the kitchen and emptying it carefully into the pond so as not to create any more damage to the fragile lining. That stew pan was heavy and transporting it from the kitchen was no mean feat when one had biceps like gnat bites. The other pond, further away from the house, was essentially a large, plastic tub sunk into the ground and filled with water and plants. The area in which it was located was quite overgrown and we would regularly see frogs and toads in the water. During the winter, it would freeze over with ice so thick that we were unable to break it, but somehow whatever was living in it managed to survive.

    Alongside the house ran a sloping lawn, although I use the term lawn loosely. It was long enough to be able to set up a full-length cricket wicket, although the covering of grass was sparse to say the least – I suspect that batting on that deck prepared me for playing at the likes of Storrington, St Peters and those other dodgy wickets that I encountered in my adulthood. At the back of the house, a long garden stretched off into the distance. This was where we grew our vegetables during the summer (whether we had a love of gardening or not, we were all expected to take part) and I have vague memories of a rabbit hutch, home to the white furred and red-eyed ‘Fluffy’, in front of a D.I.Y. corrugated iron fence on the right of the garden, opposite the shed. I don’t remember what happened to Fluffy, but I think perhaps I shouldn’t ponder on it for too long given the paucity of food offerings that we often had to contend with. Behind that corrugated iron fence, we would regularly build dens that doubled up as spaceships or gangsters hideouts, furnished with bits of old carpet and whatever else we could find, oblivious to any bugs that might be living in the trees or bushes.

    Korky, our cantankerous, black cat named after the cover star of the comic, The Dandy, came with us to our new home from Teignmouth. I would hazard a guess to suggest that she was loved by few in the family and had probably learned the hard way to make herself scarce when voices were raised and tempers flared. I’ve always loved animals and have been fortunate enough to have always been in a position to have pets. Korky, however, challenged that love of animals after an incident that took place shortly after we had moved into our new home. It was a grey day, deep in the middle of winter and it was cold enough for us to have lit the fire in the lounge. I heard Korky at the back door, miaowing to come in, so at my father’s request, I went to ‘do the honours’. With the door open and the heat rapidly escaping, Korky then decided to just sit on the back doorstep and miaow some more. Hastened by my father’s demand to ‘shut that bloody door’, I bent down and scooped Korky up in my arms, smiling as she nestled into my woolly jumper that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a lighthouse keeper.

    Closing the back door, we crept back into the kitchen at the precise moment that my Dad chose to clear his throat with a ‘harrumph’ that closely resembled the sound of a foghorn. Korky panicked, twisting in my arms in a bid to escape the frightful racket. However, in her agitated state, one of her claws became caught on the fabric of my jumper. As I tried to calm her enough so that I could free her, she wriggled and writhed like some sort of evil dervish, swiping at my face with her other front paw and scratching just below my right eye and catching the bridge of my nose. As I screamed in surprise and my father charged into the kitchen, Korky became more traumatized and decided that the best thing to do would be to bite my right ear lobe before finally freeing herself from her temporary incarceration and fleeing through the lounge and up the stairs, swiftly tailed by my cricket-bat wielding father. With blood running down my face and dripping from my ear, I chased after them, insisting that the cat wasn’t at fault but that she had simply been scared. Fortunately, for Korky at least, she found a hiding place out of reach of the said piece of willow and stayed there until the wee small hours, only emerging once a more serene air had settled upon our home.

    It might seem strange, but looking back at the time in Ideford, I’m convinced that this was as good as it got during my childhood. It wasn’t great and I still went through things that I shouldn’t have had to go through, but there were also times when I think I was genuinely as happy as I could be. For obvious reasons, it’s not an emotion that comes naturally to me and it’s only been the last few years that I have felt worthy of admitting feeling it to myself, let alone anyone else. For a long time, if I said that I was ‘ok’ that was ‘my happy’ and I believed that life would never be any better than that. Of course, I still live in fear of everything falling apart, but I’ve got better at recognising happiness and enjoying it for what it is at the time. Happiness often strikes me as the most temporary of emotions, harder to cling on to than anything else. I’ve always preferred to feel content rather than happy. It’s less far to fall when the next thing goes wrong.

    It’s perhaps no surprise that the village of Ideford would go on to feature in the books that I would write, renamed as Ivyford. I had to add a couple of things to the village, such as a cricket pitch and a water mill, but most of the village described on the page is accurate. I’m pretty sure that events of Stand Against the Dark were first dreamed up among the leafy lanes of the village, perhaps even the first plot ideas were born there and then pushed to the back of my head to bake for a few years. Whenever I write about the village though, it always feels to me like I’m going home and that’s the biggest compliment that I can give it. I regularly pop back to soak up the atmosphere if I’m ever running dry on inspiration and it’s one of my very favourite places in the whole Universe. It’s probably just as well that there has never been a cricket pitch in the village, I may never have left.

    I’d changed schools when we moved to the Ideford, although the nearest school was in Bishopsteignton, a couple of miles in the opposite direction to Teignmouth. It took a while to settle in and the early morning bus trips were a time for my mind to wander. At Bishopsteignton, it became obvious to me that the teachers I got on well with would get the best out of me. Living a life at home where the next wallop or bollocking could come out of nowhere meant that I was never going to respond well to discipline or threats. My first teacher was Mr Dunn, who was also in charge of the football team, as was Mr Glenny after Mr Dunn left. Whether or not word got around about my situation at home, I don’t know, but I was happy under these teachers and would do my best on and off the football pitch. It was here that I discovered my love of reading and writing, for once excelling at something all of my own – I’d regularly receive fulsome praise for my spelling and creative writing, completely new territory for me to be in receipt of positive feedback! I was genuinely sad to leave Bishopsteignton when we moved away from Ideford. I was given a football that was signed by all of the team, which meant an awful lot to someone who found friendships and home life difficult. Again, there were moments of contentment there and I’ll be sharing some of my memories of my school days in this blog.

    Life in Ideford wasn’t terrible, perhaps aside from all the walking we would do (including the regular eight mile round trips to Teignmouth and back). Summers always seemed sunny, perhaps now viewed through rose-tinted glasses, and we’d often go walking during the holidays to pick blackberries along the narrow lanes. One time, a particularly juicy-looking harvest caught my eye from across the knee-deep stream that ran through the fields and despite my fear of water, I was tempted enough to brave the foot and a half deep flow, tiptoeing carefully to avoid the small, brown fish that darted around my wellies that were probably a little too big for me. Two or three minutes into my picking stint, I attempted to shuffle back along the stream with my half-full bowl of fruit nestled in the crook of my arm, eyeing up another batch of berries destined for a crumble or pie. However, my welly got stuck in the mud at the bottom of the stream and as I moved back, my foot slid outwards and upwards and I toppled back into the water, earning myself a soaking and a rebuke for losing the aforementioned blackberries from my bowl. I also had to spend the remainder of the afternoon’s expedition in soaking wet clothes – going home to dry out wasn’t an option. After that, country walks were never really high on my list of enjoyable activities.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • This Must be the Place I Waited Years to Leave

    We stayed in Teignmouth for a while, in the Devon-based equivalent of the house from the Amityville Horror movie, after my parents had separated. I remember my Dad being involved in a relationship with a woman named Sharon. I think she was a bit younger than him and if I’d been in a different headspace as a young child from a broken home, I might have been able to appreciate what I’m sure were the many positive facets of her personality. However, I was hurting and I felt that she was trying to replace my mum. Older and wiser now, I’m sure that she wasn’t but through childish eyes that was what I saw and felt. And I behaved accordingly.

    In fact, thinking about it, I’m not even sure that I thought she was trying to replace my mother. I was probably more worried about her taking my Dad away from me. Essentially losing one parent and only seeing them for a handful of days every year was tough enough, I felt abandoned and unbelievably lonely. I think that I must have clung to my Dad after their separation, despite his parenting ‘style’. Even a dysfunctional family set up can be comforting in its own way and the constant comings and goings were unsettling to say the least.

    So, Sharon arrived on the scene and I was suddenly having to compete with someone else for my Dad’s attention. It wasn’t pretty. I was a little shit, rude and thoroughly unpleasant. I would interrupt every opportunity they tried to create to share any intimacy. At Kingsway, the kitchen was at the back of the house and accessed through the hallway. There was a window above the kitchen door and next to the door we had a tall fridge and various piles of domestic detritus. On one occasion, Dad and Sharon escaped to the kitchen, either in search of shenanigans or serenity. Perhaps both. Neither were attainable, thanks to the furious, small child scaling the Hotpoint equivalent of Mount Everest and pressing his tear-stained face up against the dusty windowpane. They did their best to ignore me, but I’m nothing if not persistent when the mood takes me and I earned myself an absolute shoeing that day. Maybe it was justified.

    Shortly afterwards, Sharon broke things off with my Dad and he was only too happy to make sure that I knew it was entirely my fault. It was only when I got older that I understood more about what had happened and I still feel appropriately guilty about how that particular situation unfolded. Maybe that’s why I try to understand why my Dad did the things that he did, he was far from perfect and there was an inordinate amount of trauma behind his actions as there was behind my behaviour back then and the person I am today. Of course, there is no way of knowing how that relationship would have panned out, what it would or wouldn’t have led to. But was I ultimately responsible for the fact that it didn’t work out? Yes, I was. It must have been an awful situation. Yes, I was hurting and I was only a child…perhaps that’s why I try to take responsibility for my own actions as much as possible. It’s all about choices…and sometimes there are only bad choices but we still have to choose.

    The saving grace was that he did find happiness further down the line and that happiness led to him becoming a different person. A better person, I think. A better parent in some ways, because the violent outbursts diminished and eventually stopped completely but there were still areas of our relationship that were fragmented and in many ways beyond repair. The damage, as they say, had already been done.

    Things became even more difficult after the failure of that relationship. I suspect that I was subconsciously aware that through my actions I was at fault and was ultra-keen to make amends. I have no idea why or how my sisters and I ended up at the local tip, but we snuck in and began to poke around, completely oblivious to any potential dangers. This was the late seventies/early eighties after all…

    After a few minutes, we hit the jackpot. Or at least we thought we had. Carrier bags full of discarded beer mats. I imagine the thought processes went something like this:

    Beer mats…Dad likes beer…so he must like beer mats. That’s about it. Nothing more complicated than that. So, we set off for home, weighed down by our haul yet joyous with our potential peace offering. That joy lasted mere seconds upon our arrival, mud-caked shoes and grime-streaked clothes being greeted with an unexpected fury.

    My world turned upside-down. Quite literally as I was grabbed by my right welly, flipped the wrong way up and dragged upstairs towards the bathroom. I was about to suggest that I was quite unaware as to why I had been the one to cop my father’s anger, but in hindsight and considering the previous paragraphs above, it’s probably quite obvious. Upwards I floated, my head banging on each stair until we reached the summit, his rage peaking in time with our movements, his voice rising all the time while he violently shook me by the leg on the landing. In one movement, my foot slipped out of my boot and my back hit the top step. Time stood still as I teetered on the brink, small fingers clutching at the threadbare carpet for what felt like an eternity before I began to slide backwards, tumbling towards the front door in a whirl of terror, oddly aware of the sound of myself screaming as if I was watching on from outside of my body.

    I hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs with a thud, the world spinning, my heart pounding and hot tears running down my face. I could feel the carpet burns on my back and arms, my neck hurt and I felt sick. A sharp pain in my left ankle suggested that I had hit my leg against the banister on the way down. And then, a welcoming blackness swept in.

    I have no recollection of what happened after the incident. I’m guessing that there wasn’t much left to discuss. I’ll make an assumption that my father felt a mixture of regret and relief, although I’m not convinced that either emotion would have been voiced. I would probably have received a drunken apology at some point along with a poorly reasoned attempt at justification. Love most definitely did not live at 178 Kingsway.

    It wasn’t all doom and gloom in Teignmouth but incidents such as the one above were commonplace. It’s fair to say that light-hearted moments were certainly few and far between. There was one mealtime, however, that went down as legendary in our family history. There was a disagreement between myself and at least one of my sisters and for once, it was allowed to play out without physical intervention in the form of a fist or the flat of a hand. I think my Dad may also have encouraged the dispute along its path. Suffice to say that it reached a certain point and I reacted in a particularly irritated and vociferous manner, launching into a verbal tirade as I bravely decided that I would leave the table before everyone had finished (which absolutely was not allowed and will bring me to another, small tale shortly) and storm off in the general direction of the rest of the house.

    After exiting swiftly, with no plan other than to put as much distance between myself and the rest of the family, I thought of one other thing to say, so pushed open the kitchen door. At this point, my Dad picked up one of the used tea bags from the table, whirled around and threw it in my direction just as I opened my mouth to speak. I kid you not, the teabag flew straight into my open mouth, splitting instantly and spilling tea leaves all over my tongue and lips, only serving to enrage me further but causing everyone else to dissolve into one huge, hysterical mess. Eventually, and by that I mean some days later, I managed to see the funny side of it.

    My father was a stickler for rules, especially around the dinner table. Correct use of cutlery was one, noisy eating was not allowed either. The main one, however, was nobody was allowed to leave the table until everyone had finished, which was a constant source of frustration for us all. The flip side, however, was that it offered us siblings the chance to irritate each other, which I think made it all the more entertaining for my father. There was one occasion when some of us were desperate to leave the table to watch something on tv, I can’t recall what exactly. Rachael had different ideas and decided to cut every baked bean on her plate in half and eat those halves one at a time, very slowly. My Dad found it ‘hilarious’ and played along, telling her to take her time, which she did, of course. These were the days before video recording or DVDs, so you generally had one chance to watch something and that was it. We missed whatever televisual extravaganza we’d been pining for and Rachael made whatever point it was that she wanted to make.

    Behaviour like that was fine all the time that Dad thought it was funny, but more often than not dinner would be a stressful affair. There were times when he would throw plates full of food at the wall and we’d be made to clean up the mess and if he was in a particularly bad mood, we’d have to eat the food even if it was covered in hair or dirt or bits of porcelain. We’d often be sat in silence trying not to make even the slightest sound, even to the point of trying to make sure that our knives and forks made no noise when cutting food on the plate. The rules were inconsistent as were his reactions and it made navigating home life unpredictable and at times, terrifying.

    The fluctuating moods of my father and the instability at home were nigh on impossible to understand as children and I’ve no doubt that the destabilisation of the family unit and the lack of parental guidance have a lot to answer for when it comes to the trials and tribulations that we have been through over the years. When Dad was at home we were constantly walking on eggshells and we never received any positive recognition. When he wasn’t there, we felt very much as though we had been left to fend for ourselves. Carole, as the oldest sibling, took much of this on herself but at the age of 12, maybe 13, had little experience in dealing with suddenly being thrust into the role of matriarch while also attempting to make sense of puberty. The result was not good.

    I look back on my days at Kingsway with such sadness. Those formative years of ours are so important when we move from our first stumbling, tentative steps to learn all about the world and the people around us, those people that we hope will be the touchstone for our developing personalities to lean on and learn from and then stand shoulder to shoulder with us to face whatever difficulties the Universe has in store for us until such a time comes that fate intervenes. The love of your parents should be the first thing you experience, the first certainty that you can call on when you are afraid. Unconditional love. That’s not to say that our actions and our choices don’t impact that love or challenge it, in the worst cases even slowly eroding it to a greater or lesser extent. But you can love somebody without necessarily liking the person they are at certain times. It was expected of us, the children. We were expected to love our parents regardless of their actions. So why was it not reciprocated? Why did their love come with unspoken caveats that we were supposed to be aware of in not-so-blissful ignorance?

    I have moments where I want to believe that it was perhaps because they never experienced unconditional love either. I’m pretty damn sure that my father didn’t. When I’m feeling…calm and reasonable, I can make myself ok with that as an explanation. But…I didn’t experience unconditional love as a child, yet I can clearly remember having been on the receiving end of parental frustration and punishment and understanding completely that this was not how things should be. I didn’t parent the way that either of my parents did, which in many ways blows that initial reasoning out of the water.

    I’m not saying that there should be an absence of consequences for our actions, we all have to learn how to get along in the world and even as adults we can struggle with this at times. But consequences within a family environment should be administered with love, surely? Teach with kindness, learn to understand together the rights and wrongs of social interactions. Love completely. Parental love isn’t something to be earned. If you make the decision to bring life into this world, you have a responsibility for that life from day one. You don’t stop being a parent when your child reaches the age of eighteen because to be perfectly frank, your child doesn’t stop needing you then. They don’t stop looking at you for guidance, for understanding, for kindness. For love.

    And that’s a big part of what I think my parents never understood. I may have moved out of Kingsway a long time ago, but for years there was a ghost of my own trapped in that house. Sometimes a ghost isn’t a spirit but a memory and those tortured reminisces of my childhood were just as much a prisoner in that house as the actual ghost was who haunted it. It took an awfully long time to set it free.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • Bridge Over Troubled Water

     It had been a busy day in the seaside town of Teignmouth, the sort of day that publicans loved as it precipitated heaving gardens and thirsty punters. The sun had shone and the beaches had been busy, ‘early busy’ too, as families had fought for space to lay down their towels before the sea had barely begun to recede from the shore. Local businesses had enjoyed a profitable summer so far and the weekly influx of ‘grockles’, as the residents named the ‘not-we’, looked set to increase as July gave way to August and sales of buckets, spades and meaningless plastic tat went through the roof.

    The London Inn, a good stone’s skim away from the Back Beach and arguably the busiest pub in Shaldon, was enjoying a livelier than usual Tuesday evening as children played on the green at the front of the pub, parents closely watching over the tops of pint glasses from packed benches that sat beneath slightly discoloured walls and a string of opaque, coloured light bulbs that struggled to throw muted reds, greens and blues further than three feet from the open, wooden door above which they were hung.

    Inside the pub, it was busier still, where men elbowed their way throught the crowd to the bar, their bell-bottoms sweeping the floor as they tried to make themselves heard over both the natural din of the congregated drinkers and the hideously oversized collars of their tight-fitting shirts. Behind the bar, through a thick fog of cigarette smoke, the landlady grinned a toothy grin amid idle chatter, her long, brown hair just beginning to show the first signs of being within noticeable range of middle-aged. Meanwhile her husband, puffing on a Rothmans and dropping ash as grey as the colour of his hair onto his impeccably pressed white shirt, stuffed another handful of pound notes into the till, mentally planning the holiday they would take when the holiday season had finished and autumn arrived in the town to whisper its chilly reminisces through the narrow, litter-strewn streets.

    Beyond the heaving masses, out past the toilets and the corridor that was lined with empty silver barrels, was a small, concrete garden that housed yet more drinkers and a hydrangea bush that was bursting with life, the odd lazy bee circling the flowers despite the late hour and the drop in temperature. Sat alone at one of the tables, a small boy with an unfortunate haircut that only served to draw attention to his white-blonde hair, stared solemnly into his glass that had been empty for about two hours, the Muppets on his t-shirt clearly having a far better time than he was. He looked over towards his father, deep in conversation with a woman some seven or eight years his junior, her shoulder-length, dark hair falling over a brown roll-neck jumper (or roller-neck as the boy would have called it, his fashion sense strictly limited to t-shirts displaying the creations of Jim Henson and blue-checked shorts that really were quite short).

    The boy’s father shuffled off towards the bar in search of another drink and the woman gave the boy a look that he didn’t understand. Had he been older, he might have recognised the pity in her eyes. He might even have picked up on the slight irritation at his existence, but he knew little of such things, so he simply said nothing, focusing on hiding his disappointment when his father returned with two drinks, neither of which was for him. His stomach rumbled as an empty crisp packet, long since devoid of said crisps, rustled beneath the dirty ashtray beside him as it was caught by an errant breeze.

    The evening seemed to drag on and on, with little else for the boy to do but shiver and look up at the stars. He was tired and seemed to be the only person in the pub who wasn’t having a good time. He wondered if the children that he’d seen out the front earlier were still playing and pondered why he hadn’t been allowed to join them, before his solitude and thought processes became too painful so he brought that particular train of thought to a shuddering halt.

    The conversation between his father and the woman petered out amid frustrated glances in his direction as other drinkers went on their way, unsteady on their feet, some positively glowing as their day in the sun without any form of skin protection caught up with them. The boy reached down towards his battered, school plimsolls and pulled his grey socks as far up his legs as they would go in a bid to retain the last of the warmth that he was feeling from the cooling patio and stone walls. Finally, when everyone else had gone and even the streetlights appeared to be thinking of calling it a night, the boy and his father left via the side gate, the silence only broken by the gentle lapping of the nearby waves and the sound of their footsteps. They reached Shaldon Bridge in just a couple of minutes and began their walk back towards Teignmouth, the dark water below visible through the railings at the side of the pavement.

    About halfway across, maybe three minutes into their crossing, the boy’s father stumbled drunkenly, reaching out to steady himself against the metal supports. They had stopped beside one of the few lamp posts that lit the bridge, the two of them facing each other in the feeble glare of their very own spotlight. Instinct told the boy that something was wrong as his father looked down at the water below and his fears were confirmed as he watched a solitary tear run down his father’s cheek before launching itself from his bristly chin, swirling in the breeze as it plummeted towards the inky depths below. He gently reached out to take his father’s hand in his and frowned when his father pulled away.

    It’s entirely possible that when you are small even the shortest of distances can seem far greater than they actually are and this was very much the case where the boy and the bridge were concerned. He imagined that the void beyond the side of the bridge was at least a hundred feet below them and that the waves beneath the concrete on which they stood must have hidden depths of fifty or sixty metres. Not only that, but he had very clear memories of a film that he had recently seen on television, the imaginatively titled ‘The Night the Bridge Fell Down’, a bridge that in his memory looked exactly like the one on which they now stood.

    His father slowly reached up to the lamp post and used it to lever himself up so that he was standing on the railings.

    ‘Daddy? Daddy, what are you doing?’ asked the boy.

    He was suddenly more afraid than he had ever been, which was quite an achievement given some of the things that he had already experienced in his short life. Whatever his father’s failings, and he suspected that there were many, he had never once indicated that something like this was on his mind. The boy was instantly taken back to the fateful day in the kitchen, when his mother and sisters left and he had made the choice to stay with his father, despite his fears and uncertainty.

    ‘I can’t…’ sobbed his father, his long hair ruffled by the wind, which to the boy at least was masquerading as an incoming storm, threatening to dislodge the person that he loved the most in the whole world from their precarious perch and even more precarious grip on life.

    ‘Daddy, don’t do it. I love you,’ the boy pleaded, his voice sounding fragile and insignificant, his words inadequate next to the struggle taking place before him.

    ‘You’ll be better off without me,’ cried his father. ‘All I do is mess things up. You don’t need me.’

    With hot tears swimming in his eyes and panic rising from the pit of his stomach, the boy wanted to grab hold of his father’s legs and hug him so tightly that he wouldn’t be able to jump. He wanted to hold on to him forever and show him how much he loved him because he didn’t think that all of the words in the world would be enough right now. But he also knew that one false move could send his father toppling over the edge of the bridge and into the water below and while realistically the fall would have done him little harm, the amount of alcohol that he had consumed would certainly have impacted his ability to survive.

    They stood there together for what felt like an eternity, the stars gazing down impassively in the night sky, the clouds intermittently scudding across their jet-black canvas. The boy was silently pleading for a miracle as his father remained tentatively perched on the precipice of indecision, moments away from stepping into the void and numbing the pain forever. A pain as old as the man himself, who had once been like the boy, full of naivety and ignorant to the suffering that life could cause. He was tired of that pain, the one that inhabited his every waking moment and beyond, the pain that he had brought to others, an echo of every injury and every failure that he had ever known. It went round and round, again and again. He couldn’t see a way to break the cycle. Unless he…

    He took one step towards the blackness and the boy closed his eyes, screwing them shut tightly and wishing the most powerful wish that he could think of.

    The boy never knew who or what intervened and occasionally, when he was brave enough to remember that night, he suspected that his father never knew either. But when he opened his eyes again that night on the bridge, to see the crumpled and broken man slowly and carefully clambering down from the railings before sinking to his knees beside him, he thought that miracles must exist, however rare they may seem and however difficult they may be to find. The boy launched himself at his father, raining kisses down upon him and sobbing as he wrapped his arms, his legs, his everything around his Daddy. Together, they wept. Cars drove past, a late-night train rattled along the rails at the near end of the bridge and the world continued to turn.

    At some point before the sun rose, while the town slept on and the dreamers dreamed their dreams, they both got to their feet and walked home in silence, hand in hand. And that night was never mentioned again.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • We Let the Stars Go – Part Four

    A Sky Full of Stars

    The first few flakes of snow had gone unnoticed by pre-occupied shoppers and Christmas revellers. Undeterred and perhaps a little disgruntled at the lack of interest, winter descended upon the picturesque scene that might have adorned the front of festive cards of previous years. Huge, white flakes fell in flurries that were teased into random paths by sudden gusts of icy wind. As the soft particles fell to the ground, ready to absorb the sounds of feet on concrete once this tiny part of the world had been shrouded in a frosty blanket, couples huddled a little closer together as they walked and street vendors began to pack away their wares.

    I didn’t notice the cold. I was too busy looking at a familiar figure walking towards me through the rapidly dwindling crowds.

    She drew to a halt in front of me, snowflakes nestling in her short, blonde hair as she looked me up and down.

    ‘You’re looking well,’ she smiled.

    ‘A bit older, a bit fatter…’

    ‘Same. And I hope that I’m a bit wiser.’

    She nodded towards my bags on the bench.

    ‘May I?’

    I cleared space for her to sit and could feel the warmth radiating from her as she sat close to me. With no umbrella to shield us this time we were at the mercy of the weather.

    ‘It’s been a long time,’ I said, through chattering teeth, regretting my decision to leave my coat in the car.  

    ‘Too long,’ Melissa replied. ‘How’s your wife? The first one?’

    ‘Last I heard she’d run off and left the guy that she left me for. Can’t say I was surprised. Gave me some sort of weird satisfaction, even though I know that I shouldn’t revel in someone else’s sorrow.’

    ‘It’s ok. I won’t judge you. You’ve done alright though, haven’t you? Married again, children. Cricket, cricket, cricket and still telling stories.’

    ‘Yeah. Had some ups and downs, but I think I finally got to be the man I was meant to be. How…?’

    ‘Facebook. And Twitter. And Instagram. And I know that makes me sound like a stalker.’

    I grinned.

    ‘Can’t say I haven’t done the same. Your security settings are better than mine though.’

    ‘Yeah. Work kind of dictates that.’

    By now, we were both feeling the cold as the snow continued to fall.

    ‘Shall we walk?’ she asked. ‘Unless you have to go?’

    ‘No, no. I’m good. Where do you want to go?’

    She paused and looked thoughtful.

    ‘Let’s just see where time takes us, shall we?’

    ‘Not too fairy tale for you?’ I asked, tentatively. Having not seen her for so long, the last thing that I wanted was for her to walk away again like she had before.

    She slipped her arm through mine and together we walked, away from the bandstand as the last few notes of Silent Night brought to an end the evening’s musical extravaganza that was now being watched by a crowd of four pensioners, three dogs and two bearded drunks who stood deep in grizzled conversation.

    Gradually, we slipped further and further away from civilisation, only our footsteps in the fine layer of snow hinting that we’d ever been anywhere else. We talked of our saddest days, of loss and of love and regret. We talked of the might-have-beens and the never-weres and of what would never come to pass. We walked and talked and then we talked and walked. Presently, we found ourselves at the same cricket ground where we’d met at all those years ago.

    Under the pale, ochre light of an ancient streetlamp, incongruous next to the clubhouse, we sank down onto a nearby bench and looked out at the stars through the falling snow, still puzzled by the lack of cloud cover, unable to discern from where the wintry shower was emanating.

    ‘Tell me a story,’ Melissa said.

    And I obliged.

    I told her of a boy and a girl who had met many years ago, backwards in time, when the world was a simpler place but their paths were set by the fates and they were destined to travel in different directions until…they met again, forwards in time and the Universe decreed that their love was not meant to be, that once more their timing was awry and they were destined to remain apart…until they met once more, sideways in time and though not the versions of themselves that they wanted to be, they began to understand how time worked. It was not a strict, linear progression from moment to moment, inexorably rushing towards a final destination. It was a series of fixed points, momentous events that spawned countless, alternate possibilities of everything happening all at once. Which meant that there were versions of themselves out there where the fates had not conspired against them. Where they had not got their timing wrong and where they had always been together.

    ‘Just not here,’ she said. ‘Not these versions of us.’

    I shook my head.

    ‘Where?’

    I looked up to the stars once more.

    ‘Pick one. And that’s the one we’ll call ours. That can be where we got our timing right.’

    She pointed to the brightest star and even to the naked eye it seemed to burn just a little brighter.

    ‘I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little jealous of us. Those other versions.’

    ‘I’d be disappointed if you weren’t,’ I replied, suddenly oblivious to the cold and the snow as she turned to face me.

    She nodded as if she finally understood what I’d been meaning all those years ago.

    ‘I guess I believe in fairy tales after all,’ she smiled. ‘You’ve given me that.’

    ‘I think that’s the least I could do after all this time, don’t you?’

    We paused, awkwardly and a little sadly, suddenly both aware that this was the last time that we would ever see each other. The final page of our story. It had to be.

    ‘I guess we should both go home…to our wives,’ she said and seemed to enjoy my attempt at hiding the look of surprise on my face.

    ‘I’m happy,’ she continued. ‘Guess I kind of got my timing right there at least.’

    ‘I’m happy for you,’ I smiled. ‘Really. And I’m happy too. Which, in the end, I suppose, is all that matters.’

    ‘Thank you. For hope. For days gone by. For other times and places. And for fairy tales.’

    I was about to reply when she leaned in and kissed me, not a kiss of passion or desire, but more than that. A kiss of gratitude and understanding, of discovery and loss. A kiss of hope for an impossible dream and as we all know, those dreams are truly worth hoping for.

    High up above, through all of time and space, the Universe sighed in satisfaction and that sigh rippled backwards in time, forwards in time and sideways in time.

    There was a girl I used to know. Long ago, one gorgeous night, we let the stars go.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • We Let the Stars Go – Part Three

    Why Does it Always Rain on Me?

    It was raining. No surprises there, obviously, in England. But it was raining and I was getting married. In about six hours and twenty-one minutes. I checked my suit, for the umpteenth time, gave my shoes another quick polish and looked in on my so-called best man, who was supposed to have woken me an hour ago and instead was snoring in my spare room.

    Looking at my watch, I considered breakfast. With a long day ahead, I wanted to load up early but needed to consider the inevitable nerves that would accompany the ceremony and, of course, the dreaded speech. Making a decision, I scribbled a note and left it on the lounge coffee table before taking the short walk into town beneath a large golf umbrella.

    Bacon, as has often been the case, was the solution to the problem and after collecting a baguette overflowing with pink, salty goodness, I decided to stroll down to the church at the bottom of town where I would be making my vows later that afternoon. Locating a free, but somewhat soggy bench, I sat down to enjoy my breakfast, umbrella cradled in one elbow as I casually perused the nearby lichen-covered gravestones.

    About to have my very own ‘Ed Milliband with a bacon sandwich’ moment, I suddenly became aware that someone was sat next to me on the bench where previously there had been no-one. Without looking around, I already knew who was there.

    ‘I didn’t have you down as a churchgoer,’ said Melissa, her voice, like velvet, draping itself over the empty years since we’d last seen each other.

    I grinned as a globule of ketchup dripped from my sandwich and ran down my thumb.

    ‘Not big on religion, to be honest,’ I replied. ‘I prefer my faith to be a little more centred on reality.’

    ‘Fair enough. I’m not sure the evangelicals would agree though…’

    ‘Well, fortunately they’re few and far between in the leafy suburbs. We have to make do with the Tories.’

    She laughed as the rain got a little heavier. As I offered her the opportunity to take shelter with me beneath my umbrella, I considered for a moment the possibility that some all-powerful deity had just given us a little nudge closer together.

    It had been about six years since we’d last seen each other but we instantly relaxed into our…I want to say friendship, but I’m not sure that it was ever quite that, certainly never more but absolutely never less. We’d never quite managed to get our timing right and it seemed as though that trend was set to continue.

    I’d heard somewhere that she’d gone off to University in Bath or Bristol, somewhere beginning with a B, but the exact details escaped me. She’d gone to study law and had excelled, while I had stagnated somewhat, working through failed relationships, at least until this current one, obviously, struggling to make ends meet in retail and still scratching around in the local cricket club’s 2nd XI. All things considered though, I was reasonably content with my lot. Or was I?

    I looked at Melissa, covered from the elements and the early morning light by a dark hood and I saw something in her eyes that spoke of pain and uncertainty.

    ‘You’re looking well,’ I lied, hoping to avoid her actually asking what I was doing outside the church at 7.30 in the morning before cautiously adding, ‘You always look well.’

    She flashed that coy smile that I adored and my heart skipped a beat.

    ‘So do you,’ she replied and I instantly felt worse, as though I was about to relive that day on the cricket ground that I’d never quite been able to let go of.

    ‘Bit older, bit fatter,’ I joked. ‘Not much wiser…’

    ‘Ah, wisdom’s overrated. Much more fun to stay ignorant and keep making mistakes.’

    ‘I sometimes feel like that’s all I ever do,’ I sighed. ‘And it’s all I was ever meant to do.’

    ‘Blimey, you’re a ray of sunshine, aren’t you? What’s a girl got to do to get a smile around here.’

    Which of course, coaxed a smile from me, one that just didn’t quite reach my eyes.

    ‘How’s the world of law?’ I asked. ‘You busy…lawyering…all the time?’

    My question drew a proper laugh, which I never realised how much I needed to hear.

    ‘Long days, long meetings and soul-crushingly dull people.’

    ‘Relatable,’ I replied. ‘Sounds a bit like retail, just better paid I expect. Still, there must be some benefits to it. Is there some suave, senior partner who’s treating you like a queen? Whisking you away to sun-kissed beaches and all-night parties?’

    Melissa looked away with a wry smile on her face as an elderly woman shuffled past walking a West Highland Terrier dressed in a tartan coat. The dog, that is, not the woman.

    ‘Not really me, all-night parties. Still, it looks like you’ve found your queen?’

    My heart lurched again. For a moment I wondered how she knew and then I remembered the announcement that my fiancée had insisted we put in the local paper.

    ‘It’s ok,’ she continued, chewing thoughtfully on her bottom lip. ‘I’m pleased for you. And it’s my own stupid fault for not keeping a closer eye on you. Always thought you’d make someone happy…’

    It was my turn to look away, unable to hide the regret that was writ large upon my face.

    ‘…just hoped it would be me,’ she continued. ‘Got my timing wrong again.’

    I was lost for words, floundering in a sea of mixed emotions. I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out. The silence between us felt like a divide of a million miles and ten thousand years. What could I possibly say that would make this moment any better?

    ‘What do you believe in?’ I finally asked.

    ‘Nothing,’ came the brusque response, too quickly for me to think that she was anything but disappointed in me.

    So many thoughts filled my mind, so much that I wanted to say. I wanted to explain how I’d ended up here. I wanted her to know how often I had thought of her, how she made me feel and how life wasn’t fair. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry that it was never the right time for us and that I was sure that she’d find happiness but all of the words in the universe suddenly seemed meagre and incapable of accurately expressing what I felt right now.

    ‘What do you believe in?’ she asked, her voice laden with sadness.

    I thought for a moment, staring off towards the church gardens, watching the rain drip from the magnolia trees. The pause, which may have lasted mere seconds, felt like an eternity as I tried to find some sort of consolation to offer.

    ‘I believe…that there are versions of us out there somewhere where we did get our timing right. Where I get to treat you like a queen every day and where we get to make each other happy. Where we got this right six years ago and we’ve not had to spend a day apart ever since then and where we live until we’re old and incontinent and just a little bit sick of the sight of each other yet we still tremble when our hands touch. That’s what I believe.’

    ‘Nice idea. But I don’t believe in fairy tales.’

    I shrugged, feeling that despite her assurances that I was very much to blame and I couldn’t bring myself to protest. Those words falling short again.

    ‘Fairy tales is all I’ve got.’

    She stood and let the rain fall upon her face to hide her tears.

    ‘Then I hope you live happily ever after.’

    And she was gone. Sideways in time.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • We Let the Stars Go – Part Two

    Just One of Those Things

    The sun was high in the cloudless sky as the faintest of breezes whispered across the cricket ground, teasing the pages of newspapers at the boundary edge and hinting at the possibility of the weather closing in later in the evening.

    Out in the middle, shimmering in the heat haze, our final two batters were seeing out the remainder of our innings as I finally removed my pads from my sweaty legs having recently cut, pulled, hoiked and edged my way to a not-particularly rapid half-century to take our team’s overall score past the 200 mark. I casually threw my pads into my kit bag before sitting back on the stone steps at the entrance to the old, wooden pavilion. Behind me, the club tea ladies busied themselves slicing fruit cake and filling glass jugs with weak squash as on the jukebox at the adjoining bar Roxette questioned a presumably flighty love interest on their abilities to do whatever it was that they did.

    A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead, so, in search of something with which to dry myself, I rummaged among my previously discarded pads, gloves and box, hoping against hope that there would be a clean, soft and delightfully fragrant towel within. Discovering that no such towel was to be located, I picked out the only thing that was even remotely suitable for drying and while soft, the old pair of boxer shorts that had been in my bag for about three months were neither clean nor delightfully fragrant. Undeterred, I wiped them across my brow, pulling a face of disgust as I inhaled the pungent, stale smell from the black material.

    I opened my eyes to discover that I was no longer alone and instantly tried to make it look as though I hadn’t just wiped my face with my own dirty shreddies.

    The newcomer, who I had previously known well enough to nod a polite hello to, looked at me through the bluest of eyes, a mixture of curiosity, surprise and a hint of revulsion all channelled into one raised eyebrow beneath her short, blonde hair.

    ‘I hope they were clean…’ she smiled.

    My cheeks flared what I hoped was a gentle pink but in reality I suspected that I looked positively puce.

    ‘Ah…er…so do I,’ I replied, awkwardly, wrinkling my nose at the memory of the smell and tossing the offending garment back into the darkest corner of my bag.

    I floundered and scrabbled around mentally in search of a follow up comment to try and salvage the situation.

    ‘Could have been worse though…’

    She frowned and I fancied that I could actually see her thought processes on exactly how it could have been worse written across her forehead.

    ‘Could it though?’ she asked, after what seemed like an eternity.

    ‘They…could have been… someone else’s?’ I winced, painfully aware of quite how badly this conversation seemed to be going.

    An uncomfortable silence hung between us that was finally broken by the sound of her laughter.

    I relaxed a little, relieved to have seemingly reduced my level of shame to somewhere in the region of mild embarrassment.

    ‘Melissa,’ she said with a smile, holding out her hand, which I shook gently before introducing myself, wondering whether or not I should have given my hand another wipe after the whole ‘pants debacle’.

    As our innings ended, thirteen hot, sweaty cricketers and two slightly cooler, sweaty umpires made their way off the field and filed into the ramshackle clubhouse, queuing for tuna and cucumber sandwiches and picking at piles of grapes and melon in a bid to convince themselves that they were being healthy in direct contradiction to the amount of alcohol that would likely be consumed later that evening. After a brief chat with my teammates, I made my way back to Melissa where we made small talk over lemon drizzle cake and a couple of home-made sausage rolls that had already flaked pastry over my plate.

    ‘So,’ I asked, covering my mouth with my hand as a sudden thought made a break for freedom from my consciousness, ‘big cricket fan?’

    She gave a small smile, which in turn became a short laugh as she looked coyly at the ground. I winced, internally as even with my appalling social skills I began to figure out where this might be heading.

    ‘Ah…I like it, but I’m not a huge fan. My dad used to play a bit but he’s swapped his googlies for runner beans these days.’

    ‘Well, I hope he had it done on the NHS,’ I joked and she was kind enough to laugh at my feeble attempt at humour.

    It was my turn to look sheepish, my ego, while neither huge nor out of control, was still enjoying a gentle massaging.

    ‘I think I’ve seen you around the club quite a bit lately,’ I said in as casual a manner as I could manage, while my morals swooped down and perched upon my shoulders, my disappointment at the current situation not far behind as I knew how this should unfold. How it had to unfold.

    Again, that demure smile, her eyes looking up at me from beneath her fringe. She opened her mouth to speak and then cast a glance over my shoulder at my captain, who had come to discuss the second innings of the game with me.

    I grimaced an apology in Melissa’s direction and she gave me a disappointed smile that my inner voice was quite happy to point out to me was nothing like the disappointed smile I was going to draw from her later that evening. My heart sank as I reluctantly turned my attention back to the suddenly unimportant game of cricket.

    The second innings was wrapped up within thirty of the scheduled forty-five overs and most of that time for me had been spent trying not to look as though I was peering through my sunglasses in the direction of the bar, where Melissa sat nursing a coke and chatting with Alf, a former player of the club who, now in his eighties, spent every Saturday afternoon telling everyone and anyone how cricket was much more difficult in ‘his day’ playing on uncovered pitches and using ancient equipment. To be fair to Alf, most of us felt that he had a point – the problem was that we’d heard that point repeated ad nauseum but still appreciated that we had an unspoken responsibility to accommodate Alf’s opinions and most of us were generally happy to see him on a weekly basis as a stark reminder of what awaited us in years to come. Somewhere at the back of our collective consciousness I imagine that we were treating him how we would hope to be treated in the autumnal days of our lives.

    After a quick shower, timed so in a bid to avoid the attentions of ‘Grabby Ben’, who had a penchant for pinching, slapping or cupping whatever areas of flesh that he was able to find of his teammates, I dressed and packed away my kit before heading to the bar, keen to catch up with Melissa, the nervous excitement dulled by the certainty of what had to happen.

    It took half an hour to extract ourselves from Alf’s reminisces of days gone by, which we both listened to politely, making what we hoped were appropriate noises at the right moments and nodding sagely when the conversation became more serious, in particular when Alf would recall former players who had long since departed on their awfully big adventures.

    With the sun sinking slowly behind the nets on the far side of the pitch, we stole away from the crowd and wandered slowly off towards the side of the ground opposite the clubhouse, where a small bank of grass rose up towards a narrow stream that had run dry due to the current high temperatures. Amid more small talk, we sat down on the grass and watched the beginnings of the usual Saturday night drunken shenanigans involving Vodka Pete, The One-Balled Womble and Stairway to Kevin, so-called because after every game he played he would inevitably be found passed out on the stairs by his wife the following morning.

    It was Melissa who broached the elephant in the room. Or technically outside the room and on the field of play, but you get the idea.

    ‘So…your girlfriend didn’t come to watch this week then?’ she asked, tentatively and with a tone of apprehension not quite hidden in her voice.

    I puffed out a long, drawn-out breath and turned to look at her, tilting my head slightly to the side. She avoided my gaze for a moment.

    ‘No,’ I replied, slowly and quietly. ‘Out with friends, I think.’

    She nodded.

    ‘You don’t sound very sure,’ she frowned, laying back on the slope before propping herself up on one elbow.

    ‘I’m not, if I’m honest. I’ve got my doubts. But…’

    I picked at the grass between my legs, my tired heart having been given an absolute pummelling of late by indecision, insouciance and infidelity. I began to doubt my own sanity and my values. This moment, right here, felt good and full of fire and right. It felt new and exciting and a million miles from the tortured self-doubt and the pain that I’d been experiencing for weeks. No, for the whole of my life. It would be the easiest thing in the world right now to lay down here and betray the person who I thought I was, who I wanted to be. The easiest thing. And the most difficult.

    ‘I wasn’t not mentioning her,’ I began, wanting to be understood as I always did. Wanting to make things right.

    Melissa reached out and put her hand on my arm. Her touch was cool and soft against my skin. I looked into her eyes, then down to her lips, sweet and tempting, mesmerising and bewitching.

    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it’s not just on you. I could have mentioned her at any time, couldn’t I?’

    I shrugged, not grumpily more in resignation. Our eyes met again and I saw compassion and understanding along with my determination to be a better person reflected back at me.

    ‘Timing’s never really been my strong point…’ she smiled. ‘Thank you, for…not doing what you want to do. And what I want you to do.’

    I wanted to take her hands in mine. I wanted to lose myself in her eyes and in her scent. I wanted to kiss her and find that time had slowed so that I could hold eternity in an hour.

    But time had other ideas. And it began to rain. Forwards in time…

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • We Let the Stars Go – Part One

    That was Then, but this is Now

    There was, as the song by Prefab Sprout begins, a girl I used to know. Isn’t that how all the best stories start? A boy and a girl. Or a girl and a girl or…come on, if you haven’t got the picture by now you’ve really not been paying attention. Discrimination doesn’t live here anymore, as Cliff Richard may have once sung. Or not.

    So, there was a girl I used to know. And this story starts at Christmas, because all of the best stori- oh, wait, I’ve done that bit elsewhere, forwards in time. Or was it backwards? It’s difficult to remember sometimes. Anyway, it sort of starts at Christmas, but it also started a long time before. That’s the thing about time. We see it as a strict, linear progression from moment to moment, inexorably rushing towards our final destination. But what if, and you might need to bear with me here, what if it wasn’t?

    So, it was Christmas. Or very nearly. Near enough to be able to panic about all of the things left to do, but still far enough away to be able to do something about it. Four days to go then. Cards had been written and posted, because that was what people still did back then and social media posts had been posted, signing off for a few days because that was what people did now. You can choose. If you choose to send Christmas cards, then turn to Page…do you remember those books? This isn’t one of them.

    As I made my way through the town centre, sidestepping to avoid oncoming children and pensioners alike, I considered my options. Late-night shopping had been reasonably successful so far in that I’d managed to get in and out of a handful of shops without screaming at anyone and having only heard Wham’s Last Christmas three times. With an hour to go before closing time, I navigated the streets of my latter teen years on autopilot, not entirely sure where I wanted to go but certain that wherever I ended up would be fine.

    To my left, up on the bandstand, the Salvation Army struck up, trombones, tubas and the occasional unnecessary triangle coming together to entertain the masses with an uplifting rendition of Good King Wenceslas. Surrounding stalls stood by resolute against the chill, manned by nondescript figures touting for business, while braziers burned gently beneath hot chestnuts and a poorly stacked line of as yet unsold Christmas trees seemed to sway in time to the music like a queue of drunks at closing time. If Michael Bublé had put in a sudden appearance and burst into song, nobody would have batted an eyelid. I smiled to myself, reminded of youthful indiscretions upon these very same cobbled streets, stolen kisses and furtive fumblings in the shadows of time.

    I blinked twice to clear my vision as those shadows flitted and shifted like elusive ghosts and an unexpected chill crept across my shoulders. A memory stirred and looking up to the stars overhead, I was surprised and not a little excited to see the first few snowflakes begin to tumble erratically from…from the stars. This wasn’t right; there were no clouds overhead and no snow had been forecast. Everyone knew that it didn’t really snow at Christmas anymore. And the band played on.

    I caught sight of an empty bench opposite the nearby pub and while both were tempting, I decided I would be better served spending a few minutes sitting outside watching the general hubbub pass me by than battling my way to a crowded bar. Besides, the two pints that I’d had earlier probably hadn’t worked their way out of my system yet and with the drive home awaiting, I was very much of the opinion that fate could manage very well without me doing anything to piss it off at the moment. Lowering myself onto the cold, metal seat, I piled my bags up beside me in a bid to ward off any randomers who might decide that they wanted to stop by for a chat. I mean, I’ll talk to most people, but right now, what I really wanted was…time. Backwards in time…

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • Love Wars

    So, that day, that memory that I alluded to earlier. If I were telling it as a story, I might imply that it started like any other day. Indeed, it may well have done so. On this particular day, however, there was mystery afoot, a plot bubbling beneath the surface of our working-class existence in suburban Teignmouth. I was blissfully oblivious, even when dragging my suitcase down the hill of Kingsway and huddling in a shrouded, leafy enclave with my mother and sisters as we waited for something, someone who was destined to take us away from home. I was probably told that we were going on an adventure, which would have appealed to my mind and made the reality far more exciting than it actually was.

    Like any good escape in the movies, there always seems to be an element of luck involved, a roll of fate’s dice that will determine the outcome. If anyone had visions of ‘Little Me’ wandering around the garden discreetly depositing soil from Tom, Dick or Harry tunnel over the flowerbeds, I’m afraid you’ll be somewhat disappointed by what follows. No forged papers, no disguises…not even a cameo appearance by Steve McQueen or James Garner.

    As our bid for freedom unfolded, it transpired that somehow, my father had got wind of what had happened, perhaps a tip off from an overly zealous neighbour and pulled up alongside us in a white car, driven by a man we knew as Uncle Don, whose surname escapes me, but I think I recall that he was a decent man. And so, temporarily abandoned by fortune, we trooped back up the hill, a dark and oppressive cloud hanging over us all, although I still didn’t really understand what was going on. I spent the rest of the afternoon in a similarly confused state as whispers were whispered and arguments were, well, argued. Our social worker arrived, a chap called Mr Day, who wore a brown suit and was accompanied by the smell of stale cigarette smoke and coffee, an odour to epitomize the seventies. He also spoke…very…slowly…which amused us children no end and we would regularly mimic his voice after his visits. To be fair, I’ve never envied social workers their jobs and our family, such as it was, must have been a challenge to work with.

    This image shows me with my four sisters sat on a Witch's Hat roundabout in a park in Teignmouth
    The only photograph I have with all of my sisters in it. I was obviously a fashion icon even back then.

    I don’t know what the girls were all thinking while these surreptitious conversations were taking place, but I remember suddenly feeling that something definite, something huge and scary was happening, that we were all moving towards a place from which there would be no return. I don’t recall the effects that living in such a disjointed, dysfunctional family unit had on my sisters at the time, but if the rock-throwing incident was anything to go by from my perspective, it must have had an equally profound effect on them. With age and experience on my side, I can look back now and understand how the ever-present threat of violence taught me to rely on my instincts, taught me to watch for signs in people’s behaviour, even at the relatively tender age of what, six years old? It’s something that I’ve never really stopped doing and has doubtless contributed to my tendency to overthink social situations at the age of 52. It’s also likely that it’s where my glass-half-empty outlook emanates from, so much so that it long ago became far worse than a glass half-empty as my glass is chipped, cracked, dirty and filled with a liquid that is frankly undrinkable.

    Anyway, back to those whispered exchanges and the air of despondency so thick that it clouded the entire house like a blanket of depressing fog. Eventually, we were all called into the kitchen and the situation was explained in its simplest terms. Mum and Dad weren’t going to be living together anymore. So, we had to choose, there and then, who we wanted to live with. It still hurts me now when I think about it. I remember that I was the last to decide and that afternoon in the dingy, little kitchen, where I had broken my toes and where my youngest sister, Ellie, had once fed the dog (Sheba, an Alsatian) an entire box of Weetabix, all the milk we had and a bowlful of sugar for its breakfast, is burned into my mind. One by one, my sisters crossed the kitchen floor under the watchful eye of all concerned to stand next to my mother. I didn’t know what to do, but I looked at my father and I saw a broken man. Now, that’s not to say that I didn’t or don’t sympathise with what my mother went through; in fact, I’ll come to that later. But in that moment, I saw beyond the aggression and the violence, through the anger and the arrogance and I knew that I couldn’t let him be on his own. Call it a hunch, call it instinct, maybe even a sixth sense. Years later, he admitted to me that had I made a different choice that day, then he wouldn’t have lived the life that he did. You may think that my choice in that darkest of moments might have earned me some sort of reprieve or favoured treatment. Unfortunately, I don’t think the Universe works that way.

    After that day in the kitchen, my memories of our timeline become a little blurred. There were so many comings and goings and I have memories of when the girls were there and when they were not, even after they all left, I think they came back. There were bitter custody battles to rival the notorious Kramer vs Kramer movie and if you wonder about the level of the physical harm in the relationship between my parents, in my opinion, it was nothing compared to what went on after they separated. My father drank more and his behaviour became more volatile, his frustrations bubbling ever nearer to the surface, probably fuelled by his feelings of inadequacy and failure. In the absence of my mother, it doesn’t take a genius to work out where his frustrations landed.

    The custody battles and the subsequent behaviour surrounding them are still what hurt the most to this day. One Christmas, we were told that we (myself and any combination of the girls, so frequent were the changes in personnel at home in both Teignmouth and latterly Ideford that I can’t recall exactly who was involved) couldn’t see our mother because she had died. Take a moment, because I know that I probably seem a little blasé in dropping that into the narrative. But how fucked up would you have to be to consider that as an appropriate lie to tell your children? To make them grieve for their mother in the knowledge that what you had told them was untrue. Of course, I now know how fucked up he had to be to even consider that and I understand that he suffered a traumatic childhood himself. That doesn’t and never will excuse some of his actions around this time, but it does explain it and I’m far more at home with understanding why somebody did what they did when the alternative is much more concerning to me.

    Similarly, I can remember being marched down to the phone box in Ideford to call my mother and tell her that I didn’t want to come and spend Christmas with her. No reason given, I was just told to say that I didn’t want to. As you can probably guess, it was the very opposite of what I wanted to do, but I didn’t have any say in the matter. So much of my childhood was spent obeying the command to ‘do as I was told’ or to ‘do as I say, not as I do’. The short walk back past the Royal Oak pub was a great deal colder than the December air could ever have made it with the numb, frozen heart that I carried chilling me to the bone.

    At some point, those custody battles ceased to have anything to do with the welfare of the children and, in my admittedly inexperienced opinion, became more about point-scoring and hurting the adults who were involved. Any semblance of family, any possibility that we siblings could have had of living a normal life and conducting anything approaching balanced relationships with each other was torn away from us during those days and the months that followed. To my frustration, no-one has ever really accepted responsibility for the pain that was inflicted upon us during these times and I’ll try to explore the impact that it had on us further in these pages.

    In many ways, I was more fortunate than my sisters, who, over the course of time, ended up in care homes as the impact of their situation and the damage determined by others affected their behaviour and their relationships. For whatever reason, despite my father’s drinking and the physical violence, we got by, we survived. Just. And when I say just, I don’t say it lightly. There were times when food was in such short supply that we would have to get by on a tin of spaghetti for a whole weekend. It sounds laughable, doesn’t it? But laughter was in short supply. One terrible night in particular stands out…

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • Wherever You Will Go

    If you find the dogs are crying in the morning

    If the piano plays a song while you’re asleep

    If the days we had repeat while you are dreaming

    It’s the echo of a heart you couldn’t keep

    If the cat should settle where I used to whisper

    If the snow should fail to lie where I once walked

    If my favourite book lies open on the table

    It’s the echo of the times when we once talked

    If the music that I loved continues playing

    If my old shadow walks the cobbles of this town

    If the roses wilt and wither in the winter

    It’s the echo of our days upon your frown

    If you find the tears are falling far too freely

    If you track my laughter ‘cross our years and years

    If perfume and tobacco tease your senses

    It’s the echo of our fantasies and fears

    If the wind should feel much colder on my birthday

    If the sun should fail to shine when days were ours

    If the fire should fail to warm and heal your broken heart

    It’s the echo of our time beneath these stars.

    This was written in October 2025 and was originally a poem that I wrote back in the late nineties after my aunt, Margaret, had passed away. I reviewed the original and was unhappy with the general tone, so I chose to rework a large chunk of it and I’m much happier with it now. The later version was also heavily influenced by the loss of my mother-in-law, Carol, in November 2024.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

  • Cover From the Sky

    The small village of Poundsgate is situated on Dartmoor and has quite the reputation. It is to be found on the road between Ashburton and Princetown and at the very least is thought to date back to the 13th century, when it was arguably little more than a cluster of farms and cottages surrounding the Tavistock Inn. The village was once said to have been visited by the devil, way back in 1638, but that is another story for another time for someone else to tell. But if you are so inclined, it’s at the very least worth a few minutes of your time.

    This story, however, is a much smaller and simpler affair. Details may be vague and a little florid and it’s probably a taste of things to come. But in a time of anguish and constant turmoil, this was a moment in my life that has forever stayed with me and ingrained a woman who I barely knew into my heart.

    My father didn’t talk much about his family when I was growing up. I recall a long journey and a short holiday up to Durham to see his mother, Annie and his sister, Carol and her family, but the trip was unremarkable, certainly in comparison to other memories that I can recall, and very little has stayed with me over the years. I wish that I could recall more, or at the very least, imagine some happy reminisces from the trip. I spoke to Carol years later after my father passed away, but our contact was fleeting and I learned that both she and her husband, Brian, passed not long after.

    There was no talk of my paternal grandfather, also Thomas Hepburn, and as I grew older, I understood why (to be discussed in a future post) and my father’s struggles began to make a lot of sense. His own grandfather was a violent man and he suffered at his hands during a childhood that probably mirrored my own in many ways.

    However, the one member of his family that did occasionally warrant a mention was his sister, Margaret, who lived on a farm in Poundsgate. She had horses, I think, as well as numerous cats and dogs and I recall an enormous Alsatian who was almost twice as big as I was during this visit. If I were to describe Margaret to you, I would say that she was larger than life, a looming woman whose vastness of bosom hinted at a heart full of love beating beneath. Her house was cluttered but warm and inviting and she would welcome us with a booming, husky voice and a twinkle in her eye. Her hair was a very light brown and it always seemed to be engaged in a constant battle with time, struggling to keep the greyness at bay. I think that she may also have been a smoker, which in my head suggests that the greyness she battled against may well have been imbued with the smell of tobacco. Regardless of such detail, which my fallible memory may be recalling incorrectly, she was a fine woman who I admired greatly in silence.

    In her lounge, there was a piano, which I’m reliably informed Margaret played and taught with a passion and ability that has remained unmatched within our family ever since. I often got the feeling that she would have liked to have known us better, to have enjoyed a stronger affinity with my father. Now that I’m older, with an occasional pining for impossible relationships myself, I understand that circumstances can often make those wishes unachievable.

    So, on this particular day of this particular visit, I was in the doghouse. Not literally, for the gargantuan canine inhabitant of Margaret’s house lived in a kennel outside in a courtyard that was more often than not littered with shit. No, I would have done something wrong or something that I wasn’t supposed to do, probably based on social niceties that I had no idea about relating to the somewhat Victorian view that children should be seen and not heard. Knowing me, I was probably tempted by the piano and maybe snuck a little tickle of the ivories that would have resulted in neither tune nor melody but likely raucous chaos. And that would have infuriated my father to the point where if I hadn’t received at the very least a clip around the ear, I would have been promised one later in the day and that promise would have been very much followed up on. Margaret either saw this exchange or she sensed it; such is the esteem in which I hold this woman that I wouldn’t put anything past her. However it caught her attention is largely irrelevant because what matters the most is that she was kind to me. I’m sure she saw my father for what he was in that moment and in all likelihood, she saw history repeating itself. I wonder if this was the first moment where I understood that kindness mattered more than anything else, that I didn’t have to walk in the violent and aggressive footsteps of those who had gone before me.

    I would have still received the inevitable rebuke to alert me to the consequences of my actions, but the kindness from Margaret, the softness of her voice and the tenderness of her embrace gave younger me some hope for the future and when you are downtrodden or trapped in hell, that can be the greatest gift of all.

    I never forgot that day and many years later, when we visited Margaret as she neared her end of days, I had the opportunity to tell her. And once again, she hugged me to her chest, a grown man still full of those doubts and insecurities and she told me that I was a good person, that there was still hope for the future, even when she had none.

    Sometimes we meet remarkable people and we don’t know it at the time. I wish that I had known her better and I hope that she knew of the difference that she made to my life. I think of her often and am always grateful.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2025.

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