Back from the English Riviera.

Darling! Got whisked away to a very stylish hotel owned by some lovely old friends of ours. A total surprise. Kids to grandparents, dogs to kennels. Bish Bosh. As could be expected we ate fantastically well and drank WAY too much excellent wine. Only just got back and I'm off to my book club, so I haven't much time to write. But tomorrow I'm going to do my first blog rant! Bet you can't wait.

Got back to find that one of my stories has been accepted for publication, which is nice. I'll direct you to that later.

In the meantime, here's Jesus Saves, which got rejected on Tuesday.

He wears a long brown leather coat and a woolly deerstalker the same colour as his face, a dull mosaic of icy blues and greys, with red flecks. On his feet are trainers first worn by someone, perhaps by him, perhaps not, about twenty years ago. He looks old, in the way that all those men look old, bowed down by hardship and drink, seeing the world through a fog of misunderstanding. His lower lip never quite meets his upper lip, and it glistens with wetness. Columns of steam come out of his nose when he breathes, as he does, laboriously.

He walks up and down the High Street, up one side, down the other. He never seems to go into shops. He just walks, a barely smouldering roll-up held between yellowed finger and thumb, or anchored between yellowing, glistening lips, a plastic bag hanging from his wrist.

He doesn’t express emotion; he just varies his pace. He seems to wonder at the presence of others as others wonder at strange exotic animals in the zoo. A family passes by, a mother pushing a buggy and her two exuberant children, maybe four and six years old, skipping ahead, letting out little shrieks of joy. He stops, slack-jawed and watches as they hurry on, barely aware of his stare. And then he lifts up the hand with the bag slung over it, and wipes the dewdrop from his red and swollen nose. When they have gone, he starts up again.

Then one day, as he’s about to cross a side-road at the bottom of the High Street, a car approaches the junction. It is filled with ruddy-cheeked, hearty young people. They are laughing. As it stops, he looks at the side of the car. “JESUS SAVES!” it proclaims, in big white letters, “REJOICE!”

His expression doesn’t change, but automatically, as if programmed, as the car pulls away, he puts his roll-up in his mouth and sticks up his middle finger in an obscene gesture at the disappearing Christians.

One of them notices his finger as the car pulls away. Her smile fades as, temporarily, she looks as if she wonders why.