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(Monday 2nd June 2025)

  Mental Health - (bereavement)

[ 30 minute read ] 

5,539 words read at 190 words per minute. Read it here or download the story from the post  'Writing by numbers without numbers 7'

This is the final post on Toby's love story in which in order to write it I forced myself to face dragons from my past. There are areas in my mind that seem to eternally deny any probing. I shall just have to consider that part to be my 'dark'. However, I am lifted by the lyrics in a Alanis Morissette song, in which she thanks someone for loving both her light and her dark. Incidentally, I only remembered her song 'Everything' this morning, after I had finished the story. I strongly encourage you to listen to her song after you have read my story. You can find it on YouTube.

Lyrics from 'Everything' - written and performed by Alanis Morissette. Released in 2004

'You see everything, you see every part. You see all my light and you love my dark. You dig everything of which I'm ashamed. There's not anything to which you can't relate. And you're still here. What I resist persists and speaks louder than I know. What I resist you love, no matter how low or high I go.'

This is the completed love story with no comments and no highlighted changes, and is also now uploaded as ‘A complete Toby story 01 June’ as an attachment on 'Writing by numbers without numbers 7', along with all the other attachments from beginning to end, with all my comments, notes, and changes.

I am not a writer or tutor. If you are a student of creative writing, I strongly urge you to open yourselves to advice from your tutors. 

This story is only to show how I faced a challenge to write about something that I recognise I find difficult to understand and show; love. I wrote the interaction between the characters and then embellished it to fill in with some background 'colour'.

Toby fell in love

Mimie and Chloe

(Spring 2023)

The Spring air had brought a flush to Mimie’s face that was enhanced by her closeness to her older identical twin sister. Mimie looked fondly at her over the kitchen table.

      ‘You make me laugh so much, Chloe!’

      ‘I am glad, because you’re so ugly when you don’t!’ Chloe smiled back. A long and drawn-out moment passed while her smile slowly grew to a wide grin, ‘I’m pregnant.’ she said joyfully.

      ‘That’s great! Oh Wow! Oh God, I love you so much right now! I am so happy for you, Chloe.’ Light danced in Mimie’s eyes and she hugged her sister.

      ‘Owen is delighted, he insists he will be a great dad and he has put in for overtime. He wants to celebrate by taking me, us, to Rome just before its born. He thinks it will be easier to carry inside me than push a buggy in a crowd.’

      ‘He is such a man!’ laughed Mimie.

She absent-mindedly rearranged the daffodils in a vase on the table. She was deliriously merry.

January 2024 (The following year)

Toby hated Winter. When he opened his front door a little slush fell in. The bare stems of a hazelnut shrub near his front door, despite being three metres tall, gave him no shelter from the frigid wind and tiny particles of snow, like the ice scraped from the inside of freezers, chilled his face. The gusting blast had travelled countless miles from the East, and it had no gift of value, apart from a few partially decomposed, skeletal, leaves it blew across his path. Despite his flower beds still showing signs of frost, he took a few moments to carefully search for new growth, but found nothing he recognised. ‘Winter takes so long,’ he thought.

The sky, grey with no obvious depth to it, except its blanket of dull, disinterested, clouds, gave him no hope of being comfortable to idly make his way to the bus-stop today. On days like this, his rushed, light breakfast was not large enough to stand in for satiation of a need that he barely recognised, aloneness. He was not lonely, it was just there was a distinct lessening of people around, during the winter months. People came out because it was necessary to do so, and not for fun.

His shortcut to the main road, through a spinney, took him past a long-abandoned bungalow. Its roof, open to the elements, had collapsed and lay under a blanket of snow where the shaded sun could not reach. On the footpath, a young woman, sobbing and pushing a crying baby in a buggy passed him, coming the other way. She miserably passed him every day. Her face was reddened by the biting wind. Toby thought she always looked cold, and the baby must be, he thought. He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. He would have taken the day off from work if he could help her somehow. These days though, offering help came across as pity and contempt. 'Perhaps she needs money for heating', he thought. Tomorrow, he decided, he would leave twenty pounds on the footpath for her to find. He kept walking, feeling helpless.

At the bus stop seven people were waiting. No looked at him. A couple of them rocked from side to side, and everyone kept to their own space. Apart from little crunches from their shiny shoes crushing small islands of late un-thawed snow, there was silence.

Like every day, the bus driver stopped the bus a little way from the kerb, causing the passengers to take a large step over the resident puddle. Toby, waiting for everyone else to move before he did, had time to see, in the puddle, a reflection of compacted dirty slush from the road stuck at the underside edge of the front wheel-arch, before he stepped onto the bus. He could not recall there never being a puddle there. Last in the queue, Toby took the only available seat; the seat that everyone avoided every day.

Dave, occupying one half of the bench, was a dog-lover. He never spoke, but his dog-hair covered clothes spoke for him. Only people with head colds and wet tissues were immune to the conversation that Dave's damp clothes had with fresh air.

For Toby, it was predictable, almost fate, that he would sit next to Dave every day. It was as predictable as all the passengers' heads synchronously nodding in the same direction when they hit the pot-holes just before they entered the High Street, and again when their bodies simultaneously tilted forward as the bus braked sharply at the roadworks.

Toby got off on the High Street, outside the supermarket he usually bought his lunch from. The courthouse, where he worked locally as a defence solicitor, was just down a side street, conveniently opposite his office building.

Where the block paving concourse had lain in the shade for two winter months there was a sheen of green algae beginning to spread up the abutting walls, in a corner where a small heap of frosty leaves poked through a clump of partially thawed snow, that was now becoming translucent and glossy wet.

February 2024

Mimie looked at the mildew on the bedroom ceiling and the condensation on the windows. No matter how hard she tried to keep the inside humidity down, it still touched the cold walls. The whole flat needed a complete overhaul and not just a wipe with diluted bleach.

The baby was crying again. It needed changing and was probably hungry and scared too. Tears in Mimie’s eyes starred her vision and she had to blink a few times to clear them. After making the baby as comfortable as she could, she gently laid it in its buggy. Carefully, she covered it, as best she could, with blankets warmed by the small electric heater in the living room.

Weeping now, she left the block of maisonettes and headed out on her usual route around the block. The man in the expensive suit blankly stared at her as they passed one another; he always did. Today though, without knowing why, she looked back at him. He was standing looking at her, then he hurriedly turned and continued.

The twenty pound note, Toby had left, was under one of the buggy's wheels, and stuck to it for a few turns as Mimie carried on walking, trying to soothe the baby with its motion and vibrations. She desperately wanted to go home but went back to the flat.

The next day, near the fallen bungalow in the spinney, now that there was no snow to shroud it, she noticed all the accumulated rubbish. Crushed soft drink cans and crisp packets lay alongside empty polystyrene fast-food containers and sodden pieces of paper. The striped segments of sun and shade through the trees and saplings only served to highlight the decay. Looking away and mindful of where she trod, she saw a dry twenty pound note on the wet path. Obviously, it had been recently dropped there. It wasn’t long before she realised what was happening; she passed the good-looking suited man and then found twenty pounds. Over the next six weeks, she found twelve more. She kept them. She didn’t spend them, she saved them; each time she took them home back to the flat and dried and gently ironed out the crease down the middle, all two-hundred and sixty pounds.

March 2024

Now that the days had warmed and lengthened, the ground responded and Toby pondered which shoots to keep and which to keep, He had decided to give everything a chance unless the result was only an ugly thrusting of green mounted by tiny flowers that quickly faded, or easily recognised weeds that had deep roots that perniciously grew forth into the light from just the tiniest shred left in fertile soil. Constantly cutting back unwanted ribaldry that inevitably lead to insignificance or disappointment was not something Toby felt he wanted to do. He stuck to his plan of transplanting the seedlings he recognised as being escapees from his neighbours flower garden, and discarded the rest.

This morning, he got off the bus before it got to the road-works in the High Street.

Kate, the prosecutor on Toby’s current case, eyed him with mild interest as he passed her entering the court. She knew that cases never got to court unless there was a very strong chance that the defendant was guilty, they both did. Day after day, they took it in turns to go through the routine of explaining to the magistrates in their bored voices how bad the defendant is, and then how pitiful the defendant is. Usually, they avoided each other. Today though, Kate had a kernel of an idea. She was going to ask Toby if he would share his lunch-hour with her; not in his supermarket queue, instead, in the little Greek restaurant nearby.

There was something sincere about Toby that she liked. His obvious compassion for the downfallen was apparent, yet he had a strong sense of propriety that she herself held to be valuable.

In the Greek restaurant, Toby inwardly winced a few times at his clumsy verbal blunders, which Kate telegraphed with minutely raised eyebrows and an almost invisible smile which only touched her eyes.

‘At least, she is open.’ he thought. ‘Not at all like her courtroom persona.’

The second lunch with Kate was a little more relaxed and just as the sun always shone for a week in February, Toby felt the relationship between them had warmed a little and he had a hopeful belief that the genuine smiles that Kate briefly gave him would become longer and more frequent.

It was not until the third lunch that Toby noticed how her voice, now she was not projecting it in court, came from her holding it in her chest and larynx, though each word was carefully enunciated in a deep and smooth tone. When she questioned Toby, she did it with a neutral, genuine curiousity as a child might, or an inquisitive visitor from a different country or planet. A few times, Toby surprised himself by thinking her voice sounded similar to an AI assistive tool with an almost indistinguishable Californian accent, yet it evinced a good private English schooling. He felt held by it; supported by it; and warmed by it. Naturally a talker, Toby found himself hunting for questions to ask her, so he could listen to her rich voice. Eventually, Toby was confident that a refusal for dinner with him would be skillfully and tactfully handed to him if Kate was not interested. Kate turned her head slightly down and sideways and looked at Toby out of the corner of her eyes.

      ‘I would love to,’ she said. Her lips remained straight and level with her equally straight dark eyebrows.

Toby was intrigued by her mixed message of carefully veiled sensual promise and simultaneous firmness. He found her profoundly alluring. She, on the other hand, was merely cautious and had been about to turn him down, so the smile never had time to reach her lips. She had decided that a simple ‘Okay’ was blasé and went, instead, with convention. At this stage, she was on par with the girls that give a false telephone number to chancers at night-clubs. ‘I would love to’ could easily become, ‘Something came up.’ Yet, why not? It was after all her she that had precipitated these meetings.

They agreed to meet on Saturday night. It was Thursday.

The restaurant they agreed to meet at was outside of town. Toby stepped out of the taxi onto a wet, recently lain car park. It had trees on two sides that separated it from fields. The trees however, did little to slow a damp wind that brought with it the merest puff of the scent of wood smoke that dissipated and then came again and faded. Not quite a full moon the light from it was alternately obscured by fast moving clouds, and waving branches that cast sweeping shadows across the car park. Expecting, but not knowing why, that Kate would be fastidiously punctual, he waited where he stood. Five minutes passed. Then, feeling foolish, he went inside.

Perfectly on time, Kate arrived at the restaurant with a light make-up that subtly enhanced her Eurasian features. Her dark hair was piled on her head. Despite there being some familiarity, and certainly an intriguing attraction, between them, they were still a little nervous, since this was an occasion at a different part of the day than their previous meetings and would have only one of two possible outcomes, one of which would be brought about solely by their mutual desires, and the other by a disconnect, or a shaped recognition of a job or meeting that they must return to in the coming days.

By the end of the following week, Toby and Kate were thinking of one another often, but Kate decided that they should not meet for lunch anymore. Her idea, presented to Toby, seemed sound. She suggested that their dates, and nights out, should be fresh and not mundane; in any case, they were both embroiled in their cases during the week. Soon, through Kate’s contrivance, they settled into a smooth and relaxed relationship where respect began to make way and accommodate affection and then love.

If an emergency vehicle siren was heard and they could not see each other, they worried that the other might be injured. They were silly, but love brings with it divergent, almost psychotic, thinking; Confidence is boosted and people become friendlier, which tricks the mind, and things that would have been considered trite and meaningless, while one dwelt in loveless solitude, become important and relevant.

Each day, subconscious inspection of their relationship revealed new shoots of discovery. Kate was ticklish behind her knees and Toby smiled whenever he was asleep at Kate’s house. They made breakfast together and let their fingers touch when they reached for toast or their coffee. The shape of their lives, shared with one another, seemed to be conforming to their combined values in an environment of anticipated warmth and brightness. They saw no clouds on the horizon.

Toby preferred tea with his breakfast, and at home, by himself, would eat a large but disjointed and hurried breakfast as he readied for work; toast in one hand and jacket in the other. Then put the jacket down, and scoop some scrambled egg, which never made it to his mouth without some of it falling off the fork back onto the plate.

April 2024

It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp, full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love; Kate had inflamed his desire and he had found satisfaction. She was strong and feminine; she hid her body yet was not modest in her words or actions.

He plucked an emerging stinging nettle from near the self-seeded snapdragons. It stung his finger-tips but not really unpleasantly like a sting on the back of the hand would be, or on an arm or a leg; more a tingle; more an 'ooh!' than an 'Ouch!'.

His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely mother woman with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. A jogger, recently happy to exercise now her face and especially the bridge of her nose, wouldn't get so cold, dodged the waiting passengers. The bus, unusually, arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned.

April 2024

In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings.

      ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

      ‘There’s twenty pounds down here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

      ‘Move along'

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through.

      ‘Wait!’

Toby turned to see the normally weeping woman who had smiled at him today.

      'Have you got a moment? I need to talk to you. I know what you did.' Most people never want to hear this because it makes them think about when they slightly bumped a car in the supermarket car park and drove away, hoping no-one had noticed. 'It wasn't too big a bump was it? Was it?' Toby had no such fear, because he regarded himself as honest. In any case, he recognised the woman, and she was not unattractive in a dark trouser suit. Instead of the heightened perception that precedes fear, a half itch and half stinging feeling moved invisibly within him.

      'Okay, what's up?'

      'Can I buy you a coffee, at lunch-time?' Bought coffee in a courthouse came from a vending machine, and a cup of coffee that was made in the courthouse was made in the presence of other court officials, in the kitchen. This was going to be a pseudo-date, off the premises.

      'Meet here? One o'clock?' Toby smiled. Mimie grinned. Breakfast seemed too small again.

Toby was intrigued, she didn't work here and was dressed expensively well. As duty-solicitor he hoped she was not in trouble. He wasn't expecting to meet Kate until this evening.

The lunchtime meeting with Mimie

Mimie, seated opposite Toby in the cafe near his bus stop on the High Street, appraised him and broadly smiled, her incisors were the same length as her canines. It made Toby think of a friendly spider, a beautiful vampire, and a cat all at the same time. Neither of them had ordered at the counter and so just looked at one another for a still, drawn out, moment. Toby, embarrassed by his obvious fascination with her face, reached for a menu on the table. Mimie, guileless, was not so fazed by rude intimacy and watched him with slightly raised eyebrows, and a mouth that was shaped for imminent speech. It was, for Toby, the complete immediacy of her that gave him trouble. He felt like he was drowning in fresh water while being dehydrated, and felt a pull at his stomach, a hollowness that had a metallic tang. He wasn’t hungry, but like an addict that had been free from drug abuse for years, he felt himself craving something he couldn’t identify, but conversely, he thought he might have found it.

      ‘You let me find money in the street’

Toby looked up.

She raised her eyebrows, ‘I don’t need it, you know.’ Now her confidence at being in sudden and indeterminate close-up interaction changed to a soft self-assurance. She gently placed the twenty pound notes she had saved on the table, but gave no thanks. Toby felt that she could just up and leave right now, and she would not look back at him.

      ‘The baby you saw me with, its not mine. It’s my sister’s… was my sister’s. She was in an accident in Rome, in December.’ Her face fell.

Toby felt his chair drop a little and he adjusted his body. She waited. A bus passed by outside.

      ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

      ‘Mimie’, she answered. ‘She died.’

      ‘The baby?’

      ‘No, my sister. I was looking after him at her place, waiting for her boyfriend to come back.’

She paused. A customer left. She swallowed. ‘The father. He never did. I was staying with him to help with the baby but he went out because he said he couldn’t bear to look at me any more. I felt so sorry for him. I waited for two months. I didn’t want to be with him. He knew that. He never came back. My mum has the baby now.’

She brightened, ‘C’mon!’ She stood, took his hand and started for the door.

Outside, she led him down an alley, gently pushed him up against a wall, turned to him, and pressed her body against him. Coolly, she looked him in the eyes and saw no objection there. Slowly, she pushed herself off his chest, all the time looking into his eyes, turned and went back to the High Street, and turned to him still in the alley.

      ‘Come on, silly,’ she laughed. They went back to the cafe. She ordered them both a cup of tea each, avoiding the promised coffee.

The next time he saw her she was in tight washed-out jeans and he noticed how her overall carefree bounciness could be attributed to athleticism. He felt guilty; he was more a poet than a labourer; more a human than an animal; yet more a man than a boy, and he could not help himself. Above all though, it was her suddenness; her penetrating intimacy that bordered on rudeness that captured his attention. She might break out into dancing or laughing at any time, or just as quickly, walk away, everyone else forgotten.

     ‘It is because she is so unpracticed. That is why I like her.’ he mused.

In her bedroom she was confident and experienced. Afterwards, Toby somehow knew he was no different to the lover who was there the previous night or perhaps a different one the next day. The knowledge was like discovering there were ants in a lemon meringue pie, or a sharp strawberry tart at a picnic, but only after he had taken a few bites. He wanted to spit but still imagined he could taste her mouth. His fun was sullied, but he tried to swallow his jealousy. She was ephemeral. She would never commit herself to a stable relationship. Something had broken her.

Later, at home, Toby remembered Mimie had told him about her sister dying in Rome as a new mother, and how Mimie had cared for her nephew and brother-in-law; even giving herself to Owen on one occasion, because in his grief he had wanted one last time with his wife and Mimie’s identical twin sister, Chloe. They had both weeped throughout, and afterwards he apologised over and over again, wandering the flat naked for hours before he dressed and left, she had said. Mimie had not wanted to bear the mantle of her sister’s role as Owen’s past or future partner, but in her grief she had fallen over herself to try to grasp a position from which to save herself from their drowning anguish. She had said that, since Chloe’s death, she felt like she was wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a frozen lake, while everyone else around her was an accomplished figure skater on a safe and carefully maintained ice-rink. She had said she fellt that she was always between falling and landing, and her arms were flailing to try to right herself before the inevitable impact that was always coming.

Remembering what Mimie had said, he replayed a scene in her kitchen when he had told her that her fridge door was still slightly open. Breaking his soft embrace, she had beamed him a grin, clasped her hands in front of her, held his eyes and keeping her feet together, made three little backwards jumps and bumped the fridge door shut with a sideways shift of her hip. She had gleefully laughed. Toby knew then that he loved Mimie. She knew fun. He wept for her and resolved that he would no longer be the kind of lover who just took what she freely gave.

May 2024

The compassion he had felt for Mimie in Winter, caring for and pushing a buggy with a crying abandoned baby, and combined with his new understanding of her, brought forward within him a protective quality. He was in deep with her. He was crazy for her, and his love of, and for her, had changed, She would notice it, and he knew that things would change between them. She would do what she had always indicated she would do, and what he feared she would do; she would walk away and not look back at him. He wondered then, where she got her money. In his mind, he saw her again in her tight jeans and remembered when she had pushed him up against the wall in the alley, and a message in her eyes that said. ‘You can have this. Just ask!’. He could taste ants again because he knew other men saw it.

She did notice his change towards her, and his soft concern, to her, manifested as being coarse and restrictive. Right then, she didn’t want to be loved, or to ever love again. It just hurt so much. Every day, she remembered her sister and how she had given herself in her sister’s stead to try to keep a link with her, and every day she had silently keened with grief. She liked being held but she soon wanted it all to go away, and she knew why Toby held her now; because he thought she was beyond sad; he thought she was somehow broken. It made it worse.

August 2024

Kate had a large back garden with flowers in every direction. It was bright, fresh and colourful. It was also, unlike Toby’s garden, overly well cared-for; almost manicured. Guests to Kate’s home delighted in spending time in the obvious attention to care that Kate gave out. Toby felt loved by her, yet somehow she sometimes blew a little frigid, was at times haughty, and the heat from her, though voluptuous, was never scorching like he had known, nonetheless, he loved her deeply and warmly.

One warm evening, under low-wattage garden lighting and shielded by high fences, Toby and Kate lay naked, dozing in the soporific scent of lavender, night-scented stock and honeysuckle, when a cold shower surprised them.

The shock of it on Toby’s skin was exhilarating. ‘Mimie’, he thought.

Christmas 2024

Kate wanted to spend Christmas skiing in Innsbuck but consented to having a few family members at her house the day before she and Toby left. This was an occasion that Toby had been waiting for since the late winter at the beginning of this year. He would finally get to share,the fruits of his labours in his garden. Pests had decimated his crops throughout Spring and Summer, but strong sunlight and night-time showers had been kind. There had been triumphs and achievements. Eating the first strawberry of the year was always the best flavour he tasted in Summer. Alongside this, he had discovered that they also ripen off the plant, though not so sweetly. Yet, those less sweet fruits that were left to resolve themselves when severed from the bond of the group, and which developed from their own resources, tended to last the longest.

In Kate’s Aga heated, spacious kitchen of cold marble worktops; ideal for pastry-rolling; and warm varnished wood cupboards, Toby unpacked his backpack. The hazelnuts he would crush and lightly roast to go into a chocolate ganache. The home-made strawberry jam and frozen raspberries Kate wanted, to make a ripple ice-cream with. Toby fancied that his pickled walnuts would go with an evening cheese platter to enjoy with their close relatives who were staying over. He would especially enjoy the leeks he had pulled from his garden that morning, at 5am, by torchlight.

Later that evening

Keeping the engagement ring, meant for Kate, in his pocket he made his final resolution. Just like Mimie was not Chloe for Owen, Kate was not Mimie for Toby. She never would be. He left by the back door and called an antiques dealer friend.

Mimie was not at home, or didn’t answer the door. He gave up knocking after the second time, knowing that he, himself, would have been disturbed if he was with Mimie and someone kept knocking.

He knew that just off the High Street there was a road junction where young women loosely clustered. He found her there. At first, her greeting was bright and inviting, then as she recognised him it slowly faded to smiling familiarity, but still there remained hope in her eyes. She knew why he was there but she was cold and there wasn’t much going on that night.

      ‘I have something for you’ he said. ‘It‘s a ring. A special ring.’

Mimie’s heart plummeted and her face told him her fear. It was irrational of her, she knew, but she also knew how Toby felt about her. Toby knew then that he would never see her again. Their lives would, from now on, never cross again. He felt that he did already know that before, but now he was certain. The look of horror he thought he saw there was to him the outward effect of her feeling of repulsion of what she thought he was offering. He imagined she was thinking ‘Creep!’ But quickly she swept her face clean and placed a mask of firm implacability on it.

      ‘This is a Mourning Ring. It’s Victorian. People would wear these to show their love is connected to their loved ones beyond the grave. It has a diamond, which is for constancy, to show that their love will be true and never fail even when they are not here. You don’t have to take it, but if you do, it’s fine with me if you sell it. He paused and looked down.

      It’s….it’s worth something.’

It was worth more than something, he had swapped a four thousand pounds engagement ring and paid an extra three thousand pounds for it.

She lifted her mittened hand and took it. Snow still clung to her mitten where she had touched a low wall and the ring lay among it. The ice nearest to it faded as the heat from Toby’s pocket, which was still held in the ring, melted it.

Toby thinking she might give it back, or worse still, see her casually throw it away, turned on the frosty pavement and walked away. His shoes crunched. It had begun to snow again, but with little half-frozen flakes that whipped in the nervous wind. On the other side of the road, a car crunched over the ice crystals forming on the road. The driver, possibly inebriated from a party, belatedly switched on the headlights.

Toby had passed three dark houses before he heard her call to him.

      ‘Toby!'

He turned. Her face was a pattern of sadness and pain, but a smile forced itself to the surface. She raised one mittened hand and waved goodbye. He thought he could make out her whispered ‘Happy Christmas, Toby’ as it crossed her lips.

Her head went down and she looked again at the ring on her now bare hand.

      ‘Happy Christmas, Chloe’. The warmth there restored some of the heat that was lost to the dark night air.

As she turned for her warm home, a soft puff of wind in the stillness blew up a tiny whirlwind of ice particles from the pavement near Mimie, swirled around her ankles, brushed her feet, and settled down again.

      ‘Happy Christmas Toby’, she breathed. ‘Thank you.’

The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw21955

The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

The tags for seeing only the evolution of this story are:  writing by numbers, the evolution of a character, the evolution of a story. If you can see the list of tags to the right you can click on the suggested (above) links to eliminate all the rest of the posts. If you can't see the links click on the link above and then they should be visible when the page reloads.

[ 7 minute read ]

I have been trying to write about love; the purpose of which is to force myself to confront something that is difficult for me to do. Throughout my effort, I have been looking to eliminate worn out cliches and avoid simplistic declarative statements, which I much, much prefer to read and write. One of my first books as an infant was called Peter and Jane. ‘Here is Peter. Here is Jane’. Love it! Overall, I wanted to discover characters and characteristics that I could use elsewhere in understanding diverse topics. I like to anthropomorphise dry subjects to make them easier for me to understand. The 'plot' of the story is clear to me; but the whole thing is incomplete because to give it substance I still have to have a parallel environment that follows rules we are all familiar with; I have chosen a full calendar year, a garden, and the weather throughout the year. This, I hope would add a canvas on which the story is overlaid. Since I have experience of a few English seasons I can hold the way seasons change from one to another in my mind, and how a garden is affected.

A garden has expected results from applied effort, that is affected by weather, which is predictable as seasons go, but has an enormous and largely uncontrollable effect on plant and animal growth. Weather, as an unpredictable factor can destroy well-maintained gardens. Because growing plants and looking for; falling in; and maintaining LOVE is always a gamble, I think the journey of love is similar to a garden affected by human application and random weather that we know but is always different to our memory and expectations, much like people.

None of this, however, is yet written into the story. The story plainly needs to be extended to segue in additional pieces, because all that was posted on 27 April 2025 are the outside edges of a jigsaw and some of the brighter and most recognisable inner pieces along with a few pieces to connect those islands of significance. Expect more islands of lesser colour but add background and ambience to the overall vignette, or word-painting.

I want to put in the story: 'She had been ever so slightly over-exposed to the sun and her skin was tight as though she had been splashed with lemon juice.' which is completely in my writing style but it will be toned back a bit. It should, I think, be used to add contrast to a pre-existing weather condition.

In Winter, most gardeners will be planning, or finalising their plans on, what they will try to grow until next Winter. Of course, most food crops can only be harvested once. For humans, this might be a Summer romance. Some plants only produce fruit or seeds in the second year and then die, like Wallflower. Some, like strawberry plants, are more fructicious in their second year and then decline in productivity. Some cacti take years before they produce a magnificent flower. We might, if we draw our memories back to either our own pre-teen and teen years consider that our passion for someone else is unreciprocated so we pass them in the school corridor without making ourselves obvious until we discover that ‘that’ person also likes us. Bingo! Big flower! Some deserts are almost devoid of plant-life and then a flood brings the necessary water for a carpet of beautiful flowers to suddenly appear. Insects rely on this and have life-cycles patterns to match. We could compare this type of plant growth in a desert to young people going to Ayia Napa, Ibiza, and Zante, and the type of ‘love’ they get there. Lots of insects there, in hot environments.

So, being out of love is a bare garden. The world is cold and there is not much to cause a lone person to believe that they will find love. More people mingling outside in Summer, I suggest, gives a greater probability of a happy meeting. I think because we kind of know this, we are more outwardly hopeful and people find us more attractive. Happy people find happy people, I think.

Garden

Winter - Bare ground, some possibilities. Brown if it has been tilled and is weed-free.

Spring – Warm weather, tree blossom, anticipation of a happy time approaching. A few days of fast growth – strong sunlight after rain the day before. Here then, there is cause and effect in the right order. I have noticed that watering my garden in Spring causes my domesticated plants to flower less and later than the nearby plants that have escaped, this year.

Summer – some harvesting of foodstuffs, large quantity of mellifluous flowers with vivid colours and an abundance of interesting insect activity. Boisterous displays of colour.

Autumn – Most crops are harvested, cooler weather (which might be welcomed) Beautiful and relaxing tree leaf colour in a sunlight that has travelled through more air because it is lower throughout the days. In churches there are traditional Thanksgiving services. A time of plenty and sharing, so LOVE often overflows and is carelessly shared among nearby people.

Winter – final crop harvesting and stripping the garden of debris.

People and weather

People in Winter often wear dark clothes, and spontaneous personal interaction is very brief, even non-existent. As far as I can understand, there is often only a very small and slow growth of building familiarity. ‘Hello, Hello again, A fine day isn’t it? We must stop meeting like this, My name is…..’ This slow growth may take weeks. This, I suggest is quite different to the rapidity of how a relationship grows in warmer months; ‘Hello, conversation, laugh, conversation, Let’s meet again’, all in one or two meetings

People in Spring become more gregarious and wear clothes a bit more colourful than in winter. On sunny and warm days, there are more people about and people are less frenetic about getting somewhere on foot; taking more time to look in shop windows as they pass. I suggest that nearly all of us ‘window-shop’ for attractive people more in warm weather than in cold weather. This does not seem to be evolutionary beneficial unless we consider that a new-born baby will spend its first few months entirely constrained by its inability to perambulate away from the warmth of the furs and fires in a cave.

In a garden, new growth is minutely examined by the gardener to make sure it is not a weed, and much satisfaction is found in the growth or revealing of a cherished cultivated ‘seedling’. When a human attraction is in its first stages, more attention is diverted to closer inspection of the other person, largely because it is permissible, and reciprocated.

Summer - Spontaneous smiling at strangers and a general warmth exhibited to all around. There is an exuberance of character that becomes more widespread and it is a time for showing off a little. More fun and smiles among mingling people outside engenders frivolity.

Autumn - A time of plenty and sharing, so LOVE often overflows, yet, is cautiously shared among nearby people. The reason for this, I suggest, is because there is a high level of communal love that is warm and caring, much like being under a duvet in bed; and there is also the passionate love for an individual that is more like burning one side of your body while the other side freezes in a cold and draughty house with an open fire that burns brightly.

In the garden, the warmth is still there but only the cold will come and there will be an inadequate fire in the sky to warm the air and ground. There are the final prunings of hedges, bushes and lawns. Gardeners know that plants will not survive and the warm care of the gardener must be curtailed. There is a drawing back from sharing warmth, particularly to an environment that does not give warmth back.

This is the last post on How Toby fell in Love, or this exploration on how I have tried to write about love.

Hopefully, I shall be able to update this post with ongoing attachments, all of which shall be dated.

[ 15 minute read ]

Writing by numbers without numbers 6

Toby fell in love PART TWO

April 2024

In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings.

       ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

       ‘There’s twenty pounds down here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

       ‘Move along'

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through. 

        ‘Wait!’

Toby turned to see the normally weeping woman who had smiled at him today.

       'Have you got a moment? I need to talk to you. I know what you did.' Most people never want to hear this because it makes them think about when they slightly bumped a car in the supermarket car park and drove away, hoping no-one had noticed. 'It wasn't too big a bump was it? Was it?' Toby had no such fear, because he regarded himself as honest. In any case, he recognised the woman, and she was not unattractive in a dark trouser suit. Instead of the heightened perception that precedes fear, a half itch and half stinging feeling moved invisibly within him.

      'Okay, what's up?'

      'Can I buy you a coffee, at lunch-time?' Bought coffee in a courthouse came from a vending machine, and a cup of coffee that was made in the courthouse was made in the presence of other court officials, in the kitchen. This was going to be a psuedo-date, off the premises.

      'Meet here? One o'clock?' Toby smiled. Mimie smiled back. (Way too twee) Breakfast seemed too small again.

      Toby was intrigued, she didn't work here and was dressed expensively well. As duty-solicitor he hoped she was not in trouble. He wasn't expecting to meet Kate until this evening.

The lunchtime meeting with Mimie

Mimie, seated opposite Toby in the cafe near his bus stop on the High Street, appraised him and broadly smiled, her canines were the same length as her incisors. It made Toby think of a friendly spider, a beautiful vampire, and a cat all at the same time. Neither of them had ordered at the counter and so just looked at one another for a still, drawn out, moment. Toby, embarrassed by his obvious fascination with her face, reached for a menu on the table. Mimie, guileless, was not so fazed by rude intimacy and watched him with slightly raised eyebrows, and a mouth that was shaped for imminent speech. It was, for Toby, the complete immediacy of her that gave him trouble. He felt like he was drowning in fresh water while being dehydrated, and felt a pull at his stomach, a hollowness that had a metallic tang. He wasn’t hungry, but like an addict that had been free from drug abuse for years, he felt himself craving something he couldn’t identify, but conversely, he thought he might have found it.

       ‘You let me find money in the street’

Toby looked up.

She raised her eyebrows, ‘I don’t need it, you know.’ Now her confidence at being in sudden and indeterminate close-up interaction changed to a soft self-assurance. She gently placed the twenty pound notes she had saved on the table, but gave no thanks. Toby felt that she could just up and leave right now, and she would not look back at him.

       ‘The baby you saw me with, its not mine. It’s my sister’s… was my sister’s. She was in an accident in Rome, in December.’ Her face fell.

Toby felt his chair drop a little and he adjusted his body. She waited. A bus passed by outside.

        ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

        ‘Mimie’, she answered. ‘She died.’

         ‘The baby?’

         ‘No, my sister. I was looking after him at her place, waiting for her boyfriend to come back.’ She paused. A customer left. She swallowed. ‘The father. He never did. I was staying with him to help with the baby but he went out because he said he couldn’t bear to look at me any more. I felt so sorry for him. I waited for two months. I didn’t want to be with him. He knew that. He never came back. My mum has the baby now.’

She brightened, ‘C’mon!’ She stood, took his hand and started for the door.

Outside, she led him down an alley, gently pushed him up against a wall, turned to him, and pressed her body against him. Coolly, she looked him in the eyes and saw no objection there. Slowly, she pushed herself off his chest, all the time looking into his eyes, turned and went back to the High Street, and turned to him still in the alley.

        ‘Come on, silly’ she laughed. They went back to the cafe. She ordered them a cup of tea each.

The next time he saw her she was in tight washed-out jeans and he noticed how her overall carefree bounciness could be attributed to athleticism. He felt guilty; he was more a poet than a labourer; more a human than an animal; yet more a man than a boy, and he could not help himself. Above all though, it was her suddenness; her penetrating intimacy that bordered on rudeness that captured his attention. She might break out into dancing or laughing at any time, or just as quickly, walk away, everyone else forgotten.

‘It is because she is so unpracticed. That is why I like her.’ he mused.

In her bedroom she was confident and experienced. Afterwards, Toby somehow knew he was no different to the lover who was there the previous night or perhaps a different one the next day. The knowledge was like discovering there were ants in a lemon meringue pie, or a sharp strawberry tart at a picnic, but only after he had taken a few bites. He wanted to spit but still imagined he could taste her lips. His fun was sullied, but he tried to swallow his jealousy. She was ephemeral. She would never commit herself to a stable relationship. Something had broken her.

Later, at home, Toby remembered Mimie had told him about her sister dying in Rome as a new mother, and how Mimie had cared for her nephew and brother-in-law; even giving herself to Owen on one occasion, because in his grief he had wanted one last time with his wife and her sister Chloe. They had both weeped throughout, and afterwards he apologised over and over again , wandering the flat naked for hours before he dressed and left, she had said. Mimie had not wanted to bear the mantle of her sister’s role as Owen’s future partner, but in her grief she had fallen over herself to try to grasp a position from which to save herself from their drowning anguish. She had said that, since Chloe’s death, she felt like she was wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a frozen lake, while everyone else around her was an accomplished figure skater on an ice-rink.

Remembering what Mimie had said, he replayed a scene in her kitchen when he had told her that her fridge door was still slightly open. Breaking his soft embrace, she had beamed him a grin, clasped her hands in front of her, held his eyes and keeping her feet together, hopped backwards three times and bumped the fridge door shut with a sideways shift of her hip. She had gleefully laughed. Toby knew then that he loved Mimie. She knew fun. He wept for her and resolved that he would no longer be the kind of lover who just took what she freely gave.

The compassion he had felt for her in Winter, pushing a buggy with a crying baby, and combined with his new understanding of her, brought forward within him a protective quality. He was in deep with her. He was crazy for her, and his love of, and for her, had changed, She would notice it, and he knew that things would change between them. She would do what she had always indicated she would do, and what he feared she would do; she would walk away and not look back at him. He wondered then, where she got her money. In his mind, he saw her again in her tight jeans and remembered when she had pushed him up against the wall in the alley, and a message in her eyes that said. ‘You can have this. Just ask!’. He could taste ants again because he knew other men saw it.

She had noticed his change towards her, and his soft concern, to her, manifested as being coarse and restrictive. Right then, she didn’t want to be loved, or to ever love again. It just hurt so much. Every day she remembered her sister and how she had given herself in her sister’s stead to try to keep alink with her, and every day she had silently keened with grief. She liked being held but she soon wanted it all to go away, and she knew why Toby held her now; because he thought she was beyond sad; he thought she was somehow broken. It made it worse.

(SUMMER 2024)

Kate had a large back garden with flowers in every direction. It was bright, fresh and colourful. It was also, unlike Toby’s garden, overly well cared-for; almost manicured. Guests to Kate’s home delighted in spending time in the obvious attention to care that Kate gave out. Toby felt loved by her, yet somehow she sometimes blew a little frigid and the heat from her was never scorching like he had experienced, nonetheless, he loved her deeply and warmly. Like old slippers cliched

One warm evening, when he and Kate were alone in the garden, shielded by her high fences and her neighbours oblivious to their nakedness, a cold shower caught them, dozing. The exhilierating shock on Toby’s warm skin made him think of Mimie. ‘Mimie’, he thought, ‘I want you so much!’

Christmas 2024

Kate wanted to spend Christmas skiing in Innsbuck but consented to having a few family members at her house the day before she and Toby left. This was an occasion that Toby had been waiting for since the late winter at the beginning of this year. He would finally get to share, literally the fruits of his labours in his garden.

In Kate’s Aga heated, spacious kitchen of cold marble worktops; ideal for pastry-rolling; and warm varnished wood cupboards, Toby unpacked his backpack. The hazelnuts he would crush and lightly roast to go into a chocolate ganache. The home-made strawberry jam and frozen raspberries Kate wanted to make a ripple ice-cream with. Toby fancied that his pickled walnuts would go with an evening cheese platter to enjoy with their close relatives who were staying over. He would especially enjoy the leeks he had pulled from his garden that morning, at 5am, by torchlight.

Later that evening

Keeping the engagement ring in his pocket he made his final resolution. Just like Mimie was not Chloe for Owen, Chloe’s widower, Kate was not Mimie for Toby. She never would be. He left by the back door and called an antiques dealer friend.

Mimie was not at home, or didn’t answer the door. He gave up knocking after the second time, knowing that he, himself, would have been disturbed if he was with Mimie and someone kept knocking.

Near the High Street, he knew there was a road junction where young women loosely clustered. He found her there. At first her greeting was bright and inviting, then as she recognised him it slowly faded to smiling familiarity, but still there remained hope in her eyes. She knew why he was there but she was cold and there wasn’t much going on that night.

        ‘I have something for you’ he said. ‘It‘s a ring. A special ring.’

Mimie’s heart plummeted and her face told him her fear. Toby knew then that he would never see her again. The look of horror he saw was the outward effect of her feeling of repulsion of what she thought he was offering. He imagined she was thinking ‘Creep!’ But quickly she swept her face clean and placed a mask of firm implacability on it.

       ‘This is a Mourning Ring. It’s Victorian. People would wear these to show their love is connected to their loved ones beyond the grave. It has a diamond, which is for constancy, to show that their love will be true and never fail even when they are not here. You don’t have to take it, but if you do, it’s fine with me if you sell it. He paused and looked down. 

     ‘It’s….it’s worth something.’ 

It was worth more than something, he had paid three thousand pounds and swapped an engagement ring for it.

She lifted her mittened hand and took it. Snow still clung to her mitten where she had touched a low wall and the ring lay among it. The ice nearest to it faded as the heat from Toby’s pocket still held in the ring melted it.

Toby thinking she might give it back, or worse still, see her casually throw it away, turned on the frosty pavement and walked away. His shoes crunched.

He had passed three houses before he heard her call to him.

     ‘Toby!' 

He turned. Her face was a pattern of sadness and pain, but a smile forced itself to the surface. She raised one mittened hand and waved goodbye. He thought he could make out her whispered ‘Happy Christmas, Toby’ as it crossed her lips.

Her head went down and she looked again at the ring on her now bare hand. 

       ‘Happy Christmas, Chloe’. The warmth there restored some of the heat that was lost to the dark night air.

As she turned for her warm home, a soft puff of wind in the stillness blew up a tiny whirlwind of ice particles from the pavement near Mimie, brushed her feet, and settled down again. 

       ‘Happy Christmas Toby’, she breathed. ‘Thank you.’

-end-

My thoughts go to all the young girls and boys who had their hearts broken and have never found the secret magic shop with a kind person behind the counter who fixes hearts for free; and the young boys and girls who were trained for battle at home and are confronted by minefields when they find romantic love. It is for the people who are wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a lake, like Mimie, and are trying to reach the edge, but can only see the ice shrinking from the shore. This is for the people who grew up in an environment where love was conjoined with pain and misery; from seeing too much, who have safe love now but seek a frost on something warm. This is for the people who need vinegar on their chocolate cake and for the people for whom love once washed through an open ended street, but now for them stops in a cold cul-de-sac that no longer has a path out the other end; a dead-end that no amount of bulldozing with love will open again; and it is for the people who cry in secret when they love; because for all these people, love hurts.

Something I learned was that I could imagine a camp-fire as a metaphor for a relationship, and personalities, or more fittingly, people's love can be considered to be logs that change the quality of the fire. There can be wood that gives off bad smells; ignites quickly and burns brightly but quickly; wood that smothers the heat of the fire by its size; cold and wet wood that dampens the heat; choking smoke; long lasting embers; wood completely consumed by the fire leaving a dry ash behind; and twigs and kindling that works as treats in a steady and stable relationship in the form of outbreaks of romantic actions.

Additional text added at 09:30 Saturday 19th April at the end of the published story installment denoted by orange 'Additional Text'

4  Laying out how the evolution of love unfolds

I am not a writer and cannot tell anyone how to write. 

If you are on an OU Creative Writing course, then that course is plainly where your first focus should be. I am making no recommendations, only demonstrating how I am learning.

The tags for this are: writing by numbers, the evolution of a character, the evolution of a story

These tags will be used only for posts that directly relate to this story and character evolution, so clicking on them in the list of tags will show only this evolution with the related posts. Because they will not display in chronological order the posts are numbered. This is number 4

Black font is pretty much final but subject to change. 

Red font text will be changed. 

Green font text is a replacement for the red font text.

I am going to also use blue font for comments and bold typeface and italics for something else.

So, green font is the replacement for the red font. Like this: Toby walked down his path. Toby ran across the lawn towards the path

So far, in 'Writing by numbers without numbers 1-3', which currently jump around in time, we have a compassionate and reasonably well paid solicitor (Toby) living alone who keeps his own garden, and is in love with Kate – who we have yet to meet and know absolutely nothing about.

The weeping woman, Mimie, with the crying baby may, or may not, find the twenty pounds that Toby has left for her to find on the footpath that leads to the main road during Winter. We haven't got that yet. In any case, later, in Spring, she has enough money to arrive at the courthouse in expensive clothes. She is also without the baby, though this is not implied or obvious.

Hazelnuts will grow outside the front door of Toby’s house and he catches a bus to somewhere in the latter stages of Winter. At this time, he is in love – supposedly with Kate, though this is not implied or obvious. It is also not obvious why he does not drive to wherever he caught the bus to.

In Spring, Toby’s focused attention is turned towards Mimie, the previously weeping woman, and they shall meet for coffee. Presumably, Mimie will explain how and what she knows Toby did.

These are the jigsaw pieces that are the easiest to make in the word-picture; pieces around the edges that form a sort of frame to the story. I have filled in some of the colourful pieces in the centre, yet they are still not attached to the frame of edges.

Most of what I have written, I think can stay. But now I must become aware of what is in the latter stages of the story in order that I do not waste time, while I freely imagine any future. If I do not establish shapes in the story I will struggle to make the whole story a cohesive whole, and so many rewrites will be essential, to such a degree that the story will need a complete new set of circumstances, in effect become a new story.

Toby is in love in Spring, but not in the preceding Winter; let’s find out what happened between Winter and Spring. Then, we shall look at the festive period of fulfillment in the final season of the year. We know that Toby will have hazelnuts. I need to know the end, or the scene at the end, to be sure what part Mimie, the distraction in Toby’s love life, plays in the final outcome of the story. Moving on to the Winter of a new year after Festive holidays traditionally spent with family and loved ones is a good setting for loss, loneliness and disappointment. This might complete a circuitous route of love, such as I wanted to explore. However, I need to freewheel for a bit to be comfortable with what to write, while keeping an eye on the end of the story.

Then I can fill in the gaps to make the story fun, sad, contrasting, and interesting. Finally, I shall put detail in and prepare for the final edits and then varnish the good bits. I expect this all to be done by the end of next week (Saturday 26^th April 2025).

The most important thing to remember is that it is not the story that has the most value to me. This takes the third place after first place winner; fun practice, then, very, very important to me, the second and most enduring value, having short cuts, of my own making, for emotions that, for me, are extremely hard to write about. The upshot of this, is that my pride cannot be wounded by criticism for my story-telling, as being only a story. For me, this story is a vehicle for learning.

I am just going to get the story written over the next couple of days, without much embellishment and then go back and liven it up.

Winter (continuing from 'Writing by numbers without numbers 2'). Winter is where the story begins and Toby is on the bus to somewhere. He will, today, sit next to the man who smells of wet dogs. In Spring (Writing by numbers without numbers 1), when he is in love, he does not share a seat with him.

grey sky; low cloud; swish of bus tyres through puddles and slush in the gutter; no chatter on bus; interior bus lights on; all the passengers heads nodding in the same direction in concert; dark clothes

No-one looked at him at the bus-stop. A couple of them moved from side to side, and everyone kept to their own space. Silence, There was silence, apart from little crunches from their shoes crushing small islands of late snow was all that Toby heard.

For Toby, it was predictable, almost fate, that he would sit next to Dave every day. It was as predictable as all the passengers' heads synchronously nodding in the same direction when they hit the pot-holes just before they entered the High Street, and again when their bodies simultaneously tilted forward when the bus braked sharply at the roadworks.

Toby got off on the High Street, outside the supermarket he usually bought his lunch from. The courthouse, where he worked locally as a defence solicitor, was just down a side street, conveniently opposite his office.

Kate, the prosecutor on his current case eyed him with mild interest as he passed her entering the court. She knew that cases never got to court unless there was a very strong chance that the defendant was guilty, they both did. Day after day they took it in turns to go through the routine of explaining to the magistrates in their bored voices how bad the defendant is, and then how pitiful the defendant is. Usually, they avoided each other. Today though, Kate had a seed of an idea. She was going to ask Toby if he would share his lunch-hour with her; not in his supermarket queue, instead, in the little Greek restaurant nearby.

I am going to skip to the following day when the weeping woman finds the money Toby left on the footpath and has a second lunch with Kate.

Mimie looked at the mildew on the bedroom ceiling and the condensation on the windows. No matter how hard she tried to keep the inside humidity down it touched the cold walls. The whole flat needed a complete overhaul and not just a wipe with diluted bleach.

The baby was crying. It needed changing and was probably hungry and scared too. Tears 'stung' her eyes. Skipping her own breakfast she, after making the baby as comfortable as she could gently laid it in its buggy. Carefully, she covered it, as best she could, with blankets warmed by the small electric heater in the living room. Weeping now, she left the block of maisonettes and headed out on her usual route around the block. The suited man blankly stared at her as they passed one another; he always did. Today though, she looked back at him. He was standing looking at her, then he hurriedly turned and continued.

The twenty pound note, Toby had left, was under one of the buggy's wheels, and stuck to it for a few turns as Mimie carried on walking, trying to soothe the baby with its motion and vibrations. A seed of something new has been planted, though it has not yet sprouted. This is in keeping with Winter in which there is no evidence of growth, only chances.

Additional Text

The second lunch with Kate was a little more relaxed and just as the sun always shone for a week in February, Toby felt the relationship between them had thawed a little and he had a hopeful belief that the genuine smiles that Kate briefly gave him would become longer and more frequent.

Fill in with restaurant noises and interruptions from staff. Late Winter is not a period when things stay where you last put them. The wind moves fences that need repairing and the cold and damp cause many people to with some desperation to quickly dump their tools in their sheds and forget to clean them properly. Phone calls interrupt gardening plans and so cultivating a garden requires a bit more dedication and energy than the participant often wants to provide.

Toby winced a few times at his clumsy verbal blunders, which Kate telegraphed with minutely raised eyebrows and an almost invisible smile which only touched her eyes.

‘At least, she is open.’ he thought. ‘Not at all like her courtroom persona.’

Eventually, after three consecutive lunches together, Toby was confident that a refusal for dinner with him would be skillfully and tactfully handed to him if Kate was not interested. Kate turned her head slightly down and sideways and looked at Toby out of the corner of her eyes.

        ‘I would love to,’ she said. Her lips remained straight and level with her straight dark eyebrows.

She didn’t purr, bat her eyelids, make a moue with her mouth, or touch her hair. I am allowing coquettish, though without a smile.

Toby was intrigued by her mixed message of carefully veiled sensual promise and simultaneous firmness. He found her profoundly alluring. She, on the other hand, was merely cautious and had been about to turn him down, so the smile never had time to reach her lips. She had decided that a simple ‘Okay’ was blasé and went with convention. At this stage, she was on par with the girls that give a false telephone number to chancers at night-clubs. ‘I would love to’ could easily become, ‘Something came up.’ Yet, why not? It was after all her that had precipitated these meetings.

They agreed to meet on Saturday night. It was Thursday.

The address for all my posts:  https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

3  The Evolution of Love  - Notes on Spring

It is, of course April, and my garden is flourishing with new growth, and because I am using Spring in parallel to the inception of attraction and love, it is important to ‘feel’ Spring. So, I have to make notes on how Spring affects me and pay attention to the tiny details that are happening now, details that I will not remember later if I never notice them now. Of course, understanding how to encapsulate love in a few short paragraphs is my paramount aim. Ultimately, it will go into my toolbox of tricks or more than likely stored in the spice rack of feelings and emotions, and gently placed on the shelf under the sign that says 'Fragile - Handle with care'. The frisson of new romantic attraction, I think, is difficult to show without following a well-trodden path of cliches. I have recently understood why writers might say that 'tears pricked his/her eyes'; their eyes are stinging! Maybe I am not sensitive enough to have got the meaning years ago; it just means, to me, that tears are forming; or maybe the effect of a cliche wears off. If I want to invent a character, it would definitely say, 'We need some new cliches.' For some reason, I want to include the feeling of being stung by a stinging nettle that has worn off so much that it is barely detectable as a feeling of excited attraction.

It is Easter, and as usual, people are hopeful of a bright, warm, sunny Summer with long evenings outside with friends. But that whimsical notion is played out in Summertime, and to avoid repetition (if I use it) I cannot mention long, warm Summers in the Spring section of my hypo-story (opposite to hyper). I should focus on the emergence of the people from their warm homes. It is a time of hope, of tentative dreams, of seeing plans begin to take shape, even a time of spending less time making plans, holidays are booked and hope and a tiny amount of excitement take root in many people. Whereas in Autumn there is a run-down of activities that runs into a Winter torpidity, Spring is an energetic season; joggers jog because it is just less punishing on the mind; when blue skies are above and their faces and especially the bridge of the nose, don't hurt from the cold air.

I recognise the seedlings of self-seeded flower plants, such as Calendula and Wallflower. I should spend a good deal of time making notes on what is taking place. So, there is an assurance that things are going well and I can expect some colour in my front garden without too much effort.

Blinking in the sunlight from too many days indoors; “Lovely weather!’; Nobody, but nobody says ‘Happy Easter’ …except one; Lush green; insects and bumble bees; vegetable seeds sprouting and the garden still not tilled properly, plenty of work to do but the task has its back broken by now; garden work seems to have more immediate effect and some time can be taken to look at it with some satisfaction; the hedge is trimmed straight enough; the neighbours are more obvious; annoying power tools are used, such as leaf blowers to ‘sweep up’ the hedge trimmings – use a broom, you lazy, clumsy thinking, fools; anger and annoyance. Rubbed up the wrong way. Cherry and apple blossom.

A Muntjac deer in my back garden ate most of my strawberry plants a couple of months ago, but there is one plant, in the front garden that has a lot of flowers emerging, among other strawberry plants which are slower,. ‘Pay attention to the watering this year’. A sad and significant loss in the back garden, but some hope left in the front garden. Cuttings from the Euonymus (Muntjac really enjoy eating this) did not take, before the deer was hungry in February (a frozen ground time), but that could be because I applied tomato fertiliser to the cuttings when I shouldn’t have.

1 The Evolution of a story that serves as an illustration in an unrelated subject.

One of the only ways I can write about something such as marketing or economics that makes any sense and is afterwards, to me, relatable, is to create characters and stories. This technique of conveying information is certainly not unusual in many books. In some dry books they are presented as case studies, and, for me, in interesting books they are given as examples.

One of the hardest emotions for me to write about, as an example to demonstrate a point I want to make in a piece, on, say, economics or logistics, is 'Love'. (Tricky subject). 

Many of us have heard of a cost - benefit analysis that should be done before a major decision is made. In economics, this is extended to include the cost of doing something in terms of alternative opportunities that will no longer be available once a course of action is taken. An example of this is less time spent with one's own children or partner at home if overtime at work is decided upon and enacted: the opportunity of interactive home-life with our children is fully negated if the children are put to bed by a partner before one gets home from work each work day. In order to describe this, we could write about the negative aspects in terms of pain, sorrow, and loss, and so on. We could 'show' the effect on the children too.

I want to learn how to write about the joy of love, passion for our loved ones, wider familial love and love for our communities. There are physiological changes in the body, but many of them are cliches; heart racing; butterflies in the stomach; a warm feeling; smiles even when adversity is apparent; and so on. Colours even seem brighter when we fall in love and our love is requited.

In this post, I am going to continually update my efforts to write about love; hopefully the evolution of love; how love plateaus; the bifurcation of love towards a single person to include attraction to a second person; the deterioration of love; and hopefully, the remnants of love lost.

Toby's garden will evolve in line with his love for a person

I am going to try to avoid cliches, but I will include them as placeholders - we all know what we are talking about with cliches.

The evolution from draft to, in my mind, close to a final piece of some kind, I shall leave in this post. The musing, the foolish, the unnecessary, and the mundane; all will stay.

Black font is pretty much final but subject to change. 

Red font will be changed. 

Green font is a replacement for the red font. 

I am going to also use blue font for comments and bold typeface and italics for something else.

So, green font is the replacement for the red font. Like this: Toby walked down his path. Toby ran across the lawn towards the path

I am not a writer and cannot tell anyone how to write. 

If you are on an OU Creative Writing course, then that course is plainly where your first focus should be. I am making no recommendations, only demonstrating how I am learning.

 An evolution

Toby and the garden fell in love

It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love.

His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely mother with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. The bus arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, in modern day peaceful Suffolk, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned.

I am spontaneously moving towards his new love interest being the magistrate / judge who sentences him for some misdemeanor. We'll see. This paragraph with speech may not make the final cut. It is italic red so I know that it can be deleted because nothing following it rests on its existence yet. Italics are also used for different reasons.

In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings. A five pound note lay on the floor near his foot.

       ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

       ‘There’s five pounds here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

       ‘Move along.’

Scowls came from the queue on the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through,  and called, ‘Wait!’

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through. 

       ‘Wait!’

This (below) is a paragraph I wrote that was going to go before he got to the courthouse, but I am not happy with it. I think there is enough to describe how he is feeling and I want to move on with the story, so I have left it here for future reference and big changes, no doubt.

Normally, his twenty-eight year old body felt weighty, and sluggish. Today, however, it felt like his blood viscosity had changed from heavy crude oil, dark blue with frigidy, to high-octane fuel, bright red with oxygenated heat. It felt more slippery than before. The annoying ear-worm, he had had for the last three days, faded when it couldn’t keep pace with the new speedier pace of his heart. Everything that had shaded him yesterday could not shade him today.