Mick Bunion's Writing Blog

  PUPPY LOVE - The motorway Yak PUPPY LOVE Derek filled up the second tank and got back in the cabin. His hands were black with grease and the bandage on his finger showed blood where he had cut himself fixing a joint on the first tank, near the French border. The digital thermometer from Petit Chef read 34 degrees. He was soaked. The rose on his shoulder glistened in the Italian sun. ‘Those tossers. Too tight-bottomed to get the air-con repaired. Practically murder.” He fanned his face with the little Chinese paper fan he got in Calais. He parked next to a lorry loaded with strawberries, flies hovering around the crates. The engine went quiet, and the sound of cicadas took over like a wave. In the distance, the whooshing of cars on the motorway. Before climbing down from the cabin, he put on a clean T-shirt. It smelt of home. He entered the motorway café and headed for the loos. He got through half a soap dispenser and after all that scrubbing his hands were as black as before. He...

  THE MAPLE TREE, HANDSTANDS AND GOOGLE   That tree looks like someone doing a handstand with their head under ground. The trunk divides into two, shortly above the ground surface. The dog is off sniffing a cat trail so I have time to look closer.   Now, I don’t have a green thumb. Brown in fact I’d say, judging from the pots at home. So I have to take a picture with my phone and then google later on, to work out what tree it was.  It was a maple tree.  Beautiful. It’s just past Halloween, so the leaves are mostly yellow. The dog comes this way and scatters some as it sniffs its trail around the park. The maple has an arrow shape. The outer leaves are red, like a cloak protecting the yellow ones below. An enormous skirt for the creature doing the handstand.  Every few seconds a leaf breaks away from the others and spirals slowly to the ground.   Funny how you can follow in the random thread of these internet searches, and feel suddenly knowledgeable ab...

foto: Unsplash photos for everyone My father bought a second-hand caravan a few months before I was born and was well proud of it. He got it when my sister Beckie was a toddler, and my mum was pregnant with me. Besides, the caravan thing was kind of in the genes as my grandparents had always been camping maniacs. So my father was raised putting tent poles up and taking them back down again all over Europe, every summer. He is always telling funny anecdotes from his childhood holidays. They usually end up with him cracking up, as he gets to the part where he describes the look of utter surprise on my grandparents’ faces, the time they were having breakfast outside their tent in East Germany; and suddenly realised nobody in the site was wearing any clothes at all. Apparently, they packed up on-the-spot and left with some lame excuse about my father having a temperature, and he was made to keep a thermometer in his mouth in the passenger seat as my mother drove out, for enhanced believabi...