On Sunday we rode the metro to the very North of the city. And we got off at the last stop and went and got two little coffees and a bagel to share and sat outside a cafe with a blue awning and fake snowflakes in the window. We looked at the people in the square and wondered where they came from and where they were going. There was a woman with too many dogs and another woman with not enough. People were doing their Christmas shopping and people were talking on their phones. Some of them were looking where they were going. I could see my breath but my hands weren’t cold because I was wearing the warm green mittens you got me for my birthday. We got another two coffees.

Today’s croissant was a bit too oily. It was still the best.

Good thing it’s just me. I might have been ashamed, had I been sharing my croissant with anyone else. Because I would have said, “try it, it’s the best croissant in Paris! And right on my doorstep!” and they would have tried it, and said, “but it’s quite oily.”

I asked ChatGPT to write me the first line of a story. For inspiration.

In the quaint town of Willow Creek, where every door was a different color, Eleanor discovered an unmarked, black door that appeared only at midnight.

I asked it to be a bit less shit. “Your lines are too oily,” I said.

Eleanor found a midnight-only black door in colorful Willow Creek.

“Still too oily.”

A black door appeared at midnight in a rainbow-painted town.

I thought, where is Willow Creek and why is ChatGPT so obsessed with it?

I googled it and all I got was a link to the Dulux website. It’s a shade of green, and not a very nice one.

The seeds that Sevali had planted in January were growing well.

She’d planted them on a Tuesday night in Dalston. She’d bought them from a seed stall at Columbia Road flower market. She took a razor to each of her arms and made light little cuts, just enough to be able to push a single pip in to each, and for it to stay under the skin without popping out. They’d bled and she’d rubbed in some soil from the bed outside the Rio cinema. They’d been to see Spider-Man: No Way Home, and quite frankly it was disappointing. Although she had been pleased to see Toby Maguire again.

Now it was March and she had flowers growing out her eyes, and worms burrowing through her skull.

All in all, she chalked it up as a win.

This year Autumn missed her alarm. And the night carried on around her, little elves of summer dancing on her eyelids, taunting her, daring her to wake up and tell the trees the party was over, like she always did. And then they would groan as the lights came up and told the leaves they had to go home, as they always knew they would, eventually.

This year the trees carried on partying for weeks. Maybe a month. Then someone thought to check on Autumn. “Wait is she ok?” one said, “she’s fine,” said some spruce, through a gurn. But then another morning came, and they realised how sad and embarrassing it would be if they’d been having all this fun while she was lying dead upstairs.

So the trees tiptoed and creaked up the stairs to check. She was out cold. Out hot? Unseasonable, anyway. They called an ambulance. Summer was over, and Autumn, too.

Inés couldn’t stop thinking, as the grasses parted to let her through, the little fluffy pink and yellow panicles smiling and giggling as they welcomed her in, beneath a pale milky, silty, swirling, cloudless sky, as she made her way from her little hut to the river of light, past the singing cobwebs and the humming trees, she couldn’t stop thinking about what a good deal those shoes were, and what an idiot she’d been to forget to buy them when they were on sale.

There’s a bit of blue up above, just past the awning, but also reflected in the bedrizzled tarmac all around, fizzling past the orange-brown trailblazers of autumn, crunched up and sleeping in little puzzling puddles, who went too fast and too hard this summer and said, you know what, that was a great time, I’m done, let’s give September a whirl.

It’s August 5th and you have one headphone on, the other tucked behind your left ear. There’s a vague natter dribbling in from happy hour locals. And in your right ear something shimmering and infinite.

It was absolutely ages ago.

A caveman, maybe a neanderthal? stood at the edge of a rocky cliff, at the border of a forest, overlooking plains painted by the sunset, with little meandering (actually the technical term here) rivers snaking across them like those shitty marble paintings you did as a kid, which hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had you.

He stared into the distance. He didn’t have any headphones in and didn’t have any sunglasses on, which was fine by him because neither cataracts nor eye cancer were a thing at that point, and Spotify subscriptions hadn’t been invented either.

He was all alone because he’d gone off in a huff, because his mate pissed him off by hogging all the mammoth steaks. But he was feeling a bit calmer now and decided that he might forgive him, although he couldn’t really articulate it because both language and therapy were still in their infancy. So he sighed and said “ug”, and perched himself on a little rock to watch the last of the light.

Gary tried. He really tried. I loved him anyway and I love him even more for trying. But he never got it quite right. I guess I knew what I was getting myself in for, choosing to let myself love someone from Grarslap 5! It was all in all quite a nice birthday. And yes the cake was full of lamb’s liver. But it also had chocolate in! Genuine human-edible chocolate! And mandarins. Last year it was rocks and raw sewage. So he’s getting better! He’s getting better. I love you Gary.

On Saturday he stayed in. He made an omelette and watched a VHS of Blind Date from 1995. There was a couple called Jo and Karl who really hated each other and there was chorizo in his omelette. He sipped on his too-fizzy soda-streamed ginger beer. There was an advert for Radox. A secret blend of thirteen herbs. From outside a cat, who had not been alive at the time of filming, watched Cilla curiously through the cracked-open blacked-out window.

Sometimes I press delete too many times.

And then I realise that I’ve run out of time and I can’t really fit anything in at all.