Katie had always told us bedtime stories when we were younger, with good and bad fairies, mothers whose children had been taken by the fairies but were always restored, haunted houses, men who escaped from danger and got back to their families, stolen gold, unhappy rich people and their lonely child…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘That was my first death. When the priest tossed the first three shovelfuls of clay on to the coffin, the clattering sound seemed to ring all over the hillside graveyard and my father's face moved sideways as if he had been struck.’
‘At school, the primroses were coming out. Brighton was eleven, and every day now there was something new emerging.’
A story by Georgina Parfitt.
‘Owing to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled, you are now in the strawberry beds of the eternal present.’
Unpublished fiction by the late Derek Jarman.
‘Those are not prisons, they are condominiums for rich people. Or at least that is what rich people think.’
