Author: Matthew J. Richardson

Words in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Fiction Junkies, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, CafeLit, Best Microfiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, and Shooter.

Boater | Book Review

Author Jo Bell standing on top of her narrowboat 'Tinker'

Boater: A Life on England’s Waterways

Jo Bell

304 pages

Paperback

Harper Collins

2025

ISBN: 9780008716295

Review

‘[The greatest difference between boat-life and non-boat life]…is not the sense of place, but the sense of time.’

Disclaimer: I love canals. They are a throwback to a bygone era of industry, but also one of the few places in cities where there is genuine peace. The world of the narrowboat is one of exquisite aesthetics – the eddies around opening lock gates, the sudden splash from a bank, the morning skeins of mist over the still water. I was always likely to be a sucker for Jo Bell’s book, and so it proved.

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Ribbons in the Valley | Short Story

The smell of coal smoke hangs low in the valley, skeined in ribbons of mauve and grey. As the nights draw in, it is the smell which welcomes the men home, filthy and goggle-eyed.

Straight to the outdoor tap, where mountain-cold water brings new aches to already weary bones. Hands move slowly, deliberately, the joints already worn from a day’s work. They will not be allowed in to eat until they are immaculate.

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Warmth and Wither | Haiku

A detailed high-res close-up image of an oak leaf hanging from the branch of a tree. The leaf is beginning to turn brown at the dawn of autumn.

A creeping autumn, and two haiku to match…

A compost pile in late autumn light

Warmth

Autumn compost heap –

settling scraps, writhing red worms.

Slow warmth from within.

A detailed high-res close-up image of an oak leaf hanging from the branch of a tree. The leaf is beginning to turn brown at the dawn of autumn.

Wither

Hurried withering

of once-wick leaves. Reminder

of promise, deferred.

Thanks for reading folks. Recent short stories include ‘Passing Traffic‘ and ‘A Shadow World‘.

Matthew Richardson is a writer of short stories. His work has featured in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Cafelit, Best MicroFiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, The Wild Word, Down in the Dirt, and Shooter magazine. He has a Professional Doctorate in Education. Matthew blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.

Passing Traffic | Short Story

The lay-by is one of many on the A82, hidden from the trunk road by a line of winsome, non-native pines and looking out on the sometimes grey, sometimes Mediterranean Loch Lomond.

It is not a place in its own right, not really. No-one says to their spouse, I’m away for an afternoon at that lay-by north of Luss. You remember, the one with the overflowing dogshite bin and the vicious, hypodermic stinging nettles. Still, it is a waypoint for lives, a parallax for the moments of peoples’ existences.

In the spring there are the young lovers, cloistered by the everyone-knows-everyone villages and emancipated by those pines. Steam rises up windows and tinny, unsatisfying bass sounds from within the Vauxhall Corsas and the Seat Ibizas. Young love is born in the lay-by, only to be set aside days or weeks later.

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Along the Margins | Poetry

Along the margins

of those great English, wind-brushed fields of barley

lay sunken streets,

the ringroads of rural Suffolk.

Here, where sun and moon rise and stare

at obsequious, nodding herringbone spikelets,

the countryside jostles and hums.

Amidst dog-eared booms

and weed-clogged culverts

and the shredded chaos of fly-tips innumerable,

fauna shuffles, hurried and unhurried.

A water vole snuffles,

slips from the cluttered hedgerow,

bubbles clutching thickset fur, feet scrabbling.

Dragonflies dart,

eye-slipped and iridescent,

hurrying to destinations unknown.

The sweeping fox,

the low-slung, lockjawed badger,

lords of the field, drink and pad away, their hunting undone.

Above, bats flit between shattered shards

of nighttime sky

whilst the always surprised owl

sits aloft, watchful for an unprotected scuttle

in the moonlight.

A rural cast, driven to pastoral peripheries,

centred for a while.

Thanks for reading folks. Recent short stories include ‘The Silver-Lined Ridge‘ and ‘A Shadow World‘.

Matthew Richardson is a writer of short stories. His work has featured in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Cafelit, Best MicroFiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, The Wild Word, Down in the Dirt, and Shooter magazine. He has a Professional Doctorate in Education. Matthew blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.

Leaf and Linen | Haiku

An ancient, thick cobweb in the corner of a small garden shed, more linen than thread. The cobweb is so thickset that it is more of a mesh than a web. The shed is disused and messy, whilst the cobweb looks thick and as though it has been there for years.

From the trees and into the shed with a couple of haiku…

Wide shot of a large oak in a field, which is bordered by a dry-stone wall. There are dappled shadows underneath the broad canopy. The oak stands alone amidst miles of open farmland.

Leaf

Leafy carapace,

shifting in the warm breeze.

Dappled shadows dance.

An ancient, thick cobweb in the corner of a small garden shed, more linen than thread. The cobweb is so thickset that it is more of a mesh than a web. The shed is disused and messy, whilst the cobweb looks thick and as though it has been there for years.

Linen

More linen than thread –

spider’s trap, muffled and chaste.

Ambition thwarted.

Thanks for reading folks. Recent short stories include ‘The Silver-Lined Ridge‘ and ‘A Shadow World‘.

Matthew Richardson is a writer of short stories. His work has featured in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Cafelit, Best MicroFiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, The Wild Word, Down in the Dirt, and Shooter magazine. He has a Professional Doctorate in Education. Matthew blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.

Perfume | Book Review

Cover of 'Perfume'. A figure of a woman is covered by red flower petals

Perfume

Patrick Süskind

263 pages

Paperback

Penguin Books

1987

ISBN: 9780241973615

Review

‘In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages…’

I wanted to love this book. On spec I should have; it is driven by an ambitious, fresh idea – a man with the most refined sense of smell, sniffing his way around Paris, the French countryside, and murder scenes. Grenouille is our protagonist – an orphan disfigured with smallpox scars and dirt-poor into the bargain. So far, so compelling.

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