After my diatribe about Morrissey a few days ago, I thought something a bit less serious was called for this time.

Recently I entered a competition to write a story with a maximum of 1,000 characters. Yes, that’s characters – it worked out at just under 200 words. The flashiest of flash fiction basically. I struggled to crow-bar my story into such a tight space and had to perform major surgery on it to do so. The theme incidentally was ‘happily ever after’, and I probably wasn’t the only person to immediately think of a fairy story.

So here is the original, extended version of And they both lived … – still pretty short but I hope you like it: