Kitchen. Scilly Isles 7. Written by Richard Alan Gardham. Transcribed by Angela Gardham.

It’s them damn seagulls that’s getting on my nerves lately. There’s a corrugated tin roof on my room and those bastard seagulls keep picking up those bones from out of the kitchen scraps; they seem to drop their bones on to the tin roof from God knows how high or how many feet up into the air. It wakes me in the mornings and with the instantaneous bedlam, I sometimes leap two feet out of my bed with shock. It’s only seagulls accidently dropping bones on my roof but it takes a bit of getting used to. I always think the bloody roof’s going to come in.

Clean those pans, right, clean these cod, right. She came marching over again. “Where’s the pans?” “I ain’t done the cods yet. I’ve only got one pair of hands.” She went berserk and grabbed the pan full of cods from out of the sink and threw them all over me. I was dripping from head to foot in cods and cod -water. What the hell. I came to the conclusion she must have disliked me. She used to bawl all the time but really, she was always in intense pain from migraine. It was hard to have to always bare it in mind.