Three more 55-word stories, published in Notes from the Underground:

Sweet Thunder has a collection of home recording tapes found in charity shops, which are fascinating for the glimpses they give into private and work lives, some of them decades ago. There are stalacpipe organ recordings and astrology readings, but strangely the most interesting are the more mundane moments: a legal secretary practising her pronunciation of legal terms ("Pun-i-tive damages. Quaa-ash"), some drunk men talking about spreadsheets, and a surgical needle sales meeting.

Best of all is the conversation between an elderly couple, where he ruefully admits to falling for her April Fools Day joke yet again:
"In 51 years I've never missed an April Fool. I can get you ten times in a day!"
"The thing is I think you're so sincere about everything. Trick after trick after trick!"
"April Fools Day I lie all day long."

You are cordially invited to the grand opening of Bluebell.fm – the home of robot folk tales. If you are fond of enjoying yourself, then this is the place for you.

Time: Now
Place: Here

Small boy on a bus:
"What's worse than finding a maggot in your apple?"
Smaller brother: "The world exploding!"

American teenager:
"Have you ever smelled a snake? It smells like this."
- waves chewed piece of gum under his friend's nose.

Indian man stuck in tube door:
"I nearly died then! I love your shoes! I'm a fashion
designer. People say I look like a minister, I take that on board."

Shayne Ward on Simon Cowell:
"To a lot of people he's Mr Nasty. But to me he's Mr Important."

Rush Hour, the sketch show I contributed to, is being shown on BBC3, starting on Monday 19 March, 10.30pm. I haven't seen it yet but I'm sure it's hilarious - look out for the mind-reading kid and the tactless AA man, among others.

The script for a short public information film on how you are misinterpreting the world by failing to pay attention to the right details.

Can't say much about it yet; stay tuned.

One-act play about the teenage assassins of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, commissioned by Net Curtains Theatre Company for Tales of the Black Hand, four plays on the theme of assassination, performed at the Tricycle Theatre.

The play was inspired by the folk tales of Serbia, which are full of forest-dwelling monsters, from one-eyed witches to the mysterious screaming "drekavac" – along with the twentieth-century terrors unleashed by fanatical boys with guns, learning to shoot in the woods outside Belgrade.

This 20-minute screenplay was adapted from The Diamond Lens, a short story by Fitz James O'Brien, an unjustly neglected 19th century writer of tales of the uncanny, considered by some to be one of the forerunners of modern science fiction.

It's the tragic story of a pioneering microscopist who falls hopelessly in love with a miniscule woman.

This one-act play takes the form of a lecture, on the subject of improving your brain, which is disrupted when the audience insist on starting to solve a murder.

I'd forgotten about this comic until I came across a site dedicated to it – it was a truly terrifying horror comic for small girls that ran for a couple of years at the end of the Seventies. The best thing about it, apart from the evil glamour of Misty herself, were the merciless moral lessons it imparted. Yes, you love your pony but is it at the price of your soul?:

And, most importantly:

Never mock a monkey.

This shop window was created by my grandfather, Gilbert Payne, for George Mason's grocer's shop in Stroud, where he worked as an assistant, in about 1935. He won a well-deserved prize for this tribute to Norwegian brisling.

A scientist's brain probe unleashes surprising thoughts in two young men – from a knowledge of dead languages to a secret hatred.

A 4-minute play, performed at the Lyric Studio Hammersmith as part of a Spread the Word project.

This was my first full-length play, performed at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden in 2002.

Bert takes smart drugs, which enable him to explain life, the universe and the role of the dead to his unheeding friends. The mysterious man upstairs has a more old-fashioned approach to self-improvement – become someone else.

This story was published in Allnighter (Pulp Faction), an anthology of underground fiction.

I wrote it after reading that a high proportion of noise complaints turned out to be caused by the complainant's clothing. This is a true fact.