Click the link below to a short story I wrote when I was a young man of about 25 years old living in London. I found this forgotten manuscript the other day in my cellar. The story was written on a typewriter hence the rather dated look of the typeface and the use of the correction fluid Tipp-Ex.
At the time, I sent the story to a number of women’s magazines in a package with a test tube of blue powder as shown in the photo. In the 1980s, many women’s magazines included short romantic stories. Unfortunately, no one published the story despite my eye-catching mailing shot. No one even replied! Though it was technically a love story, perhaps the ending was not happy enough.
The Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi wrote in the 13th century: “The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
I guess we are all looking for love somewhere but you just don’t expect to find it in a test tube!
By Peter Goddard