James Delahaye

It was late in the afternoon, too late in fact. With the setting sun in my eyes about to disappear over the endless horizon of the Sahara desert, landing an aircraft between the sand dunes was always going to be a risky proposition;

We had found the militia soldier slumped forward over the wheel of his jeep with the engine still idling. For how many hours had he sat there?

I’m not a poet, nor will I ever be one, but I can still “Imagine”.

Short story Conversation with a ghost. Most of my stories are taken from the memories and souvenirs of my life; writing a fantasy about a Conversation with a Ghost was therefore a refreshing change and within no time I let the Ghost take me by the hand and lead me into the past… but whose past?

A few years ago, during a visit in Barcelona, my daughter, my wife and I visited among others, the Cathedral of Santa Eulalia, named after young Christian girl persecuted and subsequently killed by the Romans

The Continental Palace was one of those typical imposing, yet stylish French hotels in Saigon built during the colonial era at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.

It may have been sometime in 1957 or maybe it was in '58, maybe it was many nights or maybe just a single one, who knows and frankly it’s not very relevant. My brother and I, oh, and the dog; well of course, he was always around doing whatever dogs do… where was I?

It must have been somewhere round eight-thirty, a moonless night in Libya had plunged the Sahara desert into near total darkness, at least seen from the cockpit of my plane.

I wrote about memories previously and I think I said something along the lines of: The problem with memories is, that they are not always very well memorised… and I am now going to have to contradict myself immediately because there are some things one never forgets,

It’s a mystery to me today when I look at some of the old black and white photographs of my mother and myself as a young boy, one of them on the ‘Pont du Mont Blanc’ in Geneva.

The swamp patrol... someone has to do it. Someone shouted, ‘Where’s the bloody barrel?’ Another called back, ‘What you mean, "Where’s the barrel?" You didn’t bloody lose it, did you?’ ‘It must have come off when he went under,’ someone else suggested. . .

On the move… again. Now let’s see, it’s all a very long time ago, maybe it was just after Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo or maybe it was more recent, I can’t quite remember;