SHORT STORY

HELLO! has invited acclaimed writers to entertain readers in these testing times. This week’s uplifting tale is by Gill Sims

PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES. MARTIN HUNTER

Sadie stirred at the sound of the alarm. It couldn’t be morning yet, could it? She was deep in a lovely dream, where she had randomly bumped into Tom Hardy in the street and he had invited her to go for a cocktail with him and now she was sipping a Cosmopolitan (her subconscious seemed stuck in the early Noughties) and gazing soulfully into his eyes while he talked about his rescue dogs. Tom (he’d told Sadie to call him Tom) was just suggesting that she must come over to his fabulous film star house sometime and meet his dogs when the alarm started blaring and shattered this lovely illusion. Ugh.

Sadie rolled over and groped for her phone. She had set her alarm to play Adele, crooning soothingly as she woke up, but one of her darling children had borrowed her phone yesterday because theirs was out of battery (why were her children’s phones perpetually either out of battery or out of credit?) and had changed it to something loud and modern and shouty. This, no doubt, was her precious moppets’ idea of a hilarious joke, due to their insistence that, as far as Sadie was concerned, music had ended in 1999, which was plainly ridiculous because she had downloaded (downloaded, not bought the CDs) at least three of Adele’s albums, not to mention Michael Bublé’s Christmas album!