This is the Day

By Daniel Blythe

They’ve got it all. And now they’re about to lose it.

Tom and Ella Barclay seem to have the perfect life. Smart, designer house in suburbia. Two lovely children, Ben and Isobel, at private school. Interesting, creative and well-paid jobs. And best of all – a happy marriage?

Beneath the surface, things are not so serene. The charity which Tom leads is struggling, about to go under. He also wants to have an affair, but it’s rather more difficult than he’d been led to believe. Ella, meanwhile, despises the hordes who stream through the grounds of the stunning fifteenth-century castle where she works.

And then fate turns the Barclays’ dreams inside-out in a way they could never have imagined. Forced to look at the world from a very different perspective indeed, Tom and Ella begin to fall through the cracks – and things are about to get much worse….

A wry, poignant, blackly comic portrayal of the 21st-century nuclear family hurtling towards meltdown.

Daniel Blythe was first published in Virgin’s New Doctor Who Adventures. Having been an 80s radio DJ, a teacher of English as a foreign language, a translator, a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and a Lifelong Learning organiser, Daniel now combines his writing with school visits. He lives with his wife and two teenage children on the edge of the Peak District.