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73 year old Davie Greendale felt like a spring chicken.

It was due to a mix up at a Specsavers eye-test where he’d accidentally come home with a pair of rose-tinted glasses.

Despite making him look effeminate, his magic specs gave him the power to live in his own romanticised version of the past whenever he put them on. This was brilliant because Davie hated the present. Nothing in modern times was as good as it had been when he was young. Not music, football or politics. All had been ruined by snowflakes and EU legislation. Society had lost it’s way and the telly was now full of bloody women.

Everyone said how much jollier he had become since getting them. Whenever he put them on his world became suffused with dappled sunlight and he could hear the drowsy sounds of childhood. The weather was always an old-fashioned 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

The only problem with his magic specs was that when he took them off he became marooned in 2019, taking 13 pills a day and watching programmes about moving to Australia.

So he wore them all the time.

One morning he looked in the mirror to admire his lustrous mane of brown hair and set off for his golf club, passing his grandson reading the library book “The Boy’s guide to go-kart building” and his granddaughter whose hair was in neat plaits.

His wife Sandra, who resembled a young Julie Christie, was busy with house work. He left his front door open because you could in these days and drove off to his Golf Club.

He was looking forwards to sinking some Watney’s Red Barrel with pals Michael Caine and Sean Connery and to also sinking the winning putt at the 18th, again.

He hadn’t driven far when he spied the jolly neighbourhood bobby PC Potter on the road ahead, no doubt busy watching out for young hooligans and helping old ladies to cross roads. He was surprised when the corpulent constable responded to his merry wave with a halt signal.

“Please read the number plate on the car in front” said PC Potter.

“Certainly officer” replied Davie, glancing at a pink Rolls Royce, “FAB 1”, he declared confidently.

“Would you mind taking your sunglasses off sir” Said the officer sighing. Davie did so and looked at the vehicle, now a dirty white Ford Focus. He stared vaguely at it’s unintelligible numberplate.

Gill Potter of the traffic police hated this beat, reprimanding the old Coffin-Dodgers who drove around as though they were Stirling Moss, whoever he was. She was relieved when the old buffer’s wife arrived, driven by her daughter, with bi-racial dreadlocked grandson and phone addicted granddaughter in tow.

“Oh Davie” said the old lady “You left the front door wide open again! What are we to do with you?”

Davie regarded her blankly, she no longer resembled Julie Christie. He was led away gently, back to his house.

Where “A Place In The Sun” was just starting.

[Story removed for contest entry. Good luck!]

She remembered the day he had taken her to the library, her tiny hand clutched in his spidery calloused one, yellowing and speckled with liver spots. She remembered how sunny and how crisp everything seemed - the colours, the shapes, the smells. Particularly the smells.

The day itself had its own perfume; freshly cut grass, the warm, musty smell of books as he held open the door for her, mingling with the librarian’s Chanel No.5 and the sour sweet odour of breath laced with whisky.

She never understood why mum wouldn’t have him in the house and how she would have to sneak off to the grim, grey stack of council flats in the estate to see him, taking her book and the few quid she had saved from her pocket money.

She remembered the never-white sheets hanging out to dry along the open corridor to his front door; the clink of glass as he got up to let her in; the sincere gratitude on his lined face when she opened her palm to show him the collection of shiny coins she had brought.

They would sit together for hours, travelling all over the world with Rudyard Kipling and Roald Dahl and Louis De Berniers, meeting all kinds of people and having the wildest adventures - all from the threadbare armchair of scratchy green tartan in grandad’s cramped flat.

Grandad said all you needed in the world was something good to read and a place to read it and you were the richest man in the world. That and a decent scotch, of course.

When he began to nod off she would take the glass from his hands and put it somewhere safe so it wouldn’t spill, tuck a pillow under his thinning grey hair and spread a towel or blanket over his bony chest before she left. Sometimes, when she was a bit older, she would take the empties out to the wheelie bin too.

And now here they were in this damp church surrounded by barely a handful of people, listening to the vicar say words he didn’t mean about a man he didn’t know. Mum wasn’t there.

Then it was her turn to speak:

“Grandad knew a few things about addiction. It was actually his addiction that inspired mine.

“It started with a library book. That was the gateway and I was hooked. Then came the inevitable downward spiral: library membership of my own, second hand book shops, reading groups.”

Muted chuckling

“Next thing I’m £15,000 in debt to a Masters degree in English literature and stuck with a lifelong habit that, like grandad, I’ve never managed to kick…”

Then it was time to say goodbye. Grandad was in his best brown suit, which hung off him as he lay cradled on his bed of white satin, instead of the usual scratchy green tartan. Someone had polished his shoes.

Quietly, in her smart shoes and neatly pressed blouse, she looked at the man in the coffin and slipped a copy of The Jungle Book into his waxy hand. She couldn’t help with the decent scotch, but she could make sure he had something good to read.