Long Shorts, Short Shorts & Very Short Shorts : Tales of Unjustifiable Optimism

"As if Douglas Adams met PG Wodehouse for tea and cakes and then ended up squabbling about the bill!"

“Long shorts, short shorts & very short shorts” is a collection of Robert Elland’s shorter form writing, taking us from London in the 1980s to modern day Crete and a locked-down Yorkshire, via travel writing, magazine articles, short stories and other ephemera.

Solidly stoical yet unfashionably un-cynical, with his first novel, “Love & Light & Marzipan”, Elland established a template for his gentle absurdism, commenting on the universal using the lens of the personal, and the supposedly important, via the apparently mundane.

In this collection, whilst “The Elounda diaries” acts as a humorous exploration of an unfamiliar landscape, its healing effects upon a traumatised teacher, and the necessity of maintaining perspective, the “Beatrice & Ben” stories are the whimsical, triumphs of hope, of two ordinary people pitted against an apparently indifferent world. Moving from implausible fact to plausible fiction and blurring the boundaries of both with knowing playfulness, the “Artycurls” reveal moments of both pure, joyous silliness, and genuinely moving pathos, stopping at all stations in-between along the way.