I tend to read more computer books and PDFs nowadays, so I don’t get much of a chance to fit novels and short stories into the limited time I get. Although I am reading “Not a penny more, not a penny less” by Jeffrey Archer at the moment, and I try to pick it up whenever I’ve got some spare time because it’s very thrilling. Quite a hard book to put down actually.. which usually ends with some bad consequences

Roald Dahl’s children’s books were brilliant – though I haven’t read them for a few years. Short stories are great too. All the guy’s works were of pure genius

But you’re right, I completely neglected Roald Dahl. He wrote excellent stories and as a child I loved the ITV series “Tales of the Unexpected” – some of them were quite chilling.

I’m not sure if it was his work or another author’s, but someone wrote a short story about a woman who marries a clerk, who doesn’t earn a lot of money. She is quite a prestigious woman, so she feels ‘let down’ in a sense by her husband. One night, when the clerk gets tickets to go to an important ball, she says she doesn’t want to go because she doesn’t have any jewellery to wear. So, he suggests she visit a friend – and she does just that. She borrows an expensive-looking diamond necklace from her friend, and goes to the ball. BUT, on the way back from the ball to her house (she was a huge hit at the ball btw ), she loses the necklace.
The husband takes out loans to purchase an almost identical one, and then she spends the next ten years of her life working in poverty and misery to repay the debt. Then there’s a huge twist at the end.

I loved that story, but I can’t remember what it was called or who wrote it. Maybe you know it?

Thanks for all those links – they’ll prove valuable time-consumers for my plane flight in two weeks’ time

-Max