The After Hours Forum: what our readers get up to once the lights go out

• Our new late-night letters page, in which respectable people admit things at two in the morning
• A caravan in a thunderstorm, a book club that has never once discussed a book, and a dumbwaiter that should have known better
• Names changed, towns kept, dignity not always preserved
• Strictly for readers over eighteen. Everything here is invented for your entertainment

Tonight’s Daily Wail Girl

SASHA, 29, Brockville. Sasha says the fog off Mallorytown is nothing next to the looks she gets walking the beach in September.Generated illustration · 18+

Every newspaper has a letters page. Ours simply runs later than most.

Below: six readers, six confessions, and not one of them will be discussed at Sunday dinner.

BRENDA, 58, PETERBOROUGH

"Forty-one years married and the best night of it was in a caravan in a thunderstorm at Presqu'ile.

The awning came down at about eleven. We did not get up to fix it.

A man from the next site knocked in the morning to say our chairs were in the lake. My husband told him we had slept right through the storm. The man looked at the pair of us and said nothing at all, which I thought was very decent of him."

GORDON, 61, SUDBURY

"My wife has belonged to a book club for nine years.

In nine years she has never once mentioned a book. Not a title, not an author, not a plot. She comes home at midnight, pleased with herself, smelling faintly of somebody's fireplace.

Last month I asked her what they were reading. She said 'Gordon,' in a particular way, and I have not asked since. I am not unhappy. I am simply aware that I am not in a book club."

ANONYMOUS, 44, THE ANNEX

"My in-laws have a dumbwaiter. I want to state clearly that a dumbwaiter is not built for two people.

We established this experimentally, during a christening, while eleven members of my husband's family ate cake one floor below.

The dumbwaiter now makes a noise. Everyone blames the house."

MAUREEN, 67, ST JOHN'S

"I spent one winter with a lighthouse keeper, and I will tell you what nobody tells you about lighthouse keepers.

They are on a schedule. The light goes on, the light goes off, the bell gets wound, and you come somewhere on that list. Not first. Not last.

But my word, when the fog came in and the boats stayed home, I came considerably further up it."

DAVE, 39, HAMILTON

"An ice hut is eight feet by eight feet and has a hole in the floor. I want that understood before anybody judges what follows.

My girlfriend brought a thermos. It went over. It was still, technically, the warmest afternoon of that February.

We caught nothing. We did not mind. The gentleman in the next hut caught a fourteen-inch walleye and heard everything, and I hope it was worth it to him, because it was worth it to us."

PATRICIA, 53, VICTORIA

"I went on a silent retreat. Seven days, no speaking, herbal tea, a great deal of breathing.

On day four a man from Kelowna passed me the salt and raised one eyebrow. That was the entire conversation. That was all either of us said for a week.

I have never been so thoroughly understood by somebody whose voice I have never heard. I do not know his name. I know his eyebrow."

WRITE TO US

The After Hours Forum runs whenever enough of you have something to confess. We do not print surnames, we do not print addresses, and we have never once checked whether any of it is true.

Eighteen and over. Be kind to each other, and mind the dumbwaiter.