Trigger Warning: domestic violence. We were sitting around the living room, me cross-legged on the rug so that I could type notes onto my laptop as we talked. The cat kept trying to get onto our laps until one friend’s eyes started watering and the sneezes began and the cat was banished outside for the…
Back in January, seven months after my miscarriage, two of my best friends from uni visited me. We took a few short walks through the city so that they could legitimately have claimed to have been in Luxembourg, and then spent the rest of the time in coffee shops and restaurants and on my sofa,…
There’s something special about the cinema. It’s the queues of people and the anticipation in the air. It’s the smell of buttery salty popcorn and the rows of colourful sweets, which you rarely ever buy anywhere else. It’s the thick blue or red carpets that are so impractical for a venue selling popcorn, yet so…
I had fifteen minutes to spare, so I bought a flaky almond pastry-pretzel from the bakery and then walked 100m up the small street so that I could stand in the sunshine. The pavements were all white from the salt the city has been throwing down each night to stop us from sliding to and…
Valentine’s Day has never been a holiday that was important to me. Sure, as a teenager, I hoped upon hope that the boy I fancied would suddenly this year realise that I was the girl of his dreams and shower me with roses, chocolates and hand-made cards – preferably in front of the rest of…
This room was very familiar to me. It’s round tables, the laminate floor, the residual smells of mass-cooked dinner remaining from last night. Here I would come weekly, gather a small group of people around a table – from Tibet, Afghanistan, Somalia, Chechnya – a few women bouncing babies on their laps, and we’d sound…
