Artwork source: Magda Wolna on Flickr This is a hard story to write. It is a hard story to live. And it is a recent story. Not one I can look back on and tell with the remembered ache of a healed scar. This wound is still open. I knew even in the midst of…
My days do not look very impressive at the moment. Maybe it’s why I am a little stumped for writing material recently. The new-country feel has worn off and we have settled into a comfortable routine in our new city. I’ve stepped off the emotional rollercoaster that moving was, and life now moves gently on,…
I don’t come from a family or even a country that typically celebrates the summer solstice. My guess is it might have been viewed as a slightly dodgy hippy pagan festival (the hippy part being ok, the pagan not so much). My summers as a child are a beautiful memory, tinged slightly pink-orange, which I…
I’ve started a new sewing project. I’m using up the material I used for my niece’s play quilt earlier this year, by making a new quilt. My mother-in-law sews a lot, and I’ve watched her so often sitting with the small scraps of fabric in her lap, sewing the tiny stitches. Last time, she showed…
Today my mum called me to let me know a wonderful old man had died. He was one of the very best men I have known. In my memory he has always been old, the retired vicar slowly climbing the narrow wooden stairs into the pulpit (which no other preacher did) to speak out the…
I grew up in a little cul de sac in a small village in Oxfordshire. In our little street there were roughly 20 houses. I think I knew well the occupants of at least fourteen of them. As a child I played in the street until the sun went down with the others from the…
