Christmas, eh. It’s all well and good if you are in a happy place. But when you’re not, Christmas is something that can push you over the tinsel-bedecked edge. “Joy to the World!” pipes the tinny supermarket muzak as you watch sad, grim-faced people gazing at boxes of SuperValu mince pies. It can feel miserable. …
I’ve been researching the rise of ‘Pauper funerals’ in the UK. Also called Section 46 funerals, these are burials that are paid for by the local authority when someone dies alone, with no known next of kin. What struck me as I read through case studies, watched news articles and looked up Gazette postings, is that when …
I’ve had no ideas lately. No wonderful words have slipped through my mind. No scintillating thoughts I feel feel driven to share. No things. No thing. So, I am borrowing a few of my favourite words. I’m just going to leave them here. And see if they start talking to each other. Perspicacious. Crystal. Ethereal. Emerald. Ocean. Sapphire. Translucent. Equinox. Jewelled. Satsuma. …
I just re-read a book by accident. It was Stephen King’s Misery. I don’t read horror books any more (I still watch horror films though). So, I was just looking through one of the many boxes of books I still haven’t unpacked since moving house, when Misery kind of fell into my hand. Then it sort of opened. Then my eyes started reading …
I am in one of those stupid defeatist moods where I keep typing stuff then deleting it. The Inner-Critic is on my shoulder poking and laughing at my blog entries and calling me a pretentious twat. Or else he’s yawning and saying how boring it is. Criticism. It can make you improve. Energize you to do …
Sir Nicholas Winton died this week. If you want to know who he was and what he did, read a bit about him at The Power of Good. He rescued around 669 children from the Nazi death camps. It was only when his attic was being cleared that the story of what he had done became …
I have some new snippets in my collection if you’d like to glimpse briefly into other people’s worlds for a moment. Bus Stop Snippets
My blog has been sadly neglected. Poor little bloggy. Moved house. Moving on. Saying goodbye to some things. It was quite cleansing to unburden myself. Going through piles of papers. Throwing out crumpled cartoons, wrinkled pages of writing, years and years worth of diaries. It’s like taking a weight off the mind or soul. I mean, if you haven’t looked at …
So when it looks like not much is happening. A lot is going on under the surface. It’s just harder to show. There’s always something interesting, bubbling away inside our heads. It’s getting it out. That’s the thing.
I was about 11-12 years old, on summer holiday in the Norfolk Broads with my mum, dad, 2 sisters and a cousin. I was one of the youngest children. It was early afternoon on a clear and sunny late summer’s day. We’d moored our hired long boat in a very quiet area next to fields and …
the crone 