existing's tricky:but to live's a gift
It’s been a pretty busy past month or so, and writing has been more of a challenge for me. We are currently on a visit back to the UK, so very much out of our regular routines, and of course the babba is a month older, and now very much constantly on the move (crawling and furniture walking), so I can no longer really write in moments of playtime. Nothing unanticipated there.
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At the end of December, when my baby was just three months and I was still spending more of the night awake than asleep, I made a list of three personal and professional things that I wanted to accomplish this year. One of them, as I mentioned in a recent post, was to develop a writing practice.
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It’s September 1st 2022, just after 6pm. I’m writing in the grey of the gloaming. Outdoors a dogged barking, the tu-tu-tu twitter of the birds, the occasional rush of a car. The trees are still, the sky bruised.
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“Where are you staying?” Tony asks politely, meaning, when are you leaving. “Oh, you know,” says Zenia with a shrug. “Here and there. I live from hand to mouth – or from feast to famine. Just like the old days, remember, West? Remember our feasts?” She’s eating a Viennese chocolate, from a box West brought…
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Here is a topic I have wanted to write about for a little while: my return to reading, as a working adult. Partly because it interests me to hear similar stories from others, partly because books are such a joy to me that I want to bring them more to the forefront on my blog…
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I associate the smell of woodfire with autumn giving way to winter, dark wet cobbled streets, treacherously slippy fallen leaves, damp socks, dim bike lights, painful chapped hands. This is the season of course that heralds Christmas, the turn of the year, and thus it felt so natural to me that it took a few seconds before it jarred against the reality of warm summer air and blue skies. I could smell wood-smoke on Christmas day
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It’s early morning before work and I’m writing again in the grey of the soft light. The feeling of writing: thoughts running through my fingers, the beat of the words, the shape and sensation of them, the joy of making something tangible out of something existing only in my mind, an exacting almost topographical pleasure.…
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Beautiful, amusing, thought-arresting passages from books I’ve enjoyed over the past month. I’m not one for full on reviews, but I will readily track down a book based on nothing more than a couple of sentences if they strike a chord with me. Do comment below if you’ve read any of these, and share with…
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This is a new little series that I hope will appeal as a bonus post each month on the day that my newsletter goes out! Just a small collection of beautiful or thought-arresting passages of words from whatever I’ve been reading recently. Little extracts like this are often what prompt me to seek out a…
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Mad to Live 