I didn’t know burial grounds were so full of life. Cemeteries filled with crumbling stones dating back one hundred, two hundred years, hidden and forgotten places known only by lonely dog walkers, head-dwellers, and retirees, places like Warriston Cemetery where the dead sleep while new growth teems with life. My friend took me there earlier … Continue reading Warriston Cemetery
The conductor, a small, blonde, square woman in her thirties, comes to our carriage last. She has checked all the tickets and has plenty of time to chat. I, invisible to the three boys sharing my carriage, am apparently invisible to her too. She does not look near me. Twice she tells them the time … Continue reading Off The Rails (II)
I am alone in the carriage when the train pulls out of Derry. I take a seat on the left by a window, the side that will skirt the water, give me the best views along this stunning section of line. As the train gains speed along the Foyle estuary three boys tumble into the … Continue reading Off The Rails (I)
“Alexander Rostov, could it be that you have become settled in your ways?” This is the rhetorical question the protagonist of the novel A Gentleman in Moscow (by Amor Towles) asks himself. Thereafter the narrator speaks, noting how younger people are rarely set in their ways: “At the age of twenty-two, Count Alexander Rostov could … Continue reading Set In Your Ways
“I think people are uncomfortable, so they say nothing,” she told me, “like people no longer saying his name.” Had that been the case with my husband, Ken, and with my dad, Barry, had my friends and family not been able to remember either anniversary landing on these days, speak either’s name, say something they … Continue reading We Should Speak of the Dead
From Perth, Australia, came the message that she could not countenance, these days, reading anything that was not beautiful. She is right. Why, by choice, should we read about ugliness of action, deed, character, when all that is so readily available in our daily newsfeeds? Why shouldn’t we self-select and sanitise what we choose to … Continue reading The Sunny Side of Life
I think about you often, not as a continuum, not as a timeline, but as something whole, rounded, and intact, a ready-made container within which is everything I require for my life. I think of you as an old-fashioned trunk, one that might have accompanied someone on a passage to India a hundred years ago. … Continue reading Monologue with Life
Before the world became the precarious place that it has reverted to being, I used to think, upon arriving or returning from a journey, long or short, how much of miracle it is that civilisation works so well. I play an Irish jig on the fiddle called The Wheels of the World, which is a … Continue reading Precarious
Bed early one night this week, exhausted from busy day. Body collapsed into deep sleep. Woke at 6am and read more Raymond Carver short stories. Read two in a row, both about alcoholism. ‘Careful’, then, ‘Where I’m Calling From’. Used to have a copy of a thick anthology of that name – ‘Where I’m Calling … Continue reading So What?
On my computer is a file named 'Interesting Writing Articles' in which I have saved snippets, essays, and interviews that I have read and liked. I knew there was one in there with Joan Didion, an interview with The Paris Review, which, following her death in December, I went back to read. The article is … Continue reading The Nightmare of Dreams
My Edinburgh Press 