At times I feel overwhelmed by all there is to do in a life, the surplus weight of life’s administration and bureaucracy and responsibility, all those things we’d all love to jettison. I take a moment to consider what could be simplified or scrubbed from the list entirely: passport renewal, new tariff for my broadband, … Continue reading The Weight of Life
Earlier this year, one of my sisters-in-law told me she’d begun to avoid doing anything where she might run the risk of falling. “Can’t afford it, not now I’m older,” she said. “I used to be built from stoneware pottery, now I chip and crack as easily as biscuit porcelain and it’s more difficult to … Continue reading Glue or Rivets
I’m talking disappointment that’s not the end of the world, one that’s somewhere between a blow and an inconvenience, yet, when it hits, it feels like the end of the world to you. In it goes to your body to be registered in your bones and muscles, nothing as violent as the proverbial punch in … Continue reading One About Disappointment
Changing rooms are a place of crisis. I dare you to disagree. When was the last time you felt elated standing alone in the confines of a changing room? A dress-finding mission can, too quickly, become a fault-finding mission, a mission in self-denigration. To start with, there is the trauma of the bare self standing … Continue reading The Art of Changing
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
People are finding words to talk about the war. “Those poor people,” being the three most common words used. Those poor people are so nearby. Those poor people are our near neighbours. Those poor people are two and a half hours away by plane. They could be us. We might be them. Ubuntu: An African … Continue reading How People Cope
I’m still in Portrush. Gales and more gales blow through, one trailing the other, bowling balls careening down a polished rink, on they roll, another, another, another. The wind abates for a day or two, then I’ll be lying in my upstairs bedroom at night and hear it gather speed, listen to it rise, rip, … Continue reading Letting Go
Parked up on a cliff edge in East Lothian, gusts of wind rocking my car, I waited for my friend and his two dogs to arrive. Our Sunday morning plan: breakfast followed by a walk. I stared out onto the bruised blue of the North Sea, looked upon the vast nearness of the Bass Rock … Continue reading When The Sky Falls In
They say after every seven years of life, there is a shift. Some might say it is far greater than a shift, it is a transformation. After seven years, every cell of one’s skin has been shed, regenerated, and a new person is born. Seven is the mystical number linked to the idea of completion … Continue reading Every Seven Years
My Edinburgh Press 