I’m reading a book on loan to me. S. brought it back from a trip to Australia earlier this year. ‘Any Ordinary Day’ is by Leigh Sales. It’s a collection of stories about the very worst things people can experience that rise up, out of the blue. The title is important; they are stories of … Continue reading Any Ordinary Day
It was either Elsa or Anna (I should know which) who implored us to, ‘Let it go’, as she belted her message out, Disney style. And why not take advice from a cartoon character when the conventional leadership and global governance of the day plays out like a poorly scripted soap opera? We may take … Continue reading The Year Is Going, Let Him Go
Choice: it is, perhaps, the single, most important determinant in how our lives turn out; in how we plough a furrow through this world. Yes, some people, often through fate of birth, are born to a life of enhanced opportunity with an array of choices before them, whilst others are born into a ready-made obstacle … Continue reading I May, I Might, I Must
‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it can only be lived forwards.’ These are the words of Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher, theologian and poet. I was at a conference last week where one of the speakers, from Denmark, drew extensively from the work of Kierkegaard. When he told us he was going to delve … Continue reading Young and Old
Auden, Barrett-Browning, Cope, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, Gallagher, Heaney, Ibsen, Jamie, Kinnell, Larkin, Mahon, Neruda, Owen, Plath, Qabbani, Rossetti, St Vincent Millay, Thomas, Updike, Vaughan, Wordsworth, Xenokleides, Yeats, Zephaniah. Who is your favourite? Feel free to reach beyond the 26 I’ve offered you; I was just playing the alphabet game, and, in doing so, left out … Continue reading Advent
I am of the generation where we ‘backed’ our books at the start of each new school year. Dog-eared and a bit tattered from use the year before (in fact, use over multiple years), a growing pile would be distributed by the teacher in September, leaning like the Tower of Pisa, in preparation for ten … Continue reading Change
I’m back in Ireland for a visit, on the windy north coast. Two years ago I was jettisoned back here, life interrupted, everything suspended after K. died. It was an unreal time, those early months. Your world contracts to the size of a snow globe, sometimes calm, but often shaken – those little white flecks making … Continue reading Those We Miss
‘The old dog for the long road.’ D. taught me that one when I was much younger, when I had more give in my knees. Back then I got the gist of it, though I can't say I fully grasped its depth of meaning. It is one of those sayings to which you nod when … Continue reading Be Still And Wait
Yesterday I had to be somewhere by 6pm. Not anywhere. Somewhere. Seated, prepared, centred. Getting to that somewhere would take me two and a half hours by train with a spare hour tucked in my back pocket. This was my unassailable, one and only, Plan A. Then the wind arrived. Yorkshire, where I happened to be, … Continue reading Running Out Of Time
I wonder about the point of writing letters to one’s younger self. Have you come across it? This fad of passing advice backwards down the years; bestowing the benefits of hindsight to the younger you, to the he or she who no longer exists? I came across a selection of snappy one-liners from a broadsheet newspaper … Continue reading Nostalgia
