Around the corner from where I live is a dentist’s surgery. Once a week, an A-frame board appears on the street outside announcing: ‘Dermabrasion clinic for fillers, lip plumping, smoothing of fine lines and crow’s feet.’ We all know, thanks to Philip Larkin, that the age of debauchery was born with the invention of sex in … Continue reading Crow’s Feet
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
The things you learn at school set hard like concrete. You don't know they’re buried deep in your brain, until something is said and all of a sudden - pow! - like cracking through the earth and tapping the well, out pour words or songs or facts; pure springs of knowledge you’d forgotten you knew. So … Continue reading Let Me Count The Ways
My visitors are here. Flew in from Canada early yesterday morning. Very early for me, as I got to see the lark-side of this city: wide-awake, bustling, industrious. The sight of if would have made Edinburgh’s enlightened forefathers proud. “How are you feeling?” I asked between hugs on Waverley Bridge. “Fine!” came the universal response, … Continue reading Lashing, Splashing, Dashing
Resilience: it has come to be one of those buzz words, a quality we seek to embody for ourselves, our children, our towns, our communities. It is that ability to withstand life’s scouring pad and boiling water, to emerge shiny, free from scrape or scald. Possessing the means to bounce back when the bowling ball … Continue reading Resilience
The time to make your mind up about someone is never. That’s what my father used to say. It is both an uplifting and depressing maxim as it means, in equal measure, that people can unexpectedly delight and disappoint. They can act out of character - or what you suppose to be their character. For one’s character … Continue reading Ordinary People
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
Oh the quirks of living alone! One has all the scope, space and time one needs to acquire, then mature, the strangest habits; time to hothouse idiosyncrasies, let them run unchecked so that, when pointed out as peculiar, you have no idea what your accuser is talking about – like when you begin to see … Continue reading Dine In For One
Is there any better song in the word about the sweetness of infatuation than the Gershwin brothers’, ‘I Got A Crush On You’? Composed by George, with lyrics by his brother Ira, it describes the giddy confusion that comes with harbouring a crush. “How glad the many millions of Annabelles and Lilians would be, to … Continue reading Crush
At school I had a very strict Primary Five teacher, Miss M.. I started the year as an innocent eight year old, and ended it as a slightly disenchanted nine year old. No harm done, that’s growing up; isn't it? Miss M. had a great range of ‘wise’, snippy sayings: her no-nonsense approach to education … Continue reading Empty Vessels
