Summer clothes. Dawn, high blue and clear. Warm through double glazing. A day to get the boxes down from the top shelf. Hello linen, shirts with no sleeves. Sandal cages for naked toes. Dresses I didn’t wear last year, or the one before. Shorts. Espadrilles. Capris. Flip-flops. Even the names glisten in the sun. The […]
100 words on swimming
Swimming – This weekend, I became one of those women who posts photos of themselves wading into icy water wearing a bobble hat. In the dark, under the fattest, glow-in-the-dark biscuit of a moon, you couldn’t see the goose flesh as the slick cold inched upwards. And upwards. Unbearable, exquisite, until, suddenly… Oh, I can […]
Vanishing act
Love, they say. Whether it’s the sneaky, while-you-were-looking-elsewhere kind Or a thunderbolt that smacks you And leaves you reeling like walking into a door in the dark, It arrives – a huge and solid thing Immovable and permanent Stone I love you, they say And it’s a fact, like gravity Or the wetness of rain […]
The peculiar cruelty of sports bras
A light in the distance
There was a rainbow across the valley. Today. It started with a colourful blister under the cloud next to the barn. And it grew up, up into the violet grey. A natural pride flag unfurling upward from the pot of gold, And other metaphors. Elsewhere, across valleys in other countries illumination comes from enemy incendiary […]