Between the frothy sea edge and the jaunty awning of the cafe, there are people. Hot, flat people in tidy rows. Roasting and snoozing. Close enough to smell them but shut my eyes and I’m all alone. That’s when the idea struck me. Too lizardy idle to take a photo, could I just think about […]
100 days of blogging
Or yet another attempt to get into gear… I’ve been wrestling with my blog lately. Oddly, I’ve allowed all sorts of irrelevant nonsense (feeding children, vanquishing squalor) to get in the way. And this has made me sad. Not the fed children or the less horrid house, but that it doesn’t matter how hard you […]
Things I’ve learned from completing an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow
That’s it. My life is my own again. I’m an ordinary person rather than a mature student. Last week I handed in the final portfolio of my course and, rather than elation and a heady end-of-terminess, I felt a bit flat, slightly sad and, even, a little empty. It would be very tempting to dive […]
Don’t worry, write a poem…
Sometimes you’ve got things to worry about and other times you worry even when there’s nothing much to worry about. It doesn’t make much difference in the end. My advice: Stop worrying and write a poem. Worry is a big black bird. It spends its hours on a wire. Waiting. And then at the slightest, […]
Women at work – what do we really want?
The more we talk about our experiences, the better. But it’s not always straightforward. My unease about writing freely about the menopause isn’t just that people will now focus on the woman who was once a person but is now just a sweaty bag of past-it symptoms. What bothers me is that the narrative about […]