I started life as a drama school student at the age of 24. It was a late start for this specific type of career, but I felt so very ready to throw myself into a creative endeavour that I was willing to take the risk....
I caught a plane to Manchester with nothing but a blue samsonite suitcase. I had no money, no job, no purpose. Luckily, I did have a roof over my head with Jim. All I knew was that I needed to be somewhere other than Barcelona...
As with most creative homes, money generally came in fits and bursts. One day we were figuring out all the different ways to eat a potato, other days we were carrying a long list of essentials/desirables into the luxurious darkness of the Casa Gispert by...
Our life in Barcelona was very sociable, it was impossible to walk anywhere without bumping into a friend on the street, shopping at the food market was an entire morning’s activity and on most days friends would join us for lunch, knelt around the long...
September 1992. The day after Carmel’s concert on the steps of the Cathedral, mum and I travelled back to Madrid on the tour bus with the band, packed up the Alfa Romeo Spider and waved goodbye to Tudor, who I think had fallen slightly in...
The very day my mum decided we should move to Spain, she picked up a magazine advertising a 350 year old farmhouse for rent, originally built for the town mayor and now with an art studio, high up in the mountains of Ronda. The landlords...
On our journey down from Scotland we passed through Blackpool as intended. It was a wet, grey day, but we walked along the beach stopping to prod jellyfish and kick cans across the sand. That night we stayed in Manchester with Jim’s cousin Gerry and...
After two years in France we returned to London, somewhat reluctantly. In our absence, Portobello had become unaffordable, so mum set her sights up the road on Kensal Rise. Somehow, with a bent mortgage broker who managed to convince the mortgage lender that she had...
My maternal grandparents met at school in Scotland and married. She was an atheist, he was not. Brenda went to Glasgow School of Art and became a teacher and Norman became an episcopalean minister like his father before him. In the 1950's they adopted my...
In early summer 1983, a young woman named Cairistiona was flying home from Java, Indonesia, after only six months of a trip that had been intended as open ended and hopefully definitive. She had been feeling increasingly ill, and none of the doctors she had...