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...
In December 2018, Elwin was only eight weeks old, we were in the tender stages of a newborn baby for the second time, but I was already itching to start on a new project that didn’t involve being a mum. Having our first son Gryff had...
We are (hopefully) moving house and I am in the midst of the mother of all clear outs: endless sorting, chucking, donating, selling, giving away and recycling in an attempt to reduce our belongings by 40%. It is what keeps me awake at night and...
Seven months ago we ended our unborn daughters life. She was a day shy of six months in the womb when I gave birth to her at one minute to midnight on the 1st of December 2014. I miss her every single day. [caption id="attachment_1116" align="aligncenter" width="300"]...
[gallery type="circle" ids="1085,1083,1082,1076,1077,1078,1079,1080,1075,1073,1072,1071,1070,1069,1068,1067,1066,1065,1084"] This is the diary I made when I was 17 in the year 2000. From this diary I deduce that I was: 1) Wearing bindis. 2) Watching a lot of Spanish independent cinema when I should have been at school. 3) Buying over priced copies of...
Home. I talk about home a lot. I am endlessly trying to understand what home is. Is it a place? Is it where your bed is? Is it a person? Right now it is a rented house that I am madly, truly, deeply in love with. I've...