I have an app on my phone that identifies birdsong so that when I am walking through the woods I can tell a woodpecker from a robin. Every so often it insists on playing an advert that ironically makes me much less likely to buy whatever it is selling and makes me too bitter and […]
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I’m in self-isolation and I’ve noticed that my chutzpah at having to stay in permanently might have been somewhat misplaced. Currently, I’m well and that’s certainly something to be thankful for but, under those circumstances, being confined to home is surprisingly unsettling. The thing I miss most of all is walking the dog. It’s my […]
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My mother-in-law died this week at the end of a decline that felt much longer than it was. She left the room where my children were nursed as babies, where I read “The House At Pooh Corner” to my son so many nights in a row that I no longer needed the book. She left […]
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I’m hunched over my laptop preparing for an online conference by completing an exercise on attitudes to death. I’m writing about how I’m fine talking about death because I feel like I experienced quite a lot of it growing up although, as I write, I realise I also think about it a lot. My daughter […]
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It was 1979 and I was sitting in the living room at Simon Bradshaw’s house, watching TV with his family. The room was dark, deep red wallpaper and a long black leather sofa stretching across one wall. The news and the darkness were making me feel that everything was closing in. The Russians had invaded […]
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Over a game of “Bananagrams” at the dining room table shoehorned in before dinner, my daughter says, “We have to keep a reflective journal but I don’t know what to write in mine.” She places down letters to make the word “conundrum”, an irony I ignore because she’ll already be ahead of me. “I’ll show […]
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Over the road, the man at number three has been working in his front garden for the past two weekends. First, he dug out all the earth and now he is laying concrete. As I walk past him with the dog she sniffs at a pile of leaves while I watch him crouch seriously, wielding […]
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Walking home past the big house at the bottom of the road I notice a huge pile of stuff sprawling across the gate and onto the pavement. There is a note taped to the wheelie bin. “Dear dustmen, sorry for all the rubbish but I’m going through a divorce and there’s a lot to get […]
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Sitting with my family around the increasingly wobbly antique dining table that still reminds me of childhood family Christmases, I am passing around bowls of pasta with two types of tomato sauce. “Do you want the one with olives, Beth?” “Is it the olives that taste like fish?” “They don’t taste like fish, but yes […]
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In the film “Manhattan” there is a scene near the end where Isaac is listing for himself all the things that make life worth living. Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Potato Head Blues”, Swedish movies, “Sentimental Education” by Flaubert, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, the “Apples […]
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