“I can’t understand why anyone who has had their dog since it was a puppy would ever have another puppy,” I say to my daughter while I try to get a piece of stair carpet from between the jaws of our second puppy. “I suppose we forget what’s it’s like,” she says with the air […]
Read More
The jasmine that I grew some years ago across a huge piece of trellis appeared to have died. Thin strands of sorry-looking wood stretching up in disparate directions from the ground it was hard to see anything much on it that looked like green shoots. It was hard to hide my disappointment in what has […]
Read More
I’m in supervision having a familiar conversation. “I’ve taken on too much work.” My supervisor smiles but says nothing. I spend the next minute or so explaining what I’ve done, how I had planned to say no to a new project but, in the final shake-up, found it too interesting to reject. I hear myself […]
Read More
I can remember once having a conversation with a client who suffered from an array of terrible anxieties in which he told me how hard he found it to either walk or drive across a bridge. One of the phrases I remember uttering to him in the course of the work we did together was […]
Read More
We’re driving to Hereford to look at some puppies. The rain is falling in biblical style and has been since leaving home, nearly four hours ago. I call ahead to let the breeder know we’re running late. “Oh, is it raining? We’ve had none here at all,” he tells me. The sky clears when we […]
Read More
Coming home from our morning walk in the park I experienced one of those rare moments in which everything seems aligned and joy clicks into place. It was short-lived. I saw the puddle of water on the kitchen floor first, and then, after my brain had started sifting through the possible ways it could have […]
Read More
I wake up thinking about how this week’s post isn’t the way I wanted it to be and wonder if it was wise to have drafted it in bed after a late night with friends. The angst makes me think about words written by the Reverend John Ames to his young son in Marilynne Robinson’s […]
Read More
Alone together on a Friday night, I wonder what I can put on the TV that will keep my daughter engaged with me and away from her phone. In a stroke of genius, I go for “Friends: The Reunion” combining my past with her present. We used to watch Friends before we had children, before […]
Read More
I am making my way around the makeshift quiz they’ve erected on medical screens at the GP surgery. Prevented from leaving for fifteen minutes after the vaccine, in case of an allergic reaction, someone decided it would be a good idea to ask a bunch of questions about the Romans and neolithic fossils. Waiting to […]
Read More
A couple of years ago I was telling my son about an idea I’d had. “I think I’m going to start an Airbnb for gardens.” “What do you mean?”, he said. “People who don’t have gardens could rent space from people who do but can’t be bothered to garden them.” He pushes out his bottom […]
Read More
Recent Comments