Spending a day at University with my daughter we are listening to a presentation about student life. She is conscientious and committed, but she worries that everything she learns won’t stay in her head and be there when she needs it. I can remember my first episode of depression soon after I’d started a job […]
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I need to write a presentation but I am finding it hard to craft the beginning. To avoid the discomfort of sitting and staring at an empty screen I go and make coffee but, as the minute’s tick by, I start to feel bad about myself, about not using my time efficiently. To avoid the […]
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I went to see Mr Pascoe every Wednesday at 12.30. I would drive the twenty minutes from my office and sit in his shabby waiting room with the pleasant receptionist who didn’t have a computer and never seemed busy. When he called me in he would leave the room while I got undressed. I remember […]
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In my dream, I can see an ex-lover across the road in the small hut where I used to go to pre-school, but I can’t reach her. She is saying something to me but I can’t hear her. As I turn the corner and approach the church, it is gone, raised to the ground and […]
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Lying awake late I wonder why I’m not asleep. The urge to enquire soon passes with the knowledge that chasing sleep succeeds only in pushing it further away. I need music to soothe me and I scroll through the classical playlists on Spotify wishing my father was here so I could ask him what to […]
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On the radio, there is an interview with Polly Harvey about her score for a new production of “All About Eve”. She speaks with freedom about her art and, at that moment, I think of all the ways I have held myself back. Like love, great art relies on openness. Like love, openness can only […]
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My mother went through a stage of making too many chicken casseroles. Shortly after I’d left home I had to go back there to be fed because, as a result of Black Wednesday, my mortgage repayments had become so severe that I literally couldn’t afford to feed myself or heat the house. Each Sunday I’d […]
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When I was young I wanted to be an actor. I dreamed of going to drama school and living a life in which I could permanently be someone else, a fact which was part of the motivation and the problem which prevented it from happening. Sometimes I have regretted the decisions I made. Predictably others […]
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Marie Kondo, author of the endearing and practical guide to de-cluttering your life, “The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying”, has a new series on Netflix. But somehow the commercialisation of simplicity makes it complicated. For someone who built a reputation on minimalism, she has become annoyingly difficult to get rid of. Then Mary Oliver died. The […]
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Waiting for a train, someone once asked me how, as a therapist, I deal with emotional disturbance in my own life. I replied that I generally have a good idea about what I need to do, but that it doesn’t necessarily mean I do it. When the human and the professional collide there is usually […]
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