When I’m out with my sister walking the dogs our conversation invariably turns to childhood. This week, for reasons I can’t recall, we were talking about desserts. “I don’t remember mum making many desserts,” I said. “Apart from the chocolate sponge with chocolate sauce.” My sister was incredulous and proceeded to spend the majority of […]
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My daughter is sharing with me her reading list for university and bemoaning the cost of the textbooks in the way that one would if one were actually having to pay for them. I tell her about how I remember my own study books being astronomically expensive but how I really loved buying them all […]
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I’m driving my daughter to Canterbury for her first Fresher’s event. She’s doing her makeup in the passenger seat and I’m wondering why I agreed to collect her again later when the club ends, at 2 am tomorrow morning. “How are you feeling?” I ask “I’m fine. I’m a bit..” “Trepidatious?” I offer. She grunts […]
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My daughter has just been away on holiday with her boyfriend on the beautiful Welsh coast. She arrived home with a bag full of enthusiasm and strangely flavoured rock. Last night she was home for dinner and it felt like an age since I’d seen her. “You must miss her. She was always in your […]
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I had a birthday this week and it seems to have come around far too quickly. I probably wrote this very sentence last year but I can’t find the energy to go back and check. Since last year I’ve had a back problem (which autocorrected to “ball problem” before I luckily spotted it with my […]
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This week I was returning home from walking the dog and the couple I wrote about recently came around the corner. I heard them long before I saw them as if they’d continued on in a perpetual state of argument since the last time they appeared, him skulking moodily with a cigarette hanging from his […]
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I’m having a conversation, by text, with my daughter the day before the A level results are published. Me: What are you doing today? Her: I’m tidying up. I’m stressed about tomorrow and keeping myself distracted. Me: You’ll know soon and then you can look to the future. Her: Yes but not knowing means I […]
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It’s a beautiful summers day and I’m looking out of a vast window of the eighth floor of a building. The Thames meanders into the distance past the Palace of Westminster. The London Eye turns slowly on the South Bank and people look like ants crossing the bridge each way, north and south. I imagine […]
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A couple are screaming at each other in the street as I’m walking home. He is on the phone and is relaying the conversation to his angry and agitated partner. “What’s she fucking saying?” she yells at him. He pulls the phone away from her as she lurches forward to grab it while he yells […]
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On the decking the nasturtiums have all but given up the ghost, bowing their heads in submission. Even the water in the hose comes out like it’s been mainlined from the kettle. It’s only been two or three days but it’s debilitating. Daisy is lying on the wooden floor breathing fast and heavy. Logically I […]
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