In therapy, I am looking out of the window at the gravestones. I didn’t deliberately choose a therapist whose office was in a cemetery but now that I think about it, there is something peaceful and fitting about talking of the past surrounded by the dead. Our conversation is about the need to please my […]
Sober Relationships
The Sunday I watched my father zipped into a body bag and removed from the living room didn’t seem an obvious point at which there would be a change in the relationship I’d witnessed him have with my mother. That morning, he would have been listening to Brahms or Beethoven, maybe Grieg and watching the […]
Happy Families
My sister texts me with the news that our brother has returned from ten days in Yorkshire to find that his water tank has been leaking and made the house uninhabitable. The insurance company say it will be a year before he is back home. The last time I saw my brother was when I […]
Word Games & Boundaries
I’m playing “Bananagrams” with my daughter and, in what now feels like a rash move fuelled by early game bravado I have “dumped” too many of my opening letters and find myself with a swathe of tiles in front of me and unable to make anything of them. Serenely fashioning “Paradoxical” on the table, my […]
I Am Not The Doer
In the mid-eighties, I went on holiday to Corfu with my friend Adam. It was the first time I had flown and the first time I felt consciously out of control. Late one Friday the 13th as the plane sped down the runway towards take-off I thought to myself, “My body has never travelled at […]
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