November 29, 2020
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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November 29, 2020
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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November 15, 2020
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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November 8, 2020
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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November 1, 2020
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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