January 19, 2020
I remember once my daughter coming home from a day at school where they had been focusing on death. “That’s an interesting and important subject to talk about. What did they get you to do?” I asked. “Nothing much. They didn’t talk to us about it. We spent most of the day designing a poster […]
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January 12, 2020
My daughter is in a good mood as she climbs into a bin bag and says, from within its dark recesses, “I have cripplingly low self-esteem” It makes me laugh, and her too when I show her the photo I take of her hunched on the kitchen floor. It’s remarkable that she is in such […]
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January 5, 2020
It’s time to take down the Christmas decorations, a job which always seems to take no time at all, shuffling the festivities out of the door as quickly as possible, their obsolescence unquestioned and fitting. My phone constantly has a notification popping up which tells me I have “insufficient storage space”, and I wonder how […]
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December 29, 2019
I love these slow days between Christmas and New Year mostly because there is an absence of expectation. On a recent episode of “Sideways” my friend Martin and I discussed how Christmas is an exciting time for alcoholics because everyone else is drinking Prosecco at breakfast time and thereby normalising their own behaviour. I feel […]
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December 22, 2019
When I was a child I can remember that my mother had little ways of dulling excitement before it arrived. If I said I was looking forward to Christmas she’d say, “Don’t expect too much” or sometimes, if she was having a particularly difficult time she might tell us that she “Didn’t feel very Christmassy”. […]
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