I have been on the move for most of the last few weeks, as I (hopefully) await all the paperwork on my new flat going through. It’s been an unsettling time, and I haven’t always been able to write, which has been frustrating, as my time has been focused on paid work, house hunting and […]
Tag Archives: personal
I’ve written before on topics like kindness, and asking for help, many of those pieces based on my own experience of coping with losing my mum and being homeless all at the same time. I like to think I have learned from those experiences: that I have seen the best in people and, if I […]
One of the most common questions writers are asked is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ Usually, the answer is no more enlightening than ‘my head’. But sometimes you do remember the spark, even if the final story bears no resemblance to what inspired it. So it is with Louise’s Tattoos. It’s an old […]
Some words have such a weight you can’t carry them. They are so freighted with import, with the expectations of others or the ages, you shy away from applying them to yourself because you simply can’t live up to them. So, five years ago, when I became, in fairly rapid succession, both homeless and an […]
I feel like I have blogged a lot about mental health this year – in no small part because the world has seemed to be making a concerted effort to make us all anxiety-ridden wrecks. But also because I hope that, in continuing to talk about it, I am helping, even in a tiny way, […]
I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions any more. January is smack in the middle of my busiest time of year, it’s always bloody cold or raining, and everyone around me is undertaking a detox, which only makes me want to surrender myself more to Bacchanalian excess, provided such excess can be carried out from the […]
This year, so far, has probably been the least productive of my life. Hell, even that time I was homeless I managed to write a book, but 2017 has felt like one long anxiety attack, where any impulse to create has been buried under a deluge of apathy and stress. Some of this has been […]
I have been thinking a lot about kindness this week. This has been prompted by two things – public and personal. Seeing the outpouring of donations to the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire – only weeks after Londoners opened their homes to victims of the London Bridge attacks – moved me to tears; but […]
So, I was in London yesterday – drinking in Borough Market, actually, only a couple of hours before the attacks, having had a day out at the Globe, so my natural horror at the event and sorrow for those affected is also tinged with a visceral relief that my friend and I weren’t caught up […]
I’ve written a lot about writing advice – the good and the bad – but if there is one piece of ‘accepted wisdom’ I’d like to see killed by fire, it’s ‘writers must write every day’. It comes packaged in many forms – ‘real writers write every day’, you are told, as if being a […]
Dark Dates 