Sunday Blog 173 – 23 Feb 2025 When darling husband mentioned the UK Prime Minister’s name this week and I didn’t know who he was talking about, I thought perhaps I’d taken my news and current affairs sabbatical too far. With the same tentative gesture of venturing into the shed, pulling a box from its …
Author Archives: pipbrennan
Post-retreat Retreat Pastiche
Sunday Blog 172 – 16th Feb 2025 “Your windows are super clean, Mum.” It was the sixth occasion I’d flicked on the windscreen wipers instead of the indicator while driving my daughter to Perth airport. She and I had a short window of overlap time between me returning from San Francisco and her heading to …
Beautiful Carmel-by-the-sea
Sunday Blog 171 – 9th Feb 2025 “Hands up if you rang your family to tell them you had no business coming to this writing retreat.” This question was posed to us on Tuesday, the morning of the first full day of the very last Carmel Writing Retreat run by Linda Sivertsen that I have …
Shedding my skin
Sunday Blog 170 – 2nd Feb 2025 It has come to my attention that the Chinese New Year 2025 kicked off 29th January-and it’s the Year of the Wood Snake. I am a Wood Snake, indeed a woman entering her third act of her life this year. There’s going to be some shedding. Here’s me …
Meet you in the field
Sunday Blog 169 – 26th January 2025 For most of this week I’ve snuck off into a log cabin to work on edits of my memoir, prior to flying out to Carmel-by-the-Sea next week for a writing retreat. I wanted to take a better draft of the memoir there to work on. A retreat before …
Calculating anniversaries
Sunday Blog 168 – 19th January 2025 Is it just me that gets confused each and every year about which anniversary I’m celebrating? It’s the same conundrum every time January rolls around, and darling husband usually knocks off a year of wedded bliss. “The year you get married is year zero,” he’ll say, and that …
Cherry-picking from religion
Sunday Blog 167 – 12th January 2025 At the tender age of 14, my family’s tightly woven Catholic framework that had swaddled and coddled me loosened. The impetus for this was my eldest sister joining the Orange People. As I puzzled through all the culty aspects of the Rajneshees, I suddenly realised that the brand …
Incomplete list
Sunday Blog 166 – 5th January 2025 I spent the in between New Year space listening to Edith Eger’s memoir The Choice mainly because I thought it would provide my key to all mythologies I talked about in my last blog. It didn’t exactly-it was a gripping, beautifully written memoir more than boiled down list …
In between the years
Sunday Blog 165 – 29th December 2024 (I checked the date twice lol) This in-between Christmas and New Year time is one of my favourites of the year. I love how quickly the days melt away. How I have to check my calendar more than once to verify which day I’m on. It’s a time …
One more selfie
Sunday Blog 164 – 22nd December 2024 “I’ll go if you go,” we’d both said. The Christmas party at my mother’s residential aged care home was like all the events. Kindly meant, organised with care. Riven to the core with loss on the part of the residents, anticipatory grief on the part of the families …