Sunday blog 1. 29th August 2021 Your average audio book takes between 6 and 12 hours to listen to. Think about it. Imagine if you could sit down over a weekend and talk into your voice memo for ten hours and knock out a book. Technically, you could, but in reality, books can stretch over …
Author Archives: pipbrennan
My Real Name
It was the third time he’d approached me in two hours. I was scratchy-eyed and still unclaimed, waiting at Thessaloniki airport from three o’clock in the morning. A particularly charmless airport in Greece’s second-biggest city, six hours north of Athens. He was yet to find the person he’d been tasked to meet, or so I …
London 2019
Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. Soren Keikegardd Going to London in 1979 from suburban Perth was literally like going to the moon and looking back at the earth. I was 14 years old, and from then on I knew I would return and live in London. The 1979 photos …
Refugee Week Reflections
It was a beautiful day for a walk, from Greece to Bulgaria. My daughter was under one and I carried her in a sling. I walked along to our destination, the check point between the two countries. Perhaps it was the walking, the baby in a sling, but it put me in mind of the …
No makes way for yes?
So this week at work, when I turned up for an event the day after it had occurred, I contemplated yet again my inability to say no and to manage my diary. To be fair, I had given myself a lovely quiet morning in a cafe right next to this event, working on something that …
Germaine Greer, I have something to say
Please be aware that this post deals with sexual assault and rape. Please take care of yourself and if you find this subject triggering, please scroll on. Against my instincts, I attended your session at the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival On Rape. I was going to ask a question and during the session …
Seeing Mrs Aylward
It’s a lifetime now since Mrs Aylward taught my then pre-primary aged child. Her green eyes are just the same, overflowing with kindness and empathy. That pre-primary year was the first time I realised my daughter was going to be socially ostracised by her peer group. She didn’t know it yet, but it was so …
Things that I realise, forget, then remember #1
This could become a very long list… How often does it happen that an insight you once really “got” – something that was so clear and right – somehow drifts away? And then, a reminder will suddenly come, and you once again know an insight’s truth, right down to your bones? Back in January, I …
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Complexity of doing good work…
This week, like many weeks at work, has got me thinking about the complexity of trying to do good work. Because nothing can be achieved without the combined effort of people, working together. If only it could be one person, striving valiantly in the arena as per this quote – but usually, the work that …
In praise of yoga
Let’s start with praise for the idea of domino habits – one habit creates a chain reaction of better behaviours which lead to a better life. For me, it’s been yoga. I was nearly 30 old before I ever did any kind of yoga. I was living in London at the time and was well …