Sunday Blog 105 – 8th October 2023 I blame the travel, but I missed a deadline for a writing competition. For the lols I thought I would make it today’s Sunday Blog. It’s a fictional riff on a real stay in a writer’s cabin. When I came out for my morning break, I was no …
Author Archives: pipbrennan
Giving Up The Ghost
Sunday Blog 104 – 1st October 2023 While I was away on holiday, I took two actual physical books. One of them was a copy of Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir, which details her struggle with endometriosis. I was too mean to lend it to my husband after he finished his one …
Reflections from the city of ghosts
Sunday Blog 103 – Sunday 24th September It always takes me some time to “arrive” once I return from a trip. One of the biggest mysteries of travel to me not just exploring new places, but also being once again in places that you were before. It’s like re-reading a book over time, when you …
An Independent Greek Holiday
Sunday Blog 102 – 17th September 2023 It’s there in my Vision Book – “I allow myself to have regular independent Greek holidays with Zoe.” My beautiful half-Greek daughter. This year, finally I have achieved this. And it was absolutely in every way worth the wait. It’s a complicated life path to here – Greek …
The Carpet Beaters
Sunday Blog 101 – 10th September 2023 At risk of disappearing into my own navel, I’ve been re-reading letters I sent to my mother and a friend while I lived in Greece intermittently from 1996 until 2000. In March 1998 I wrote to my mother, while I was living in a very dark and dingy …
Island dreams
Sunday Blog 100 – 3rd September 2023 This was a postcard I sent to my mother in 1997, re-photographed by my own fair hands this holiday which accounts for how skew-iff the image is. I sent it to her when I had all but finished my first year of teaching English as a Foreign language …
Holiday in Brussels?
Sunday Blog 99 – 27th August 2023 Several decades ago when I worked in London, a colleague shared a birthday with me, albeit she was a few years older. It was one of our many points of connection. She was a character in so many ways but her staunch dislike for committing to a relationship …
Malevolent bed clothes
Sunday Blog 98 – Sunday 20th August 2023 (It’s still Sunday in Frankfurt!) He was trying very hard to be diplomatic, in the face-to-face interview he was conducting with me for my final recruitment process to become a shelf stacker at Woolies. This was in 2022, when I was still trying to get the right …
Creativity tobogganing
Sunday Blog 97 – Sunday 13th August 2023 Forgive me because I can’t easily lay my hand on the link – but etched onto my memory is Liz Gilbert’s description of the creative process. Imagine being up the top of a steep incline, a cardboard box or a toboggan your only tool. Creativity is egging …
Not the day, not the hour
Sunday Blog 96 – 6th August 2023 I began the week with two cousins born in the same year, same month as me, and ended it with one. On Wednesday I was looking after my mother as per usual and heard the phone ring. As she always has it on speakerphone, I usually get to …