Sunday Blog 85 – 21st May 2023 Every family has their little sayings. “You were robbed” was something our father would say to us whenever we, say, got 90% in a test. It was always said in jest, and wrapped in a general cocoon of his pride and kindness. Recently and rather impulsively, I decided …
Author Archives: pipbrennan
Minds Went Walking
Sunday Blog 84 – 14th May 2023 This is the chapter I would have written for the Minds Went Walking- Paul Kelly’s Songs Re-imagined book if only I had been asked to contribute. Australian singer songwriter Paul Kelly is our Bob Dylan. Our Billy Bragg. Perhaps they sent me an invitation via email and I …
Blame it on the moon
Sunday Blog 83 – 7th May 2023 This week I marinaded in a shame bath. Monday morning started too early, 4am to be exact. I was glued to the memoir manuscript a dear talented friend had sent me to read after I had begged her. I was following along her teenage travels, heart in mouth. …
Two very heavy suitcases
Sunday Blog 82 – 30th April 2023 Between deciding to go and leaving, there was a two week period. I packed two very heavy suitcases for that brief trip to the UK to “lift my spirits”. It had been a long eight months, and after Summer had waned I’d endured Winter in snowy Thessaloniki in …
The Glass Window
Sunday Blog 81 – 23rd April 2023 For something a little bit different I thought I might share some of the rejected submissions I have been doing, adapting them to the Sunday Blog platform. Gets them out into the world somehow! “I think I’m done,” she said. Until that moment, she was my boss. She …
It’s all Greek…
Sunday Blog 80 – 16th April 2023 I still remember when I was just about to leave London for Greece in 1996. So lucky to get a five year contract at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in 1990, I had seen that out and had started on the next. But something wasn’t right. I …
Transfer papers
Sunday Blog 79 – 9th April 2023 It’s fair to say my father loved life, and left it reluctantly just before he turned 95, nearly three years ago now. Even two weeks before his death he was fairly adamant he would get behind the wheel again on discharge from hospital after another health setback. The …
Only connect
Sunday Blog 78 – 2nd April 2023 “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” Howards End, Chapter 22 Howards End began life as an Edwardian novel before being made into a movie with Emma Thomson, Helena …
Sunday Evenings
Sunday Blog 77 – 26th March 2023 I’m still not sick of that glorious Sunday evening feeling when I realise that I don’t have to go to work on Monday. One year in and it still hasn’t got old. I get excited that I can just do my semi-vagabond creative thing. My working from home …
Marshmallows
Sunday Blog 76 – 19th March 2023 The podcast Invisibilia is still riveting my attention. Like this 2016 episode. What must it be like to be a scientist whose best-known piece of research, aka The Marshmallow Test seems to be persistently and widely misunderstood? In summary, researcher Walter Mischel offered children aged four one single …