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 …

Every night I dream of India

Sunday Blog 159 – 17th November 2024 It’s been a bumpy, busy old two weeks since I returned from Rishikesh. And almost every one of those 14 nights, I’ve dreamed of India. Unusually active dreams with colours, sounds, sights of India. And lots of animals. Because I’ve been dreaming of India, does that mean I’ve …

Early steps on the valedictory tour

Sunday Blog 153 – 22nd September 2024 One of the absolute wonders of travel to me is that I can be me, but somewhere far from home, if I just travel enough miles. And since Wednesday, I’ve travelled 17,000 kms/ 10,563 miles. The I, the Me that is housed in my body can find itself …

Goodbye darling Mum

Sunday Blog 151 – 1 September 2024 Almost to the very end of her long life, my mother, Bet, remained who she was, of sound mind. Funny, spunky, unpredictable. In the emergency department last week where she was being treated for her broken hip, she was next to a man who had imbibed a little …

On this day 26 years ago

Sunday Blog 130 – 7th April Diary Entry, 7th April 1998, 11 Olibiados Street, Thessaloniki It’s the morning. I awoke at 4 feeling distinctly queazy after dreaming about eating a mouthful of dried Earl Grey leaves and then trying to get rid of them by washing them down with water. Anyway, that plus the very …

Reflections on coloured pens and dull meetings

Sunday Blog 128 – 24th March 2024 While I usually date my advocacy career as beginning with my daughter’s birth, in truth, I have always quite enjoyed sharing my opinions. I enjoy puzzling apart systems, how they work and what the puppet strings might be that are putting on the show we live with day …

Seeing sepia in colour

Sunday Blog 120 – 28 January 2024 Old photo albums marinade us in the difficult truth that everything passes. A picture from the late 1920s of my mother as a toddler, smiling in front of the rose garden her father created from the heat and dust in the small town of Winchester in mid-west Western …