‘Beauty Queen’ – 2023. Watercolour pencil, paper, chicken wire.

The invisible children

Let’s talk about the Blind Side and the Invisible Children; about another way in which regimes slide into place out of seemingly good intentions. Imagine that there was a school for children with special educational needs, which you can be assured will teach your children. There are so many of these schools across the country […]

ad infinitum

The “love of my life” has left, and I see He was a misfit, just the same as me. My question, though, is this: why did I hold That mask on for so long? I’d like to point and blame and scream and shout, And kick my parents’ teeth out of their heads: How dare […]

A Portion of Perspective

They are in the car park of the local gym, and what starts as banter veers into a lecture, it seems. What started out as a light-hearted jibe about vegan custard descended into a polemic about meal-planning and a perceived disorganisation on my part. Some euphoric ramblings about hashish make it clear that we are […]

Social climbing in the subconscious

Now Wash Your Hands

It is April 8th. I’ve been feeling slightly rough for about a week now – slightly sore throat, the impression that there is phlegm about to burgeon on my epiglottis, tired and, frankly, about to have a breakdown . But this is also quite possibly due to where I am in my menstrual cycle. I […]

COVID-19; But Seriously…

This is ridiculous; I feel I don’t want to leave the house, and it isn’t because I might catch germs. It’s the hysteria that has been created in the mismanagement of safety measures during the Coronavirus pandemic. I don’t want to hear the figures being attributed to Covid-19 being, as they are, over-exaggerated. Since when […]

Woman as Commodity

Woman as object or possession; this has always been the case. Why haven’t women learned to defend themselves? Perhaps I seem flippant; facetious even. But, over the decades of my life, I have had a pretty comprehensive view of men’s and women’s peccadilloes. Just over four years ago, I ended a peculiar relationship with an […]

Depression in an Electronic Age

Advances in technology enable us to connect with people all over the world in seconds. Increasing facets of our identities reside in the online realm, packaged and edited and floating on the aether. Are these merely fake phenotypes, or do these elements of who we are serve any beneficial purpose in a world in which […]

Lockdown Awakening

Ever since my brain injury at the end of 2007, I haven’t known where hormones end and depression begins and, to be honest, when I look back, I realise that I have never known: puberty, when I was 13, kicked off a great deal of difficulties for me about living in my own skin – […]