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 – […]

Carry On Up the Zombie Apocalypse

Between Coronavirus hysteria and Special Educational Needs parenting with depression, there seem infinite Grounds For Despair. But for my sense of humour, I might be found dangling from a roof-beam in the garage, swinging like a Smiths back-catalogue metronome in the breeze. I am blessed, however, with a character that seeks to overcome and to […]

Day 21

I am very different since my brain injury. On December 4th 2007, a funny thing happened to me on my way home from work, and I never got home as the person I had been again. I particularly struggle with hormones. It took me 30 years to see that it was puberty that triggered the […]

Poetry is not procrastination

It is, in fact, a well-spent use of time; The house needs to be cleaned, but then, in my Imagination, I’d rather play with Words than wipe the kitchen clean of grime. My son at school (at last, at last!) I drive Through plashing risk of aquaplane in grey Torrential rain, braking on the […]

An Alchemy of Self-Esteem

Achieving a balance in life is more easily said than done, and I have been somewhat hampered in my pursuit of this by several factors, including brain injury-aftermath and the failure, over the last year, by the education system, to provide my son with his legal right thereto. Thankfully, we were approached by a school […]

Red in Tooth and Claw – June 2019

The dogs killed a cat last night. While I was chatting with Allison, and Lilly and Daniel were playing before they left, Pollux rushed off the settee in the living room and shot into the garden. I thought no more of it, since they do this frequently, and I wasn’t unduly worried now that Leo […]