With both hands. Last week I was struggling to stand up and get things done. When my two washed and dried the dishes, when my other half did countless tasks for me, I was overcome with a feeling of being cared for.

It was one hundred and three, or if someone got in his way, one hundred and six steps down to the shore. He always took his time – a deliberate setting of one battered DM shoe in front of the other. The way was mostly hazard-free, the path was a gentle, paved slope and then…

In my last book, The Lost Things, one of my characters uses the ideology of the hundredth sheep to inform her attitude towards every individual that crosses her path. In the New Testament parable, the shepherd leaves his other 99 sheep to search for the lost one. It’s the idea that each person is worth…

The only thing he had done wrong was want back what was his anyway. Mrs B had thought she’d put it out of reach, on top of a cupboard at least twice his height. But as he watched her, his face wet with hot tears, he noticed the wobble. They all sat cross-legged on scratchy…

Your bad experiences stop you from trying again.

When I say the word ‘hope’ to you, what image comes to mind? Light at the end of a dark tunnel? Green shoots pushing through dark soil? An outstretched hand?

Usually when people use the #nofilterneeded it’s because the picture is perfect without any enhancement.

This past year has been a time of learning new skills, getting used to staring at a screen or looking down a camera lens. It has felt like launching our talks, prayers, thoughts, even ourselves, into an empty void.

A boost. Most days I feel like Mr Smallwood in Bleak House who tells his daughter repeatedly, ‘shake me up Judy’. Most days it seems that my energy connection has been pulled out. Most days I need back-up.

I’m reading Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library at the minute and there’s one phrase that has stuck with me: the main character always holds onto or returns to her ‘root self’.