Ruth Writes

A room of one’s own

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  • Living without applause

    I caught some of the proms the other night. There was a glaring absence however. The diminished orchestra was there. The animated conductor was there. But the audience was not.

  • Finding The Lost Things

    It’s possibly a self-fulfilling prophesy, but my latest book The Lost Things is threatening to disappear into oblivion. Call it my inept marketing or people’s suspicion of that condemning word ‘subscription’, but this book is flapping round like a dying fish in the bottom of a boat right now. When I write and publish a…

  • Uncharted territory

    I’ve said this before, but I don’t like going on a journey just for the sake of it. The only mystery tour I’d tolerate is like the one my granny went on years ago which was called ‘the mystery tour to Armagh’.

  • Good surprises

    As a self-declared catastrophist, I am always taken aback when good things happen. There’s a steep hill below my parents’ holiday house in Donegal, my nemesis now, that holds something I’d never heard about in all my forty years. My dad has been seeking out an easy way down for me and others. Turns out…

  • Looking for the opposite.

    Thinking over my numerous blog posts, I’ve discovered the one leading philosophy that runs through most: acknowledging the difficulties we’re experiencing at the present time and looking for the opposite to get us through to the other side.

  • Dig deep!

    What does that mean anyway? What if you search around inside yourself and come up empty?

  • Why do we save things ‘for good’?

    Yesterday, my daughter and I snipped off the masking tape on a box with a label saying it contained her great granny’s china coffee set destined for her when she’s old enough.

  • “Do you think you could very kindly lean against me,’

    cos I keep pulling so hard that I fall over backwards.” I was reminded of that Winnie the Pooh quote when I saw the other mugs on the shelf in my parents’ holiday house. My siblings had different ones, but that one was mine. Now, I can see how apt it was.

  • A storehouse

    Of happiness. Do you have one? This past while, life has been reduced to a bare, lonely existence of limited human interaction bound up with an abnormal level of anxiety. How can we keep trudging through it all? How do we find any richness in the life we’re living? Or are we just surviving. This…

  • If a picture paints a thousand words,

    Then how many words for a hug?