A room of one’s own
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Goldilocks, smiley biscuits and a little red bicycle
My granny died this week, and as I was trying to grab hold of my best memories of her, these were three of the many things that came to mind. Granny never did anything by halves, and before old age caught up with her, she moved through life like an unstoppable five-foot hurricane. She never…
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Perfecting or wrecking?
There’s a hilarious Father Ted episode where he tries to undo a small dent in a borrowed car, and ends up completely hammering it beyond all recognition. Tap tap tap, just a wee bit more here, a wee bit more there, and it turns into a write-off. I think I found it funny because I…
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The opposite of the emperor’s clothes…
Terrible title, I know, but I’m waiting to come across a better way of putting it. My reasons for it – the emperor thought he had everything, when he had nothing, sometimes I think the reverse about myself. Recently, I’ve had a growing realisation that maybe my frequent hankering after unfulfilled aspirations and possible plans…
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In my papa’s chair
children wondering why papa cannot Or will not play; His heart joins them While his body cannot respond Those are the lines of a poem that my grandfather wrote towards the end of his life. Out of a whole book of poetry, I have always remembered those particular words – mainly because they gave me…
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Ships that pass in the night
“We’re like ships that pass in the night!” I quipped to my neighbour as we lugged our children out of the car and into our prospective houses. But it got me thinking: how many encounters do I have every day that are like that, and how many of those are in any way significant? I…
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The taco’s getting cold.
Which means: stand up, turn the oven on again and put the taco back in, because I don’t have the energy to do it myself, but really don’t want to be accused of nagging. Under some self-scrutiny, it seems that, most of the time, there is an unspoken current of discourse running through my life. …
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Reach for the sky.
What does that mean in non-cowboy terms? In this age of dream-catching, maybe it’s better to say ‘reach for the stars’… In any case, what I mean is that I want to take a risk, put myself out there and see if I can make one of my dreams a reality. That dream is to…
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Disability, or defeat.
Something has happened to me over the past few months. I seem to have gone from living in denial about having MS, to letting it cloud everything that I do. I remember distinctly the day I was told I had it. I stood at the front door about to put the key in the lock,…
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Coming to terms with mortality
Reading a superficial article the other day, I came across a surprisingly th0ught-provoking comment. It was an interview with Julieanne Moore, and in it she claimed the reason that she was so at ease with getting older was because she had accepted that one day she was going to die. I find that comment nigh…
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Leave no trace.
I’m a terrible one for prematurely tidying away things. Sadly ‘tidying away’ can often mean throwing out. There have been times when I’ve been practically head-first in the recycle bin retrieving something I just realised was actually important. The worst one by far was my ill-judged decision to wipe out the entire written record of…
