Seven and a half years ago I learnt about a bile duct for the first time; in the days running up to my Dad’s 60th birthday he’d been a bit itchy and had started turning yellow. An amazingly astute GP (with personal experience of what was to come), swift turnaround in our local hospital and […]
Today it’s two years since my Dad died, a marker of sorts, just another day, and an anniversary all at once. I’m never quite sure how to mark anniversaries, does your death day deserve a celebration? In a culture that so readily celebrates birth days, why not death days too? I mused this quite a […]
This weekend was/would have been Dad’s 67th birthday. I mentioned it to a few people on twitter and got a couple messages from people asking how I was and mentioning I’d not blogged lately, when I checked back this post is long overdue. What to share really, well at the risk of stating the obvious, […]
Going to keep this one short, there is enough written about the limitations of fighting metaphors to last a lifetime (however long that is). Susan Sontag wrote Illness as a Metaphor back in 1978, since then many, many others have visited this territory. I was reminded today of Jay Rayners obituary for John Diamond (hat tip to […]
It was five years ago today, yet I remember nearly every bit of it as though it was yesterday. I can recall his name, his walk or rather his strut, his voice and his manner, perhaps one blessing in disguise is that I can’t remember his face. It’s odd that but I often wonder whether […]
Wow, what a day. I pride myself on being quite good with words, they’re my preferred tool, and usually I can sit down, think for a moment and the fingers just start typing and the words come. Not today. Today I can’t find the right words, or rather I can find the words, but not […]
I can’t remember Father’s Day last year, I suspect I dismissed it as a hallmark holiday, a little grumble and moved on. This is my second Father’s Day since Dad died and I’ve been raging all week when I open my inbox!! Lots of really drossy, ill considered, spammy emails…earn extra [insert generic loyalty brand] […]
If you missed it at the weekend an amazing thing happened and Amanda Palmer, musician, connector, gracious lovely person shared my blog post on facebook with her fans, adding a commentary and exploring the point I made in the last post about people choosing to focus on her eyebrows, rather than her talk. I added […]
I watched a TED talk by Amanda Palmer last week, it was doing the rounds on facebook in one of those articles that is guaranteed to put me off! Enough people I respect commented or shared it for my interest to be peaked and I’m really glad I watched it. I would highly recommend the […]
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Life after Bobby: being remembered, where I reflected on Dad’s responses to the question of How would you like to be remembered? and offered some musing of my own. In this post I shared my plans to shave my head, to raise funds and awareness for charity: […]