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 […]
Dear Libbie, It’s now a few weeks since you turned five and having spent the day together I decided that I’d better revisit the letter on your birthday tradition! So what more can I offer after this from your third birthday and this from your fourth! The big change in the last year is that […]
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 […]
Today is World Mental Health Day 2014. As ever I’m a little uncertain and sceptical about the actual impact of awareness raising days, but genuinely believe we’ve a long way to go before discussing mental health is truly easy and accepted in society, so thought I’d add my two pennies worth. Today I’m feeling prickly. […]
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 […]
Short post from me today because it’s Day 2 of #JSWEC, the morning after Social Care Curry and I’ve a workshop to run later today and I’m selling VivaCards, so lots and lots of reasons why this can’t be a long or detailed post. I offer that context to also point out that this is […]
The first award I ever won was a Tiny Tots Judo Award. I was six, very cute, two little plaits, white judo suit, quite shy (believe it or not) but put me in a judo ring and I became alive. Here I could fight with the boys and it was ok (there was only one other […]
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 […]