Who was Thomas Rawnsley?

This blog post was originally shared as a twitter thread here. I’ve duplicated it here for ease of anyone reading other posts on my blog and to ensure who Thomas was is captured somewhere other than twitter. I’ve also edited some of the tenses given this was written after Thomas’s inquest had concluded. Gather round, […]

Making a difference #GettingToKnowGaia #GaiasGuide

Today we reach Day 12, and the last in this series of posts that mark the time that Gaia was missing in 2017. I sincerely hope that through these posts you have developed some understanding of who Gaia was, if like me you never had the chance to meet her, or that they’ve reminded you […]

Hated injustice #GettingToKnowGaia

This is the penultimate post in the #GettingToKnowGaia series. Another characteristic, personality trait if you like, that everyone was unanimous about was that Gaia hated injustice. She didn’t just hate it, but she had to speak out about it. Kim recalled on Day 6 how Gaia was sensitive and caring, maternal towards her friends and […]

Artistic and musical #GettingToKnowGaia

There are only a couple more blog posts to come in the Getting To Know Gaia series, and I hope you’re all feeling like you know Gaia a little. This is a short one. I was discussing childhood with Maya, Gaia’s twin, and she told me that Gaia loved watching documentaries and loved biology at […]

Mischievous #GettingToKnowGaia

One of the questions I asked of everyone was ‘What was Gaia like as a child’. Some of the memories people had have been incorporated into earlier posts and shared, such as Kim and Talia mentioning the magnetism of the twin roly-poly games in their parents’ lounge, but this post speaks to how Gaia and […]

Epilepsy and spirituality #GettingToKnowGaia

This isn’t a personality trait or characteristic but was a significant part of Gaia’s life and one that I felt should be covered in some way. Gaia’s mum described how her epilepsy came on over time when she was a teenager. She felt it was linked to stress and pressure. She describes how Gaia’s first […]

Loyal #GettingToKnowGaia

This is going to be a short post today, with just one example. Gaia has so far been variously described as caring and maternal, good at building trust in people, warm and loving and not afraid to show it. There were several examples given of Gaia’s loyalty, to her sisters, other family members, her friends. […]

Sensitive and caring #GettingToKnowGaia

I’m conscious that we’re getting to a point where there is a lot of overlap between some of these aspects of Gaia’s personality that I’m sharing. I’m not going to apologise for that, I think it’s an inherent consequence of trying to describe someone based around individual aspects of their personality, when in reality we […]

Loving #GettingToKnowGaia

Yesterday I focused on how Gaia had this inner core sense of self and was uninhibited in her approach to life, unsurprisingly this spilled across all areas of her life. Clara, her elder sister, described how loving Gaia was. She described a loved one being in a bad place and how Gaia responded: ‘The last […]

Uninhibited and confident #GettingToKnowGaia

This is a hard one to capture, it was more of a composite sense that emerged from conversations, rather than something that anyone specifically named as a personality trait. It also overlaps with other characteristics highlighted on earlier and later days. On Day 1 we shared how Gaia was ‘unfiltered’ and I think this is […]