The Word usually arrives around 4am in that deep soft grey area between sleep and sheer wide awakeness.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Never was advice passed down from generation to generation so gleefully and in full knowledge that it was a lie. Sticks and stones leave bruises but they fade in time taking the memory of the pain with them. Words do nothing of the sort. They stay

In my case they do so in those early hours of the morning. Too early to get up and start the day full of the piety of the dawn riser, but usually too late to get more than an hour or so of decent sleep. So I wake, I plump the pillow, check the dog is still snoring gently and aim sleepwards. On occasion I am blessed with a wish granted. But more often than not I find myself unwillingly climbing the ladder from dreamworld to wide awake. It is at this point that The Word arrives.

The Word is usually ominous, or at least appears so to me. I spoke in a previous essay about my fear of the word pulchritude which invaded my thoughts one morning. I was convinced it foretold great impending disaster. In fact it means “beautiful” I know because at 4am I got out my phone and looked up its meaning.

Subsequent words have been more familiar, but no less frightening. Ascites, the accumulation of fluid in the peritoneal cavity associated with various unpleasant diseases. I know precisely where that word came from in my memory and it is not one that most of us would welcome at any time of the day, let alone those lonely early hours.

Crepuscula was a recent one. I know it refers to twilight, but it sounds faintly medical and not in a pleasant way.

Words are merely sounds. We give them meaning so that we can communicate with each other. But we also give them our own meanings. Either unintentionally (as I did with pulchritude) or perversely as I did with crepuscula.

It is not the word that carries dread it is the sound that the word makes. So it’s not that the words of others hurt us (though indeed they can and do). We hurt ourselves with our own interpretation of the sounds that we hear.

So I lie there and tell myself it is only a word. I repeat it over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes just a sound. But still it lingers. As if it knows something I don’t.

.As he left the tattoo shop Mick wanted to run down the street showing off the majestic cheetah on his back.

“Look at me! Look what I am!”

But of course it was covered with a dressing and was far from majestic. Right now his back was red, speckled with dots of ink that had yet to settle and melt into the power of the big cat that would soon race across his back. So he walked slowly and carefully as if a sudden movement might startle the cat he carried.

Gradually the skin healed and the cat grew in stature. It became more lithe and supple with every step he took.

Mick knew that the tattoo was permanent, that it was part of his body until his body was no more. But what he had not anticipated was how it would grow inside him. Not just a mark on his skin but a mark on his soul. It moved around his body with each beat of his heart. The thud of giant paws on hard ground were mirrored in his chest. After a while he could no longer distinguish one from the other. His blood spread the cat through his veins with every beat. He itched to chase his prey.

His posture began to change, he became both taller and closer to the ground at the same time. His gait became looser and he swayed slightly as he moved. And then he began to run

I did everything I was told to do. But it didn’t work.

I took it seriously. Every year I reflected, set goals, made plans. I followed the systems, tried different approaches, adjusted, refined. And still, by February at the latest, I had fallen off track.

It took me 62 years to realise why. The problem wasn’t my discipline. It was the goals.

I have read so many personal development books, life planner programmes, listened to tapes, then CDs and finally podcasts by coaches and inspirational speakers. Fired up with enthusiasm I followed their systems. I set achievable, measurable goals. I set wild outlandish goals. I set goals for all areas of my life. I focussed each year on a different aspect of my life. I wrote letters to my future self. I wrote letters to my past self. There was very little consistency in the huge array of life enhancing programmes out there.

Each year I tried something new and as a lover of structure and organisation I duly organised my life around whatever flavour programme I had picked for that year. Way back in the eighties (yes I still have several Filofaxes) I was a huge fan of the Time Manager system. Unfortunately it was indeed huge. A vast unwieldy ring binder that combined planning with a physical workout. But I loved it, and still have sufficient fondness for it that I am occasionally tempted by the vintage sets that pop up on Ebay every now and then. I went through a slightly cutesy phase where I used different coloured pens for different areas of my life although I drew the line at stickers and washi tape. I even created and sold my own planner for a few years. It was a whopping great A4 beast that covered everything, it vyed with the Time Manager for heaviest planner on the planet!

But neither the goal setting nor the planners led me up the path to goal achievement and success. It was not the fault of the systems or the planners, or even me. I was doomed to fail the moment I let the ink dry on the goals. The goals were the issue. It didn’t matter how I got to them, wild imaginings, meditation or practical step by step methodology. I didn’t want them. They were the goals I thought I ought to have. They were the goals that I thought society would find acceptable. Laughably one that I distinctly remember was around getting fit and involved joining the local tennis club. I have no idea where that came from. I haven’t played tennis since I left university, (although I did play competitive squash until my thirties – why didn’t I join a squash club?) I had three young children, a part-time job I disliked and a freelance career I liked even less. Quite why I thought adding a sport I had little inclination for into the mix is quite beyond me. Unsurprisingly I did not play tennis that year.

My career goals were for a career that I didn’t enjoy. Without a desire to succeed goal setting is futile. Heck, I struggled to generate enough enthusiasm to even seek out new clients let alone sell my skills to them. So year after year I failed and year after year I told myself how much of a failure I was.

I do not recommend a life changing event as a means to chuck out the rubbish goals, but it certainly does make you rethink your priorities. Stuart’s death left me rocking over the edge of a precipice in pretty much every area of my life from the emotional to the financial. For quite a long time I protected myself with numbness. In practice that meant I did very little other than what was required on a day to day basis. I made no plans for the future, in fact I actively avoided thinking about the future at all. Gradually that void gave me space to think outside the claustrophobic box in which I had been living for almost a decade. I started to realise that I could do whatever I wanted. There were no rules or boundaries. My life choices were entirely up to me. I experimented in my head with all sorts of goals and dreams. In that safe space anything was possible and slowly I allowed myself to make decisions in real life.

I closed a business that was starting to get me down, I was stressed, overworked and no longer sure what success would look like. That was the moment when I really felt free. A lot of people were shocked but the moment I made the decision I genuinely felt the weight lift and I knew it was the right one. I no longer woke up each morning already exhausted by the list of jobs I had to do before I had even got out of bed. I wasn’t terrified by the daunting prospect of having to take on staff without the guarantee of an increased income to pay for them. Instead I felt lighter and happier and enthusiastic about the possibility of a future doing what I really wanted to do.

Write

I couldn’t stop writing. I was writing over a thousand words a day. It was quantity over quality. But you can’t edit, prune and perfect something that doesn’t exist. I created a new workspace and looked forward to sitting at my desk each day. I still do. As I write this I look around and pinch myself, this is my space and I love it.

I took my writing seriously and made my goals for the year feed my overarching goal to write a bestselling memoir. Suddenly I wanted to do the work, to meet my goals because I chose them for me not because I thought they were sensible, appropriate, right or any other reason that is external to my desires.

So here I am at the end of March. I am on track, much of what happens next is slightly more outwith my control. I can write the book and I can research and choose the agents I send it to, but whether they think I am worthy or not is up to them all I can do is send the best I am and the best I can do. And for the first time I am learning and practicing at being the best I can be at something I actually love to do. I want to get up and work each day. I relish the time I spend at my desk. My desk, with my things that make me happy in my study with my fairy lights and scented candles. My freshly sharpened pencils and my year plan with my goals that finally I am starting to achieve.

In the middle of the dance the music stopped for her. For everyone else it seemed to play on. They skipped and spun, twisted and twirled. But for her there was silence. She stopped, unsure. She could hear nothing. The utter sound vacuum hurt her ears.

Nobody noticed her, she was as still as the room was silent and though the dancers around her became more wild they did not touch her. They skimmed so close she could have heard their heartbeats had there been sound to hear. But not once did she feel the touch of even a wisp of silk or the tip of a feather trim.

The silence grew louder, her body began to spin involuntarily, moving in time with the silence. Faster and faster she spun, flinging her arms out to embrace the noise of the silence. She lifted one leg and wrapped it effortlessly around her other. She raised both her arms high above her head and like a pencil in a sharpener she spun until she was sharper and sharper and smaller and smaller and eventually there was nothing left of her and the noise of the silence ended.

In the corner of my sitting room is a bookcase that has travelled from Glasgow to Ardgay and finally down to Durham. On the top there is a small collection of photographs, Stuart in his waders at the end of a day’s fishing carrying a sleeping child back to the car. My father and stepmother in their finery at a Christmas party. That same child a few years older grinning from ear to ear next to a pony and a family photo of all five of us curled up on the sofa at the end of the day of our twins’ christening. Snapshots of generations, snapshots of ordinary lives.

But that bookcase holds a collection of books that is less ordinary. Over a hundred books plus magazines and pamphlets, my own essays, plant monographs and dissertations on herbology, plant identification, the history of herbal medicine, spirituality and plant medicine and more. They are what is left of my plan to train as a clinical herbalist. Plan is perhaps rather generous. Like much of my life, planning played very little part. I discovered something, I enjoyed it, I pursued it.

I cannot pinpoint a moment when plants as medicine wafted across my horizon. Stuart and I loved food, we loved to cook and we loved to experiment. Foraging followed naturally from that and as we sought to expand our knowledge beyond the chanterelle mushrooms and bilberries around our Highland home I began to expand a little further from food to medicine.

I started slowly, a few books, a workshop here and there. Then a two week course, then a six month course. All the while I was looking at my garden and the hedgerows that surrounded it with wider eyes. Holidays offered the opportunity to discover new plants and traditions and the bookcase became heavier. Eventually I realised that other than personal practice the only way to go now was to train to become a clinical herbalist if I wanted to dig deeper. So I began the first of a four year course, and then covid struck.

Covid gave me perspective. I didn’t want to be a clinician, I just wanted to learn more. I pulled out of the course. For a while I stepped back completely but gradually I have returned, picking up a book here, making a tincture there, foraging for fresh leaves for teas. I found the balance I needed. I didn’t need to throw myself headfirst, wanting more and more knowledge.

I have kept the books. They are mainly text books but I am sure I don’t need them all. That I keep them is strange. I have no hoarder instinct.

In my kitchen drawer is a large wooden handled knife. It was a present from a friend of Stuart’s. It no longer cuts well and though I have tried various sharpeners it has lost the edge it once had. I cannot bring myself to get rid of it. When we got together Stuart’s friend became our friend, he is godfather to our first child. In our Glasgow years and early years in Durham we spent hours in each other’s company and he was a regular guest at our table. Often with little warning but always with an excellent bottle of wine or a delicacy for starter or pudding. And then silence.

There was no drama, I just suddenly realised I had not heard from him for a while and the address and phone number I had for him were no longer valid. By chance several years later a colleague mentioned she worked with him and gave me his secretary’s phone number. I rang and left a message but he never returned my call.

I do not know what happened, if we did or said something to upset him or if he decided that we no longer fitted in his life. I sent him his goddaughter’s email address in case he ever wanted to make contact with her and assured him I would not contact him again.

I broke that promise in July last year when Stuart died. They had been such close friends I thought he would want to know. I had no address and he was no longer at his previous job. I used a people tracker agency to send him a letter. About five days later the agency told me they had forwarded the letter to his address and the same day a bouquet arrived but the card was blank. I contacted the florist but they told me the sender did not want to reveal their name. I cannot be sure it was him, but I cannot think of anyone else it could have been.

That bouquet almost tipped me over the edge. In the midst of grief all the questions about why he had walked away from our friendship so decisively came flooding back and this time poisoned with anger. How dare he send an anonymous bouquet. The bouquet was not about me it was about him. He was saying, yeah I got the news, I’m sorry but I’m going to stay mysterious.

I’ve kept the books, I’ve kept the knife. I’ve even kept the blank card. I genuinely don’t know why. It would be easy to say that I keep them because they are a connection to Stuart, but that is not the case. I have far more precious reminders of him. It’s possible I keep them because they are a reminder of messy endings but that too is trite and doesn’t reach the heart of the matter.

Being human is not about being happy all the time. We keep mementoes not just to remind us of happy times but of sad ones, painful ones, ones that hurt and even ones of which we are deeply ashamed. One lesson I learned in the early days of grief was that pain helped. It roughed up the numbness. It brought up emotions that allowed me to cry and scream, both of which definitely help. And in the really dark moments when I struggled to make it through the next hour let alone the next day it reminded me that if I could feel pain then there must be something at the other end of the spectrum that was worth hanging on for.

The knife is still in the drawer. I keep it there, as a reminder.

“I’ve been walking, walking these shores all my days, but with you by my side I am walking on the waves.”

Those words were written Robert Robertson and Angus McPhail when they were both in the band Skipinnish. I just about managed to type them, but though it was once one of my favourite songs and I know all the words, I cannot bring myself to listen to it, let alone to sing along.

I have a funeral plan tucked away with my will. There is no obligation for my family to follow my wishes. But I hope it will make the onerous task of planning a funeral and trying to work out what I would have wanted, just a little easier. Only a few weeks before his own unexpected death I asked Stuart if he wanted to put some ideas down for his own funeral. He was firm in his answer. No.

I was somewhat taken aback. In retrospect I should not have been so surprised. He had been expecting death from the day he turned 60. He veered between facing it head on, displaying a lack of self-care so strong it was almost as if he was tempting death to come even earlier and shutting his eyes. That day was one of the latter. If he didn’t acknowledge death then it didn’t exist. I would curse him in those late July days when we sought out the perfect components for the funeral that would declare our love and his extraordinary life and death.

It would be wrong to say that Walking on the Waves was our favourite Skipinnish song. They all were, it just depended on the moment. However, the lyrics invoke the belief that love can transform the ordinary, or even the awful, that with the right person beside you, you don’t just survive, you are walking on the waves. Yet towards the end of the song there is a reminder that nothing lasts forever, it is a “game of sweet surrender” . There will be one person left only with memories.

How could we not let Stuart leave the church to the song that we not only both loved but summed up everything that was good, and not so good about what had brought us there in the first place? As we walked out I instinctively sung along for the last time, several Scottish feet tapped to the beat.

And so a piece of music once that uplifted me and gave me hope for the future took my hope away. It was an intentional sacrifice. I knew once I gave it to Stuart I could never have it back. Maybe one day I will be able to listen to it again, but I will never stand at the front squashed up against the stage and sing along as if my life depended on it.

Why do we intentionally deprive or hurt ourselves? Is it out of love or is there something less altruistic going on? I cannot speak for anyone else but in my case it felt like love at the time. I wanted to give Stuart at his funeral everything I felt guilty about not giving him in life. And there is the answer guilt.

Guilt took the lead role in my grief. It came in several flavours but the overwhelming one was why had I not been kinder. The night before he died I wrote in my diary that if there was one thing I could do to rebuild our marriage it was to put aside the anger and resentment that years of living with addiction had fuelled. I could accept that we had a new start and I could be kinder.

When we use the word addict most people imagine somebody shooting up in a back alley or swigging from the bottle when the rest of us are pouring a morning coffee. But that is oversimplified in the extreme. You probably know at least one or two addicts, you just don’t know you do. They and their family may not even realise it is addiction, at least not yet. However, they will be familiar with the tension, the anxiety, the remorse and the gradual resentment and anger they build up as their normal life begins to crack and crumble around them. Meanwhile the outside world looks on oblivious.

It is hard to be kind when you are fuelled by resentment towards the person who is pulling the house down. I criticised Stuart, I tried to control him and his addiction, I made empty threats and I said things that I knew would hurt because he had hurt me and I needed him to know what hurt felt like. All massively counter-productive but nonetheless a common response.

I made a decision to actively change. To recognise the role I had played in our mutual downward spiral and to behave differently. I resolved to acknowledge the work and effort Stuart had put into turning his life around and his determination to work equally hard in rebuilding ours together. I resolved to stop automatically criticising him and instead to consider whether his way was at least as good as if not better than mine. I resolved to tell him what I was going to do and to ask him to kindly remind me when I slipped up. I didn’t get that chance so I threw myself into loving him even more now that he was dead.

Obviously that love was entirely lost on Stuart. And it wasn’t really loving him more it was assuaging my guilt in many different ways. One of which was to give up a piece of music that had been ours and give it over entirely to him. Pouring love into a dead person who cannot receive it, let alone absolve you of the guilt you feel is perhaps a fools errand in terms of the obvious goal of showing love. But it serves a purpose in working through that guilt yourself.

The pain of losing a piece of music that meant so much to us together was emotional self-harm. Martyrdom if you like, look what I have given up for you. As a lifestyle choice it is not to be recommended under any circumstances. However as a single act to help release the unresolved emotion that arose from never being able to share with Stuart what I wanted to do for him and for us it was, and remains, perfect.

Occasionally I hear the music. I turn it off, but it is enough to make me sad. Sadness is not a bad thing so long as you can move away from it when you are ready to. Sometimes I can, sometimes I am less successful and it takes several goes. I still need that sadness, perhaps to prove to myself that I really did love him, but I think it is more to prove to myself that I never stopped loving him. Now, bit by bit, the man I married is coming back to me. The man he became when he was in the throes of anxiety and addiction is fading, and rightly so. However, that hurts more because now I can remember more clearly what I lost.

I have been writing non-fiction solidly for seven months and it is time for a change. In between editing and planning my next book I am experimenting with fiction. Some complete, some like this, opening scenes for something that might happen but might not. Every word written is practice, every sentence honed down is experience and both are vital

In the exposing of secrets there is only a revelation if its exposure is shared to the world.

Rebecca had never understood her mother and she thought the misunderstanding was mutual. She had been a woman of many layers some paper thin, others heavy and solid. They were vast enough in number to create a solid suit of armour between her and the outside world. Rebecca felt very much in the outside world

Millions of dusty fireballs danced through the dusty dawn light above her mother’s desk. The desk, a beautiful Georgian Davenport with deep green leather inset, had sat in the alcove between the drawing room and the snug for as long as Rebecca could remember. What she couldn’t remember was ever seeing her mother use the desk. She could not picture her sitting down, lifting the lid, taking something out and starting to write. She squinted in the orange dawn light and tried to force her imagination to create the scene. Her imagination failed to oblige.

Davina had preferred the big flat desk in her study where she was surrounded by books and she could look out over the pocket handkerchief London garden The image of her shifting papers, shoes kicked off and spinning from her desk to her filing cabinet on her ancient office chair sprung instantly to Rebecca’s mind.

Yet this desk, although rarely if ever used, was not empty. Rebecca poked around under the lid. A few receipts and a manual for a long forgotten hair dryer. Some postcards, a couple from her grandparents from Cyprus way back in the seventies extolling the virtues of their hotel and the extensive buffet. Plenty of old pencils and biros, the lack of bin near the desk was evidenced by the curled slivers of pencil sharpened directly into the desk. She obviously did use it occasionally thought Rebecca as she dug further through the layers of Davina’s life.

A red leather box, scuffed and stained by close proximity to a leaky biro. Rebecca knew what that was. The saviour of lost buttons and, she recalled with a smile, a rip in her beloved sari silk skirt that Rebecca “absolutely had to wear right now”. She pulled out the sewing box and opened it, careful not to tear the thin leather. Hooks and eyes, poppers, knicker elastic. Did anyone use them anymore? Various dangerous looking implements with hooks and menacingly sharp points and a few receipts from Woolworths.

She closed the lid and as she did so the red satin lining fell away slightly. Tucked behind it was a piece of folded yellowing paper. Using one of the sharp pointy things she had found in the box she teased it out and laid it flat on the desk.

It was a marriage certificate.

8 March 1964 Central Registry Office Pollokshields

James Richard Robertson bachelor lawyer date of birth 15 April 1934

Father Richard David Robertson university professor deceased

Davina Rachel Paton spinster author date of birth 23 May 1938

Father Charles Henry Paton medical doctor deceased

Witnessed by Maria Charlotte Helvin Jeremy Philip Patterson

Registrar

Sarah Helen Baxter

Who the hell was James Robertson?

The most important moments in life are rarely heralded with dramatic music swelling in the background. In fact most of the important moments in my life occurred when I was least expecting them and without drama. The proposal from my husband (actually I think he surprised even himself), the Friday afternoon I was fired from a job I hated, the day I started a business over a slightly tipsy phone call.

However, unexpected and unheralded as those moments were, they were significant at the time. The moments that fascinate me are the ones that pass us by without notice. The seemingly inconsequential nod of a head, the slight hesitation, the inexplicable decision to stay when leaving would have been easier. The moments that we don’t notice until later when we realise that is when something shifted.

Often these moments are cumulative. One small shift or adaptation to accommodate a change in circumstance is followed by another and another until without realising, one’s life has changed irrevocably, and not always for the better.

In my life this was how I became a carer. How I found myself on suicide watch within my marriage. There was no single moment that marked the shift from couple to watcher and watched. It was the flow of everyday life that slipped a little more each day until it was as if the river had reversed its course.

These are the grey areas. Grey covers a huge range from off white to almost black. Most colours have names for different shades, turquoise to navy blue, crimson to coral. But the word grey has to cover the entire spectrum. Which is perhaps apt when you think about the grey areas in life. Most of our lives are in the grey. No dramatic headlines, no grand gestures, just the quiet internal spaces where we actually live the dull stuff that is everyday life.

But that doesn’t make those spaces less important. In fact I would argue that their very nature makes them far more powerful than the big splash. For every star on the silver screen there is an unseen army that put them there and keeps them in the spotlight. The power rests with them.

The risk is that we fail to give credit to the unseen army of moments that have led us to where we are now and instead concentrate on the big splashes. To go back to my opening paragraph. Those three moments were entirely unexpected and each changed my life. But I didn’t get to those moments without hundreds of little choices, most of which I didn’t notice at the time and certainly cannot remember now.

Most of those choices were probably made in uncertainty. They were too small to consider seriously so they slipped into that grey area where clarity is lacking and instinct rules.

Writing about the everyday matters because we don’t live on the stage we mostly live in the wings and if we focus on the stage we miss the story. By the time we recognise the significance of the decisions we made in the grey those decisions have already shaped who we are and where we are going.

It would be easy to say “learn to love the ambiguity”. To pretend that the grey is a friend. But it is not. It is there to feed the itch that we cannot quite reach to scratch. It is there to wake us in the night. It lives in our regrets and our shame, the things we wished we had done and those wished most fervently we had not.

Is that bad? Well it certainly doesn’t make life easy. But if life were easy would it be interesting? Would it even be fun? On the face of it I cannot imagine anyone wanting my life. Yet even the darkest moments have had something to offer whether I wanted it or not

I first cast a salmon rod on the Conon on an early August evening over 30 years ago. The summer sun was still warm and it sparkled on the water. The timesharers on the other bank had long gone and were no doubt tucking into dinner at Contin House or Coul House, both popular with the fishers. Stuart, me and George the ghillie on Upper Fairburn and my first casting tutor, had the river to ourselves.

It was a long time ago and my memories are already fading. If Stuart were still here I am sure his memories would be different to mine and together we could build a bigger picture of the evening. But there is now only me and I have to build that picture with only my memories.

I was wearing an old pair of Stuart’s waders and they leaked. George and Stuart were adamant that I was imagining it. I was not, and when we finally put our rods away and retired to the hut for a dram I proved it by dripping all over the cushions on the soggy old sofa.

George was patient and Stuart wise enough to let somebody else teach his future wife how and where to place the fly on the water. Gradually I learned the rhythm, step and cast, step and cast and I walked slowly down the pools of the beat. Until then my experience of fishing was dropping a line over the side of small boat to catch mackerel. There is little art to mackerel fishing and certainly no meditation. I didn’t catch a fish that evening, in fact it would be the following year on the lower beat when I caught my first salmon and had my first entry in Trout and Salmon magazine. Yet the lack of fish whilst frustrating to some, and certainly to me in later years when I was more experienced, could not dim the joy of the meditative movement.

Or did it? I am not sure whether I am remembering or inventing. That is certainly where and when I cast my first line and my waders certainly had a hole in them. But I cannot be sure that I fell in love with fishing that evening or if I believe I did. My mind is filling the gaps with memories that make sense in retrospect. I was happy, I was in love. The man I loved had been fishing since he was four years old and wanted to share that passion with me. It was a beautiful and peaceful summer evening on a glorious river. How could I not have loved it? But the nub is that I cannot remember how I felt other than I was deliriously happy.

Does it matter? There are places where filling in the gaps of your memory is not acceptable, a court of law being the most obvious. But what about biography and memoir? Is it okay to presume a memory? Or perhaps the real question revolves around whether memory is fact or fiction in the first place. Even in our own family we have different recollections of the same event. Each of us convinced that we own the correct version.

Memoir perhaps allows greater freedom of interpretation, for a memoir unlike biography is just that, an interpretation of an event or series of events. My take on what happened, how I felt, how I reacted and how I believe the world changed as a result. When you pick up a memoir you are entering into a contract with the author whereby you accept that this may be fallible but it is their memory and therefore a personal view. The author is bravely letting you into their memories, a space that hitherto was only open to them.

Memoir is a place of vulnerability but also a place of great exploration. When I write fiction I start with an idea and see where it takes me, but I know I have a story in mind. When I write memoir I start with a blank page with no idea where it is going to take me. I am as much in the dark as to where we will go as the reader will be, it’s just I get there first.

So to answer the question I posed at the beginning. Does it matter if we fill in the gaps of our memories. Of course not, it is how we make sense of our personal history but I believe it is equally important to know that my memories may be different to yours and it is unlikely that we will ever know if either of us are completely correct in our recollections.

As he watched the steady stream of people walk up the narrow vennel towards the cathedral Robert clenched his cap in his thin hands.

He was not part of the gathering. He was here amongst these people and he moved with them, part of the tidal sea of bodies. But he was as if a paper boat or a small stick floating on the surface, unable to make its own path. Completely at the mercy of the waves swelling beneath it.

He glanced to his left. A young woman stared back at him. She too had an air of separation about her, a non-belonging. For less than a second their eyes locked and then the waves parted them and Robert once again was swept towards the cathedral, away from the woman with the piercing eyes.

At last the crowd slowed as they reached the green. Still moving but closer together becoming one as more bodies rose up behind them. Robert recognised the familiar fear well up from deep in his stomach. Too many people, too many people. He couldn’t breathe. He looked up at the sky, the huge grey expanse and prayed. A lone voice spun across the crowd and as people stilled to listen they moved less. There was space, just a little. He clung onto his hat harder. A hand slipped over his. The woman with the piercing eyes smiled at him and as his heartbeat slowed he smiled back.

Looking at everything in black and white was the revelation that led me to wonder if we could have instead embraced the grey could we have navigated our lives better? But first we had to know what the grey was and therein lay the big question.

Perhaps the grey was our love that was incrementally crushed by our fear of the future and our hatred of the present. The grey that was the void between what we knew and what we could not ever comprehend. The void between what made us safe but unhappy and the possibility of happiness that was intrinsically linked to fear.

Living in the grey is more than stepping outside the comfort zone it is looking out towards the edges of what lies outside and beyond the comfort zone and saying “that is the beginning of where I want to be”.

Living in the grey is accepting the tears, the dirt, the vomit and the pain and saying this is the route to something I cannot comprehend. The route to a dimension I cannot begin to describe for it defies description within the terms I understand. Yet it is an experience that will allow me to recreate those terms and bend them and form them into something new and indescribable.

Living in the grey requires you to be fearless, because in the grey there can be no fear only experience. It is only when you let go of fear that you can benefit from the grey. Until you can do that, living in the grey is a grinding existence that will suck you dry and spit you out. Spit you out not as a seed that will germinate and grow, but as a dried stalk that once held rich fruit and is now worthless

.

A few days ago I woke up with an unpleasant sense of doom hanging over me. Whilst I did have a few issues that were giving me some cause for concern, they were not, of the apocalyptic variety. There was no reason to feel so cautious about the day. There was also a second factor, a word. Specifically the word pulchritude. I had no idea what pulchritude meant, but it sounded bad and the fact that I couldn’t get it out of my head made me even more convinced that the day did not bode well.

It was also about 4am in the morning and the more I tried not to think about the word pulchritude of course the more I did. The more I thought about it the more convinced I became that it was going to be the beginning of a terrible day.

It was clear that there was no likelihood of returning to sleep so I turned on the bedside light and retrieved my phone. The modern encyclopaedia. I entered the word, hit send and closed my eyes. I wasn’t quite ready to find out exactly how awful my day was going to be.

To my surprise pulchritude means beautiful. An archaic word which might explain my unfamiliarity. So if I had banked this as my word for the day, far from a day of doom and gloom, it was instead going to be beautiful. I slid back under the covers, Poppy the Jack Russell curled up against my tummy.

That is the power of words. You don’t even have to know the actual meaning on the word. I gave the word pulchritude a meaning of my own making. I didn’t spell out the meaning in more words, perhaps worse I gave it free rein. I gave it a power over me by not even pinning it down to a specific terrible situation or emotion. I gave it the power to be as terrifying as it could possibly be. By accepting it as an undefined portent of gloom or even disaster I added to my fear and apprehension the terror of the unknown. Not only was the day going to be terrible but I didn’t even know the manner of the terror.

But then I looked the word up. The fear dissipated instantly and I returned to sleep.

We all know that words are often much more powerful than sticks and stones and the bruises they leave can last a lifetime. But it is not just the words of others that can shape us. The words we use ourselves, and in particular the words we use about ourselves are some of the most powerful we have. We should chose them with care and consideration and perhaps make sure we have a good dictionary to hand

I was unsure whether to share this. It’s not my favourite piece of writing. It was born from the writing course I am taking with Beth Kempton. One of the things I have loved most about this particular course is that it is not about how to write but about learning how you write.

When we were at school we were usually given a title and told to go an write a story. Or worse when in detention we were given intentionally odd titles and made to spend Saturday afternoon under the evil eyes of a sixth former who would rather be either revising in the library or in town with her friends. I wrote detention essays entitled “Smiling”, “Christmas Trees” and one on “Photographs”. Though I too would rather have been elsewhere on those Saturday afternoons, those essays were perhaps an early lesson in getting outside my comfort zone and just seeing what happened when I wrote.

This exercise was less about the content, rather it was to encourage us to explore titles. I have great difficulty with titles. They either come to me in an instant or lurk miserably in dark corners, humiliating me with their weakness. I have two books on my writing shelf at the moment. The first, narrative non-fiction was written in six months and the first draft is complete. Its title is a dark corner lurker. I also have a novel, unfinished with a title that was I think ,written before the first word of the manuscript.

So it was no surprise that this exercise was going to hurt. And it did. Here is the short piece. Personally I think I prefer the title to the writing. What about you?

When love was a scarf

Tom is already out the back by the supermarket delivery area puffing on a vanilla vape by the time Mark, still pulling on his jacket squats on an upturned crate next to him.

“Canny good night Saturday” Mark winks at Tom, who blushes back. “Come on mate, she’s gorgeous” He prods his friend gently in the ribs and Tom’s blush deepens a little

An articulated lorry navigates past the two lads and the low winter sun reflects off the windscreen momentarily blinding Tom as he turns to his friend. He grins sheepishly.

“She is isn’t she?”

“My God, do you ...” Mark pauses, he should have seen this coming and though in a split second he knows it will change their relationship forever he is genuinely pleased for his friend. The deafening blast of the reversing warning of the lorry makes conversation impossible. In that moment he sees their friendship, from primary school, comprehensive to work pass, it seems quite slowly, across the screen of the crisp blue sky.

“Well, I’ve not said anything, we’ve only been seeing each other for two weeks, but I just know.” Tom puts his vape away and puts his hands up to his neck as if to adjust his scarf. The scarf is not around his neck but is currently being worn by a young woman the other side of town.

“Tell her”

Tom puts his hand back up to his neck and smiles “I think maybe I already have”

The fire door bursts open, a woman sticks her head through the gap “Come on you two, lunch break over, those shelves won’t stack themselves”

Writing is a lonely business. Or is it?

When I closed my business and announced that I was returning to my love of writing I had some very mixed reactions. Some people were enthusiastic, these were mainly people who had read my work before. They were either pleased to see me return to work that gave me genuine joy, or perhaps a minority, I don’t know, looking forward to reading what I had to say. Some people were kindly but didn’t quite understand what I meant and were surprised when I had finished the first draft of my next book within six months. It was the third group who cautioned me. Writing is a lonely business they told me. Was it wise to lock myself away alone in my rural backwater so close to the death of my husband?

They had a point, my business had got me out and about a great deal. In fact that was part of the problem. I spent most of the summer at music festivals all over the country. It is not quite the free concert tickets that everybody thought it was. It was hard work, I was away for weeks on end living in a van and rarely seeing any of the headline acts. I won’t deny that it was fun, my fellow traders were a wonderful group and I did get to see a few really good acts. However, it is not a job for one person and I was now travelling solo. The one thing I was rather looking forward to giving up was spending six months of the year on the road.

Their concern was however valid. Whilst I did love the relief that came with closing the business and the time it gave me to write and just get up in the morning without the weight of a massive to do list around my neck, I was spending my days on my own.

In the early days of grief I veered between wanting only to be with my own thoughts and panicking that I would never socialise again. Stuart’s illness had meant that our social life had divebombed and unless I made the first step it was clear that I would remain at risk of becoming the lonely old lady who lived up the lane. Six months on I have a more balanced view of my future, but that sense of panic led me to join a local writers’ group, sign up to every local event by the Society of Authors and join the Lit and Phil a fabulous library in Newcastle. It was quite exhilarating to make arrangements to attend events. It was so long since I had been out of the house let alone attend talks or meet new people that I signed up to everything. It was ultimately exhausting.

By the time the new year rolled around I had found a balance and it was not one I was expecting. I wrote best in company and edited best alone. However not all company is the same. I struggled with the writers’ group, rarely producing more than a few pages. Yet a day in the Lit and Phil and I was pouring out the words.

I am writing this on a Tuesday, my Lit and Phil day. I am seated at a long table wide enough for two people plus laptops and associated paraphernalia to sit opposite each other without encroaching on each other’s space. Long enough for a total of thirteen of us to sit along each length. Most of us don’t know each other, although some faces are familiar. Like all good libraries it is quiet but not silent. Those of us working at the tables talk rarely and in whispers, but the main body of the library with tea hatch and the comfy tables and chairs are filled with happy voices and chatter. I cannot hear what they are saying but the general bubble of voices is a beautiful background.

People come and go, some of us stay all day, some only for an hour or so. Come three o’clock some of the chairs will be filled by students in school uniform. Our demographic may be wide but our aims are fairly universal. We are here to work, most of us to write. There is something encouraging about looking around you and seeing other people doing the same as you, some struggling, some succeeding. Pens are picked up and chewed, books piled up and notes taken. Sometimes all of that is put to one side and we actually do some writing.

There is no distraction other than the need for a fresh mug of tea. I cannot tell myself that I need to empty the washing machine. The mere act of getting up tells everyone else that I am no longer working, taking a break. I need that accountability. I am sure that my fellows around this table have no interest whatsoever in the number of times I get a fresh tea, but the fact that they might is enough to keep me in my seat for a little longer and so I write a little more.

The writers’ group is held in a bright modern café, floor to ceiling windows, plenty of space and a slightly more upmarket food offering than the Lit and Phil. The idea is that we meet, chat for a while and then write before catching up again at the end. More recently there has been more chat than write and despite taking out my hearing aids I can still hear the sharp sounds of the voices, they are too close to be a hubbub. I am too easily distracted and struggle to write. Because we are a group of people who know each other we fall into the natural human instinct to socialise. I can’t socialise and write.

When it came to editing, I discovered I needed those breaks that the Lit and Phil denied me. It helped to empty the dishwasher or walk the dog. The act of tidying up the books on the floor of my study gave my mind space to work out a tricky problem. So editing was best done alone at home. My study, once Stuart’s is my sanctuary. He would find the fairy lights unnecessary and the neatness unfamiliar but I think he would appreciate how I have made it mine. He would also, I know, be immensely proud of what I have achieved. He was my greatest fan.

So I don’t think writing is a lonely business at all. By sitting together with pencils or pens or keyboards we become a collective quietly supporting each other in our creations; quietly adding questions and answers to the words of the world.

Light ran after me, but I could run faster.

Light chased me, but I could jump higher.

Light shot arrows of sunbeams at my back, but I dodged like a dancer light of foot.

Then Light stopped.

I turned to see where she was.

She crept up from the East and wrapped her arms of dawn around me.

I don’t often write short stories. I don’t know why because when I do I rather enjoy it. There can be only one story, there is no space for extraneous storylines or red herrings. There is often only one or two characters and I like to have a little twist at the end. I’d love to know what you think of this one.

If you prefer you can hear me reading the story here

It had never occurred to Jennifer that something so simple as a lost shopping list could completely change her life. It should have been in her coat pocket. She distinctly remembered putting it there. She had had to take out a rather scrappy tissue first, she shivered at the thought. She never used tissues, only properly ironed pure cotton handkerchiefs. Rodney must have borrowed her coat.

The supermarket loomed in front of her, all bright lights and bustling people. She paused, unsure what to do next. Go home and look for the list or risk winging it with no list. She heard people tutting as they negotiated round her. Flustered she moved away from the door and into the shop. Decision made she was going to wing it.

Vegetables, she definitely needed vegetables but which ones? She decided to choose by colour, she remembered something about having as many different coloured vegetables as possible for a healthy diet. One shiny plump aubergine with a lovely little green hat for a stalk; bag of lemons, unwaxed; she was going to choose carrots for orange but at the last moment picked a big fat orange pepper with a red one as well just in case; spinach for green and finally some soft creamy mushrooms, bit round portabello ones. Her trolley looking quite cheerful Jennifer moved on to condiments.

She was pretty sure she didn’t need anything from here, but the oils glistened under the bright strip lights and the flavoured vinegars looked intriguing. Who knew you could get fig infused vinegar. It looked thick and syrupy, a bit like that balsamic stuff Susan kept going on about. She popped a long thin bottle in amongst the vegetables and some deep golden garlic olive oil for good measure.

She definitely didn’t need milk but that pot with the gold lid looked interesting. Ah ha, she thought clotted cream. That would be a nice treat for tea, but she would need some proper jam and of course scones to go with it. In went the cream and Jennifer followed her nose to the bakery. Fresh scones, big and fat and full of raisins, she had to steel herself not to eat them there and then. The friendly assistant passed her the bag and Jennifer placed them carefully next to the red and orange peppers.

Jam was a surprise, Jennifer had not noticed before that there were quite so many options. She narrowed it down to raspberry, her and Rodney’s favourite and chose the one with the prettiest label of a bush heavy with fruit .

Her trolley was filling up and Jennifer knew that her list had not been a long one so she probably had everything she needed. She steered her purchases towards the check out. She certainly wasn’t going to use the self-service, she worried they would put the lovely ladies on the tills out of a job. She glanced at the newspapers, full of bad news, she wasn’t interested in them.

Her badge said “Miriam” and Jennifer asked Miriam how her day was as she packed her bag for life with her shopping. Miriam said she had just started on shift and had a long day ahead of her but seeing all the lovely fresh food that Jennifer had bought had really perked her up. Such a lovely change from all the tins and bags of sliced white bread she usually saw. Jennifer puffed up a little at that.

Jennifer carefully placed her bag in the boot of her Micra, wedging it with the plastic box that held the emergency supplies in case of an accident. She didn’t want the bag to fall over. As she sat behind the wheel she noticed a scrap of paper in the passenger footwell. Ah, her missing shopping list, the one Rodney had written before she left. It must have fallen out of her pocket. She read it.

Newspaper

Baked Beans

Pasta sauce (no garlic)

Milk

Bread (sliced white)

Margarine

Oo thought Jennifer I ought to forget the shopping list more often. And with a huge grin she started the car and drove towards home. Dinner was going to be a whole lot more fun this evening, and she thought, tomorrow and the day after too. She noticed a fishmonger she had never seen before and decided it might be fun to pop in later in the week. She had always wanted to try squid.

I am taking a writing course with Beth Kempton. It is not a writing course as most of us would know one. That is good. I am rediscovering the art of writing me, writing that appears on the paper (for I am writing with fountain pen and with pencil) from deep within, bypassing the naysayer editor that is my brain.

The words of this piece are alternating sentences from two very different pieces. The sentences have been spliced together creating something that makes perfect sense to me. To you it might be nonsense, or it might make another perfect sense completely different to mine.

Love is messy and ugly, not just sweet cakes and wine. And I need that fire. Does that make me human? If I am, how am I human? I am sticky and soft with a strong smell of the unknown. What is the point of this unknown, why am I here? Perhaps just because somebody has to light that fire. Perhaps I can explore us, expose us. I push up my sleeves. But even now I am still searching and the animals and I sit together watching the flames and waiting for the warmth.

I have always been told, and taken as gospel that without a goal and a plan on how to reach that goal you will most likely achieve diddly squat. I have spent most of my life as a dreamer rather than a goal setter. I am perhaps proof of that theory. On the other hand dreaming has provided me with hours of pleasure. Dreaming has been a place of refuge and a source of inspiration and ideas none of which goal setting could possibly achieve. Whilst I may have spent the first sixty years of my life modelling myself more on Walter Mitty (without I hope the firing squad ending) than Deborah Meadon I thought perhaps it was time to dip my toe in the goal setting pond.

I started small with the goal of reading 52 books in 2025. I managed 49. I had thought that was quite an achievement until a friend published her total of 73, but I’ll pass swiftly on. Reading is not a game of Top Trumps.

Goodreads provided me with one of those ever popular summaries of my year in books. However, it was a list of questions about what I had read that one of members of our book club handed out for fun that was more interesting.

Best book, The Madness of Grief by Richard Coles. I had read it many years earlier and in the early months of grief it was one to which I returned again and again. Six months on it still piques thoughts and perspectives that I otherwise might have not noticed. Grief is, at least in my experience, a lot about noticing. Therefore having a bigger basket of observations can help shape the grief into something a little less daunting.

Most disappointing: There were a lot to choose from in this category. However the question asked which was the most disappointing not the worst and that did narrow the field. Several books which were less than satisfactory had not surprised me but there was one stand out in the disappointment stakes. Private Rites by Julia Armfield. I hate giving bad reviews so I was pleased to see that others felt quite differently. It promised all I love in a novel, particularly a winter one. Dark, gloomy end of the world background for a take on King Lear. The end of the world was more of a rainy season than the apocalyptic death of the planet. I don’t have to like character to be invested in their future. After all it’s Hans Gruber who makes Die Hard not the nice but unmemorable chap played by Bruce Willis. But I do have to care. I didn’t, not for any of them. I even began to feel sorry for their apparently ghastly but dead father. I imagine he died of exhaustion and with a great sense of relief. It was a whacking great disappointment.

Most surprising. Joint first, the Bees by Laline Paull and Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton. I didn’t expect to enjoy the latter. Were it not that it was a book club choice it would never have landed on my shelves. The former was a present and the premise so strange that it too was an unlikely candidate for the reading pile. Both sort of nature based. One fiction, a thriller based in a beehive. The other memoir of a life shared with wild hares, as in really shared, not just observed across the fields. I found the structure of Raising Hare rather clunky. Huge chunks of the wikipedia of hares amongst tender tales of new life, death and the circling of the years but the story had me gripped. It also left me terrified for the end. I have read Ring of Bright Water. My lips are sealed. Read the book.

The Bees. Who know that life in a hive was such a tightrope. Beautiful and inspired interpretations of real bee behaviour become a tale of cults, corruption, deception and …. well I’m not going to give the end away to this one either.

I started book five of 2026 yesterday evening. Another very different approach the novel. Cuddy by Benjamin Myers. I have read two of his other books. Loved one, didn’t have much time for the other. Cuddy is keeping me on my toes.

Six, even three months ago attending a meeting in this room would have brought me up short. It would be a trigger that would probably have sent me spiralling downwards into an ocean of “why?”, “what if?”, “if only”, “could I"?” Questions to which there are no answers or a million answers. Choosing either option is always the wrong choice, there will be no happy ending.

This time is made me smile. Instead of a trigger I thought of it as a message “hello Darling, it’s good to see you too”. The meeting was at The Caledonian Club, we could have been in any one of a number of rooms. But we were in this one and I am thankful for that. It was almost comforting.

Time changes everything. Sometimes it makes things better, sometimes is doesn’t. Time is not in the market for setting the scene, creating the background, that job is ours. Time changes the lighting, the background music and as any director will tell you get that wrong and however great the actor the audience will miss the point of the story you are trying to tell. The problem of course is that we cannot know what Time is thinking, how it will soften the lighting or sharpen the string section and bring on the timpani. We just have to go with the flow and recreate the scenery as necessary.

The triggers will always be there, that much I do know and like the best drama they will be unexpected and pull me up short. I am building a set where I can feel comfortable and safe. Perhaps it will become boring and I will build a more dramatic open set where the actors create the scenes without props, leaving much more to the imagination. Who knows? I don’t. But I am getting better at set design day by day

.

The moons a balloon, ee cummings. It is always the first thing that comes to my mind. This is not a deep and reflective piece. I don’t feel any complex metaphors coming to mind.

I see the moon and the moon sees me, God bless the moon and God bless me. Those words make me think of Daddy. I don’t even know if it was him who used to recite them to me as I was tucked up in bed. And to be honest I am not sure how often he was at home to tuck me into bed in the first place.

I love the banality of the moon. It isn’t flash, it has no siblings it just is, there in the sky, night in night out shrinking and growing. ee cummings was right, the moon’s a balloon, blowing up and deflating until the end of its time. It belongs only to us, the earth and we are rare in having only one moon so we must be careful not to lose it. There are no spares.

It is monochrome. There are no hidden colours, hidden depths perhaps but it is all shades of white to grey and surrounded by the black night sky. Even the night time birds are monochrome. When did you last see a kingfisher, a yellow hammer or a woodpecker fly across the sky at dusk let alone deep in the night?

This is the time for the ghostly barn owl, the nightjar or the storm petrel. Like the moon in shades of grey they stalk the sky. The time of shadows that are less than themselves but more that you fear in the depths of your heart. Pull the covers over your head and pretend those moon shadows are just tricks of the light not tricksters of the night.