Sophie enjoyed her trip to China. She went all over Beijing even though the traffic was scary. The road was full of cars and they all seemed to travel at full speed even though they had to push each other away. She didn’t know if she had the nerve to drive in this city but […]
I Want to Walk Again
Walking is basic to everything we do. Walk around the house. Walk from the car. Walk from the kitchen to the dining room balancing plates of food without tripping. Walk upstairs without a railing. Walk around the neighbourhood or down to the shops. I miss walking. I miss being normal. I watch people walking and […]
New Neighbours
I moved into an old people’s community. It was getting difficult to walk and I had to call the neighbour in to change the light globes. I couldn’t catch public transport and the only way to get around was driving. There were no shops nearby and I couldn’t walk to them anyway. The doctors were […]
Daisy
It was different now. The house was silent. He was gone and there was no more grumbling. She was used to the grumbling. What would she do without him? He made all the decisions. Then she realised. He was gone. She made the decisions. She could do anything she liked. She could get rid of […]
Madness Explained
I found Madness Explained in the Coop Bookshop where I went to shop because I had a voucher. I think I originally planned to buy something else, I can’t remember what, but in any case, it wasn’t there and this book was. As usual I spent more than the voucher allowed me too. I couldn’t […]
Grandmummy’s Box
I think it held stationery once. The name on the box is Doeskin Deckle. The box itself is covered in deep red paper, blood-red actually, but the name in gold and the gold deer in mid-leap are meant to denote elegance. Though the box is broken, the paper tattered and the gold faded, I can […]
The God Delusion
I have a friend who regularly reads books about the mind and consciousness, hoping to find scientific proof of the existence of the soul. He’s an educated man, the type Richard Dawkins claims is increasingly becoming atheist and I think he thinks he probably should. But he’s invariably disappointed when each new writer he discovers […]
Celebrity Politicians
I started thinking about celebrities and politics watching Team America, the movie that ridicules everything yet somehow ends by vindicating Hollywood’s happy endings and America’s strong arm tactics on the world stage. Kim Jong Il, after all, turns out to be a sentient trilobite from another planet and fortunately, the dicks are there to save […]
Shopping Opportunities in India
The subtitle to this essay should be ‘how I went to India and came back with a lot less money than I expected’. India is a wonderful country which is different in many ways from the rest of the world and definitely worth seeing but it has a bad reputation. I think that is caused […]
Lost
She wondered what they looked like. There were mostly geometric drawings in the long corridors and the arenas. Squares like gameboards with little markers as if they were playing draughts and someone interrupted them. Landscapes too, rows and rows of stylised trees with low-hanging branches like the ones in the fields and forests around them. […]