I think you know that I’m falling apart. I know you have sensed it, and so many in our lovely community have done their level best to hold me up in the past three months. I am so grateful. But the past three months have all but destroyed me and I am crumbling. I cry when no-one is looking because…
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We have a chirpy, delighted blackbird nestling in the camellia at the back of the conservatory. Each morning now that the sun is shining again, we sit on the sofa, sipping tea and watching as Mrs Blackbird dives in and out of the tangle of branches decorating the brick wall behind us, singing at the top of her voice and…
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Perhaps then, this is the natural order of things. Turning pages. Starting new chapters. The bewildering evaporation of all that we have known – a slate life wipes clean for us, because attachment, pain or dependency keeps us tied to all that is clogging up our emotional arteries. This is what I know: we can never understand who people really…
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Today. A long call with my doctor and then a drive with Finn, to sit staring at the geese gathered like so many gossiping Mothers at the school gates, cooing at each other and gathering their babies into groups dotted along the coast line. Changeable weather. One moment sun cracking the flags. The next the finest fluttering of snow. Ugly…
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I am all of us. I have been foolish. I have believed in things that weren’t true and imagined myself capable of much that I am simply not. I have made bad decisions in the midst of struggles I was too ashamed to share. And tucked terrible things deep down inside me afraid of what would happen if I labelled them…
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Perhaps it is a sign of the times, this nostalgia for moments long gone I am experiencing. A reaction to the deep uncertainty I currently feel. Claustrophobia as a symptom of Covid. The longing to scream out loud my suppressed panic and run like Forrest Gump until I have managed to run away so completely, I am refreshed and ready to…
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Rachel Ashwell is one of a trinity of women, that also includes Sarah Ban Breathnach, and Cheryl Mendelson, that I credit with teaching me how to live, when I was a young homemaker, running an interiors business and trying to fathom who I was, and what really mattered to me. I think I have told you before that when Mark…
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A few weeks ago a new family moved into the old cottage across the lane. A typical family with two young girls and a happy little cockapoo, they moved in with an eyesore of a trampoline, a boat, and a boy-racer car so noisy it has become my morning alarm clock. Over the years we have lived here more than…
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My Mum used to wake up in rather a bad grump. Mornings coloured her outlook on life and seemingly made it impossible for her to see the positives in her day until mid-morning when to all our relief she seemed to thaw her way back to loveliness. It was difficult to live with and something I was too quick to…
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