If you’re having a rough day, read this.

Our recent road-trip around the USA Pacific Northwest was centred specifically around going to a concert at the epic Gorge Amphitheater. My favourite singer-songwriter of all time, Brandi Carlile, was playing and there was no way I was missing her show at a venue that's considered to be one of the most scenic concert locations in the world. Emmylou Harris was one of her incredible support acts and during her set, as she was introducing a song and strumming the chords on her guitar, she said something along the lines of: "This next song is one I wrote about 30 [...]

By |2019-07-17T08:28:57+01:0023 June 2019|

Road-tripping, whales and learning.

I'm travelling at the moment, with my little family. Mainly around the The Pacific Northwest and Canada. I'm learning a lot on this holiday. I'm learning that travelling is tiring and hard and yet heart-opening and wild. Travel stirs something in me that makes me want to pack up my life back home and live in an RV and hit the road (although I'm also not daft enough to forget that I LOVE regular showers and working toilets and my dream of living a life on the road would last approximately 2.3 days before I got fed up. So there's [...]

By |2019-07-17T08:25:13+01:0023 June 2019|

Girls can’t wear baseballs caps.

When you were a kid, did you ever play the game, Guess Who? You know, the 1980’s mystery face game where each player chooses a person and then using yes or no questions, they try to figure out the other player’s person? Turns out, the game still exists! I've been playing it with my son recently and it's been a total blast from the past. Nothing much has changed with the game. The people are still mostly the same. The format is still the same. The rules are still the same. And yet I've noticed the questions my son has been asking me about my "person" are [...]

By |2019-07-17T08:32:24+01:0016 April 2019|

The cat food.

Every morning and evening, after I've fed Lily, my cat, I leave the house and walk 100 metres across the garden to the garage. I open the garage door and walk to the bin store in the corner and put the empty cat food pouch in the bin. Every morning and evening, after I've fed Lily, my cat, I look down at the empty cat food pouch in my hand and think, "I can't be fucking arsed to walk 100 metres across the garden to the garage, to then have to open the garage door and walk to the bin store in the corner [...]

By |2019-07-17T08:34:22+01:006 January 2019|

My mother-in-law and the trees.

I'm standing in the living room of the old, rambling farmhouse we've just finished renovating. One hand on my hip, the other cupping my chin with my thumb and index finger, I hesitantly scan the room. "Are there just way too many types of wood in this room?" I ask my mother-in-law. She is standing to the right of me and watches, as I nod towards the oak wooden beams and then the pine floor and then the walnut coffee table and then the new dining chairs with the ash legs. "No", she replies in her direct and confident German [...]

By |2019-07-17T08:37:16+01:0025 September 2018|

An injection and an icepack.

Two weeks ago, I had surgery on my ankle. I sobbed so hard that evening as I lay in my hospital bed. The pain was unreal. The nurses tried all sorts of different varieties and doses of painkillers, but nothing seemed to help. I shared a room in the hospital with a 70-year old woman who had had knee surgery 2 weeks before. In her thick, German accent, she told me lots of stories about her life. Her ex-husband had been a very "bad man" to her, and one day, in the middle of the night, she snuck out with her [...]

By |2019-07-17T11:28:53+01:0012 May 2018|

My blue cup.

I'm sitting at my kitchen table eating avocado on toast with chilli flakes and lemon juice on top. I gesture towards my partner, Kristin, who is standing a few metres from where I'm sat and I say, "Please can you pass me my blue cup, you know the one with the pattern on?" My blue cup with a pattern on is my favourite cup of all time. It's massive. It holds probably twice the amount of liquid that your average cup holds. If you're a client of mine, you'll probably know this cup because I generally drink herbal tea from [...]

By |2019-07-19T09:59:32+01:0015 February 2018|

Porn, Buddhism and missiles.

Not last Saturday but the one before that, the residents of Hawaii were informed by text message that a ballistic missile was heading their way. 45 minutes later, they were subsequently informed that the initial warning had been a mistake and that it was safe to come out from shelter. 15 minutes after receiving this particular news, the website, Pornhub, an online platform for, you guessed it, watching porn, noticed that their page views surged +48% above typical levels. It seems that the relief from the anxiety of believing they were going to be blown to smithereens, caused quite a few Hawaiians to go and seek, well, a little [...]

By |2019-07-17T11:35:03+01:0028 January 2018|

You don’t need permission.

The other evening, a dear friend of mine text me with, as she called it, a wording question. She'd been invited to a party, you see, by someone from her work who she doesn't like very much, and was struggling to articulate how to RSVP with a "Thanks but no thanks" yet still be polite. In her text to me she said, "I don’t want to say I’m unable to come but should I make an excuse? I don’t know how to combine politeness and integrity!" I text her back and suggested she write: “Thanks for the invite, however I won't be able to come". Voila! With the holidays [...]

By |2017-12-20T09:26:14+01:0020 December 2017|

Demand it.

"Trust me, I do this day in, day out. You've got to take my word for it." A surgeon said that to me, nearly 4 years ago, shortly after I'd fucked-up my ankle.  "I can't see anything wrong with the bones in your ankle, the problem is definitely in your calf muscle" he added, standing up from his desk and gesturing me towards the door. My allocated 10 minutes with him were up. "It'll be a quick operation, we'll cut some tissue away from your calf muscle, then, once you've recovered, you'll hopefully be able to run properly again. Just let me know what [...]

By |2017-11-26T17:07:53+01:0026 November 2017|
Go to Top