memoir Archives - Chris Creegan

Sixty-three down: memories of birthdays past — and the long road to Dundee

20/03/2024

Today is my 63rd birthday. Age comes increasingly quickly it seems. As far as I can recall, most of my pervious sixty-two birthdays have been spent in one of four places: surburban Cheshire where I grew up, Lancaster where I studied as an undergraduate, London where I spent my formative adult years, and Edinburgh, the […]

A journey through grief

10/07/2024

In 1937, even though banned by the Nazis from producing her work, the artist Käthe Kollwitz secretly made one of her last major pieces. Just 40cm high, it is a sculpture of the draped figure of a mother, sharing a silhouette while cradling her grown son. Twenty-three years after her son Peter’s death, at the […]

‘You and me together, fighting for our love’ – how Bronski Beat’s The Age of Consent defined an era and why it endures 40 years on

18/10/2024

On Monday the BBC’s flagship arts programme, Front Row, marked the 40th anniversary of the release of The Age of Consent, Bronski Beat’s debut album, on 15th October 1984. Presenter Samira Ahmed talked to Laurie Belgrave, founder and director of the south London queer bar and performance collective, The Chateau, and novelist, Matt Cain, formerly editor of Attitude. How far […]

A letter to my sister, Rachael, at 60

27/10/2024

On human forms, your presence, first and always open smile; I cannot reach the memory or ease the space, of in between the cliffs and sky: the silence. From Untitled by David Annwn* It has taken me 16 years to write this letter. But you would have been 60 today and I could not let the moment […]

How I became an assisted dying advocate — and why Westminster Parliamentarians must stand up for choice at the end of life

29/11/2024

On balance the choice of an assisted death is probably not one I would make for myself. That may sound like a curious way for an advocate of assisted dying to start an article at such a moment. Contradictory even. But at its heart this is a debate about choice. And whatever choice I might […]

Ending new HIV transmission in the UK by 2030 is within our grasp — we must not fail

01/12/2024

It’s World AIDS Day again. For those of us who lived, loved and lost through the 1980s and 1990s, it is an opportunity to recall the lives of those who didn’t make it through that hell. It matters that we remember the dead. The past is not a foreign country. It is a place we inhabit still. […]