‘I think, like me, you have had quite a few lifetimes,’ remarked an old friend after we met up recently for the first time in more than 20 years. I have reflected on that message in the run up to today, the first anniversary of the day I learned my mother had died. My friend […]
Category: memoir
‘It’s A Sin’ was so much more than a TV show — a year on, I carry it in my heart
In the dead of night over Christmas 1988, I became aware that hardly any of my fingernails had a lunula. I was 27. Until that very moment, their absence had completely passed me by. A lunula is the half-moon shape at the base of your nail, just above the cuticle. The realisation came as I […]
Notre Dame – ‘the heartbeat of our story’
‘The heartbeat of our story’, said Archbishop Vincent Nichols on the radio this morning. He’s right. And it’s why, for a moment last night, my heart stopped and then felt broken. The unmistakable image of Notre Dame on my Twitter feed, caught in a casual glance at the screen when I should have been looking […]
Shortening days, lengthening reflections — and Settling Up
Just a week to go until the shortest day and winter’s beginning. Somehow, though the year stumbles on for another ten days, for me, it’s the winter solstice that marks its finale. I’m no pagan. In a fragile world, I cling onto my Christian faith, against the odds. For all the fairy lights that bedeck […]
What’s left? Nowness and the next phase
More than forty years ago our car pulled into the drive at home after a holiday in north Wales. We couldn’t have been away for more than a couple of weeks but it seemed an age since we’d been there. Time lasted longer in childhood. It was an ending of sorts, of the holidays, of […]
Be here now: reflections from Provincetown
‘The season’s over now’, said the flight attendant as we were about to board the Silver Line to Seaport Boulevard on our arrival in Boston in late September last year. ‘But if you want to party you should definitely try the Tea Dance at the Boatslip Beach Club’. We were heading to Provincetown, on Cape […]
The day the new dawn broke
‘A new dawn has broken, has it not?’ I remember that dawn and the speech but I wasn’t there to hear it. I had left the Festival Hall shortly before Tony Blair arrived. As I said good morning to the night and headed away from the revelry I had another new horizon on my mind. […]
A letter to Lawrence
I went to see you this week. On Thursday in fact. I hadn’t intended to when I woke up that morning but 12 hours later I was stood in front of our old front door in Stoke Newington. The house looked as sturdy as ever. They built them to last in the Victorian housing boom […]
How Long Lost Family reeled me in
I was sceptical about Long Lost Family. The programme began in 2011 and I missed most of the first two series. I dipped in and out a little because I thought I ought to. I was chair of an adoption agency and I knew that each time the programme went out there was a spike […]
Who spoke for us?
Making policy that protects the most vulnerable without using a sledgehammer to crack a nut can be a challenging business. Combine that with a tenor of policy debate in Scotland which, because of the political landscape, can quickly become binary and you have something of a perfect storm.