Life after retirement
This man, Robin Keen, is my old head teacher and my old employer. He is 93 or 97 depending on who I listened to and retired at, but my calculations, around 60.
I was down in Kent this week to give a talk on ‘Creating a life you don’t want to retire from’ at my … Read more
Women are the first environment – Katsi Cook
I love the On Being Podcast and the episode with Katsi Cook called ‘Women are the first environment’ touched me very deeply.
Katsi is a Mohawk midwife, mother and grandmother and I loved how she described women as the first environment! So obvious and true.
We know that what the mother eats and drinks crosses … Read more
We are not alone
Do you know you have more cells in your body that are not yours, than are your’s?
Mind-blowing isn’t it!
We have ‘trillions of cells that are not human, but microbial, each of which has its own unique complement of genes.‘. We get them from each other, the food we eat, everything we touch … Read more
An Interview about the poem ‘Definition’ taken from Farmotherlands
(This blog was first published on Substack as part of the Thrutopia collection. The editor for the piece after the poem was Ana Salote. ‘Thrutopia’ was an initiative I attended, curated by Manda Scott. It was a creative and educational project encouraging us to consider not utopias (idealised futures) or dystopias (the worst imaginable … Read more
It takes a community to write a book
(This first appeared as a guest blog for Booka Bookshop, Oswestry).
I grew up with the image of the lonely artist; Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce sitting in the lonely garret writing in splendid isolation. I accepted that Wordsworth really did wander lonely as a cloud and that Yeats wrote about things falling … Read more
Violets, oaks and how we are all connected
Violets
Have you noticed how many violets there are this year?
The warmer weather has drawn them out. They peep from the hedgerows, the verges, the woodland. Tiny, purple, delicate. This year they have had a chance to bloom before the more robust plants like nettles and grasses crowd them out. They glow in the … Read more