Thoughts
On 10th December 2024 everything stopped - I was diagnosed with breast cancer aged 44. Here we are, and at the time of writing, I'm 2/3 of the way through chemo (to shrink the cancer before surgery) and getting appointments in place for the next phase. I&
Thoughts
Mike was a colleague I used to know a little when I worked at the library service in North Yorkshire, and I wrote this after his very untimely death. If people truly can outlive their physical lives through their writing then thank goodness for Mike's writing. It'
Thoughts
First question. Why would a person desire to kill a beautiful, majestic creature like this. Why would they spend £32,000 in order to be able to kill it. Why would skinning it and taking its head be important. How can we even begin to understand such behaviour from our
Thoughts
Some of the most annoyingly cliched advice that people prone to depressive thinking receive is to "think positively"; "just be positive"; "look on the bright side". As if optimism could be artifically made; as if you could somehow fake or whitewash your experiences and
Thoughts
Read more about the challenge and about my reasons for taking it on. Below is my food diary that I updated all week - comments and thoughts are at the end. Day 1 - exactly £1 As much as anything keeping a diary will help me police myself and check
Thoughts
Click to read my diary and conclusions after Live Below The Line. I'm regularly troubled by my own privilege compared to people living on dramatically less. Although I am a single parent with a low income, because I live in the UK and have additional support from the
Thoughts
The #nomakeupselfie trend is in the news - here's coverage by the Independent and here's The Guardian, for a little background. I donated £10 to Breast Cancer Care yesterday, and since it's been troubling me, I decided to try to examine my own thought
Thoughts
This was written when I moved my personal blog onto yorkshirewords.com. Attentive followers will have seen that I previously had two websites, a personal blog using my name, and a professional blog talking about my freelancing. I also had two distinct Twitter accounts, one personal and one professional. I
Thoughts
An open letter to James Rhodes, pianist (in reply to his article). James, on the off-chance you do read this (since I'm going to tweet you a link to it!) I don't know you at all, of course, and please forgive my direct way of addressing
Thoughts
The more I talk and think about actually, concretely starting to write creatively, the more it feels that I'm being dragged over a precipice. The more I feel the need to write, the more preoccupied by it I become and the more difficult it becomes not to start.
Thoughts
I'm going to stop being afraid of writing. Neil Gaiman, Rainer Maria Rilke and Gustav Holst are the specific heavyweight inspirations for this burst of courage. But explaining the initial reticence which has silenced me for more than a few months is a complicated one and comes down
Thoughts
Here's the full text of an opinion piece I've drafted for the Friends of Nidderdale AONB newsletter - where it did end up, albeit in edited down form. I thought I might as well archive it here. It was a bit of a spontaneous rant inspired