Writing.

Creative writing, short stories, general musings.

  • Reclaiming Space

    An underrated parenting milestone is the day you can finally claim your living room back. I barely remember what my living room looked like without a haphazard assortment of toys, games and books strewn around it. My son recently turned 10 and we’ve been in this house almost as long. There have been several attempts at tidying over the years, of clearing out old junk (saying goodbye to all the noisy, brightly-coloured plastic was a blessed relief), which was quickly replaced by new junk. But we stopped short of a concerted effort to really make the living room nice.

  • Paddington the Fox

    In the quiet evening hours, as the sun was going down, a lone figure could be observed at the end of the platform. Ears pricked and nose in the air, ever alert to danger, she scampered back and forth, in search of scraps left behind by the returning commuters. She might be lucky and find a half-eaten pasty, or a sausage roll dropped in haste. Those were her favourites. Sometimes it was just a few crisps, and on the worst days she had to make do with licking clean a discarded greasy wrapper. She usually found something though.

  • Escape

    A little slice of freedom is the sweetest feeling. I’m on a platform, waiting for my train to London to spend two days reconnecting with old friends, mooching around art galleries, visiting my 90-year-old Nana, swimming, eating cake and drinking coffee. Despite my busy schedule for this whirlwind trip, it’s the most relaxed I’ve felt in a long time. An escape from work, studying, parenting, planning, and the long list of domestic chores that never end.

  • Stage Fright

    It’s in moments before you go out there and face your audience that you know with absolute certainty. You know deep down in your bones, with every fibre of your being, that you’re never doing this again. Why put yourself through this? Your throat constricts. Your tongue feels like sandpaper. You feel like you need to drink constantly, and at the same time you need to go to the toilet for the thousandth time, because otherwise you’re absolutely, definitely going to wet yourself on stage. Every muscle in your body is rigid, while your limbs simultaneously feel like jelly. Uncoordinated, uncontrollable. People talk to you, you nod and smile politely, while all you can hear is the maelstrom in your head, the rushing of blood in your veins. The room lurches. Just putting one foot in front of another takes all your powers of concentration. You know without a doubt that you’ll go to pieces the moment you get out there, that there’s no way you can go through with this. But you do it anyway. Because it’s too late to back out now. Because not doing it would be worse, somehow.

  • Live Music: Alanis Morissette and Skunk Anansie

    Yesterday I took a trip down to Exeter with a good friend to watch Alanis Morissette play Powderham Castle. Alanis is one the artists that had a significant influence on my youth: I listened to Jagged Little Pill obsessively, its raw, righteous female anger awaking something deep within me. In those days big-name, North American acts rarely toured in the UK, and rarer still played anywhere close enough for my teenage self to scrape together the funds for a ticket, train travel and an overnight stay in an unfamiliar city. The only chance I got to see some of them was when they headlined festivals like Glastonbury which, although expensive even then for a teenager, at least gave me the opportunity to work for my ticket, and a chance to tick of a whole lot of my bucket-list artists all in one place. I never had a shot at seeing Alanis in her heyday, and had more or less resigned myself to the idea that I never would.

  • Sparrow

    It was as I was pulling into the driveway that I spotted it. I thought it was a mouse at first. A tiny creature frantically trying to insert its tiny body under the garage door, whether for shelter or escape I don’t know. I shut the car door and walked over slowly. The creature increased its frantic scrabbling then, realising it wasn’t going to get anywhere with the garage door, found a narrow strip of shelter under the garden gate. Not the best idea, considering the garden is the cat’s domain.

  • Clear Night

    I sit at the table in our small back garden, ice-cold drink in hand. The condensation on the glass is refreshing under my fingertips. A little light leaks from inside the house, not enough to read by, but I don’t want to anyway. Now is the time to collect my thoughts.

  • Open Mic Night

    My band played our first gig last night: an open mic night at Mr Wolf’s in Bristol. It was raw and chaotic, we couldn’t really hear each other all that well and we made a lot of mistakes. But I’m still feeling good about it.

  • Playing Music Live

    Tonight my band, Green Sirens, make our live debut at an open mic night in Bristol. It’s been 20 years since I’ve played music live. I feel like I usually feel just before I deliver a talk: nervous, excited, scared I’ll be facing an audience full of professionals who are there to find flaws in what I do. All the same irrational feelings, when really it’s a much bigger deal in your head than in real life, and no one cares that much. It’s only an open mic night, after all. I hope I can relax and enjoy it, as I usually do when we’re rehearsing and I’m pretty sure I used to do back in the old days with my high school band. But playing live as a 42-year-old feels like it comes with more baggage than in your teens. People expect you to be good, I guess. I must be a far better player than back then – I’ve spent years seriously knuckling down and practising like I never did when I was younger. My technique has definitely improved a lot. But I still never really feel I’m a good drummer, far less a great one. I play for fun, and because it feels good, just like when I write: it’s absorbing and consuming, and I feel a deeper connection to something bigger. That’s what I hope to get from playing live too — that and the rush of adrenalin you get after doing something that scares and thrills you. I hope it’s like I remember.

  • The Poisoned Lake

    At the bottom of the deepest ocean, there is a lake. Where dense, ultra-salty seawater sinks to the ocean floor, it forms a toxic pool of unfathomable depth, deadly to all but the hardiest of undersea life. Somehow, strange muscles, hundreds of years old, thrive on the banks of this mysterious lake. But most sea creatures brave or desperate enough to cross it meet their end in its murky depths. Eels venturing from the safety of their caves to hunt on the lake tie themselves in knots as the deadly toxins claim them. Shimmering silver fish twist and turn gently on the current, their embalmed bodies doomed to float upon the surface, washing up on the banks of the lake and adorning its shores for years to come.

  • Deadlines

    Self-imposed deadlines can be useful, when the work is something you actually really want to do. Last month when I set myself the challenge of writing every day, having that daily deadline meant I prioritised the thing I wanted to do (writing) above almost everything else. This is especially useful for giving yourself licence to push the mundane but time-insensitive tasks (such as vacuuming the house) to the bottom of the to-do list, although, of course, those tasks all have to get done eventually. And setting writing as a high priority meant I was more likely to do it earlier, when my brain was at its freshest and the ideas could flow freely.

  • Reflections on a month of writing

    When light hits a surface and bounces back to our eyes, we see a reflection. Our face in the mirror is perhaps the most familiar one we see, but it is not our true self. It is a distorted image, flipped by the light. And so it is disarming when we see ourselves as others see us, through another’s webcam or video. Any reflection of ourselves should be honest, but it can only be as honest as our own perspective allows. Perhaps that is the perspective that really matters. Bats use echolocation to orient themselves in three-dimensional space, the reflections of sound waves helping them locate prey, find their way and circumnavigate obstacles. In a similar way, we can take the opportunity to reflect on our experiences, to consider not just what we’ve achieved but how we want to move forward.

  • Book review: Children of Memory, Adrian Tchaikovsky

    This is a book that would certainly fit into the category of “epic” sci-fi, spanning as it does vast intergalactic distances, countless millennia, and various intriguing alien races. But the story it tells is fundamentally human. The focus of the book revolves around the human colony on the far-off planet of Imir, as observed by a crew of highly intelligent aliens with far superior technology, and a young girl, Liff, on the planet itself. As the humans’ last-ditch hope after fleeing a dying earth, life on Imir is hard. We are treated to glimpses of the founding days of the colony and the tough decisions made by the founders.

  • Funfair

    When you’re ten, the funfair is a place of excitement and adventure. Of exhilarating, brightly-coloured rides with flashing lights, booming music, smoke machines. Of games of chance, with exciting prizes for the lucky few who can master them. Of ferris wheels and helter-skelters, taking you up high for a never-before-seen birds-eye view of an otherwise familiar place. Of the scary ghost train, where you enter if you dare. Of rainbow candyfloss, dodgems, bouncy castles and magical memories.

  • The Weeds

    Eleanor hacked at the brambles until her hands were blistered and sore. The midday sun beat down on her as she dug determinedly into the dry, stubborn soil, yanking up roots and tough, thorny stems. She’d been at it all morning. Sore and dripping with sweat, she stepped back to admire her handiwork. It was a start. A patch was starting to clear and she could see the brown, dusty soil underneath. A patch where she’d promised herself, a year ago, in the full flush of honeymoon, that she’d plant a vegetable garden.