The Power of Words
I am woman who has a baby. She was wanted, she is loved, but it has been such hard work. There have been times that I have spiralled into despair over how much my life has changed, how tired I am. I spent a lot of time preparing and planning to have her, and even […]
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“The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it…when the world’s filled up, we’ll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.” Doris Lessing I spent almost all of […]
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Over the past few weeks, something strange has happened. In the tiny bubbles of time I get between work and baby, I’ve started to write again. At first, it wasn’t much. A few scenes that barely reached 300 words. Some thoughts, a memory, nothing substantial. But it was something. I opened up ‘stickies’ on my […]
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On Friday evening, I went to bed at 8:20pm. Before I went to bed, I browsed through Jamie’s Fifteen Minute Meals books and ordered enough ingredients for the rest of this week. I treated myself to some ice cream and some quiet pages of my book before slipping off to sleep. It’s fair to say […]
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On Sunday, we finally let ourselves back in. Six months and three weeks after we locked the door behind us and set off round the world, we came home. The flat was full of echoes, of the strange feeling that other people had existed in our space for all that time. You could see it […]
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Sadly, this is the first time I’ve missed a weekly blog post since February. Fortunately, it was due to a huge gathering in the French countryside. A meeting of cultures, generations, family and friends to herald three momentous occasions in one family over the last year. As excuses go, I think it’s a pretty good […]
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This week, I’ve made several journeys. Once into London to see some friends, once to a local town for some shopping, and once to Paris. While that is hardly a new experience for me, these trips were different: I did them by myself. For those who’ve been following my adventures, a brief jaunt on a […]
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One of the reasons people thought we were mental to travel around the world with a baby (and there were many) was because of the perceived danger. The world is a hazardous place if you are small and inquisitive. But abroad, those risks become much higher, or at least they can seem it because they […]
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It dangles at the end of the bed. The plastic clips rattle against the bed frame when I walk past it. The straps have yielded to the stretch of my baby’s changing size, the buckles clasped around me in snow, wind and sun. It’s been left there like a forgotten thing – the sling that we […]
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In the week since we’ve touched down on UK soil I’ve been back to work, travelled (again) up to London and attended a book launch. It’s fair to say it hasn’t exactly been an easy transition. I was expecting the tiredness. I was expecting the excitement at seeing faces I had missed for so long. […]
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