“You want to go upstairs, don’t you?” His eyes glint with amusement and prophecy. He knows we won’t stay here long, down here where it is warm and dry, where we are protected from the bitter winds that run the length of the loch, picking up droplets from the clouds above and the waters below and turning them to needles as they strike our faces.
I don’t know how to write about this. I don’t even know if I should. But I don’t know what else to do with my body today, and with the emotions and thoughts that rage within it like bees trapped inside a glass jar. Instinctively, I open a blank page and stare at its blinking cursor.
There’s an unmistakeable moment – just one – that completely captures solo travel for me. It is the instant, relieved of my bags and assured of a place to sleep for the night, that I step out onto a foreign street in well-worn (but usually impractical) shoes
Voices mumble and a guitar starts up, a gentle melody to which Steve soon starts singing in French. “No no no, wait, please stop,” I hear my 19-year-old voice say more than once. “Please. Start again
The first time I tried to read The English Patient, it took me seven months and I laboured through every word. I endured it because it was a gift and I felt obliged, but I absorbed nothing. Two years later, I was obliged again when it found its way onto
Imagine skin stripped from flesh. Imagine only the muscles and tendons and fascia beneath, sinewy and strong, revealing and raw. For a couple of metres from her roots up, that’s what she reminds me of: a body exposed to its essentials
September marks seven months of freelance. Seven months of buying groceries with the pensioners at 11am on a Wednesday, of riding the waves of desperate anxiety and joyous I-got-a-gig relief
“Put this on,” he says. “You’re going to need it.” “What for?” “We’re going out.” “You can’t be serious. It’s snowing.” “Which is why you’re going to need my coat. Put it on.”
When I was living in Toronto, I learnt why the Canadians call it fall. It’s not because of the leaves that descend; instead, it’s the invisible fire in the sky. My sense is that it’s always there, the fire. I imagine it gaining in strength during the summer months