-
A number of you have touched me sweetly this month, noticing it’s some weeks since I blogged. Attention feels like love: thank you for caring. My half-excuse has been wave after wave of summer visitors, my attention going in their direction! And – I’ve been on a mission: gathering up the insights of the book…
-
Image by Ehsan Haque, Pexels Midsummer, Tobago Broad sun-stoned beaches. White heat. A green river. A bridge, scorched yellow palms from the summer-sleeping house drowsing through August. Days I have held, days I have lost, days that outgrow, like daughters, my harbouring arms. Poem by Derek Walcott (1930-2017), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature,…
-
‘Still Life with Grape Juice and Sandwiches’ (1994) is a painting by David Ligare (b. 1945), who used to serve the same when he volunteered at a homeless shelter. It hangs in the de Young Museum, in the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California. June’s gifts: the abrupt arrival of the Azorean summer – and…
-
See how unbothered these girls are, moseying to their milking! Traffic jam, Azores-style … five minutes for me, while driving, to unhurry myself as they shamble – confident, casual – along a known road to the ritual afternoon appointment. If there were previous lives, I would have been a cat – cold water, ugh! If…
-
I’ve been an apprentice writer for nine-tenths of my life. That may leave you guessing! What I will let slip is, aged nine, modelling myself on LM Montgomery’s teenage aspiring author Anne Shirley, I took on board ‘Write what you know’ – likely a Mark Twain maxim. I didn’t find this easy. Despite loving the…
-
Speaking another language you haven’t grown up with strikes me as revealing an individual flair – like painting, or ballet. I’m not convinced that anyone can do it. In particular, I’m hesitant that I can do it. Nevertheless, this month I ventured, with my husband – who was blissfully sanguine about it! – to join…
-
Flashes of promise – that’s how the change of season is manifesting in the Azores. More rainbows than full-on sun. But swathes of bright yellow oxalis waving from the hedgerows all month; and last week my heart did a double flip over two luminous purple magnolia trees in full bloom – a month ahead of…
-
How has January been for you? A wet, and sometimes wildly windy month here in the Azores – though avoiding the extreme storms assaulting mainland Portugal, and my native Britain – I’ve been glad to stay home and enjoy some virtual contact, beginning with my online writing group. This has not been escapism. Hosted by…
-
New Year The yearsFall like dry leavesFrom the top-less treeOf eternity.Does it matterThat another leaf has fallen? by Langston Hughes (1901-1967) I shall be glad to be greeting 2026 with people I love and care for. Of the date prompting me to make a small change or two. And also mindful of the Black American…
-
If I had three wishes – alas, no lamp or genie! – after “1) Peace in the fraught places of the world, and 2) cures for life-limiting diseases, so we can all of us just grow old and die of natural causes” – I’d squander the third on myself: “Please make me funny!” I’ve always…