motherhood

The End of Lockdown

(For those with children going back to school after 6 months at home) Maybe it’s not a time for writing. Maybe the coalescing of junctioned thoughts gives too much structure to the wisps of ideas. They haven’t been written for so long anyway. The traipsing catalogue of lockdown lent a plan of Things To Get […]

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Dreaming of the resurrection

NOTEBOOK SPOTLIGHT: Natal I almost don’t know how to write. It’s Holy Week (or Still Week, as in Denmark; or Suffering Week, Germany). This year, more than most, I find myself small in the face of Christendom’s elegiac, centuries’ old commemoration of Jesus’ last hours. I’m feeling it partly because of my husband’s seried, close

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Dylan in the spotlight

One Born Every Minute, Channel 4, 9pm, 10th March. I find myself emerging from maternity leave with both a work hat and a mum hat on at the same time. In the public sphere of TV and online debate around this programme, I’ll be considering the spirituality of birth, with an eye to producing new

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The photo before the family

The formal group photograph – in this case a typical college portrait of a particular year – is both a launchpad for stories, or a place where they seem to stall. The front plane of smiling faces and presented posture has no side or back, and there is no way round or into pictures from

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When I met Verity

I’ve seen quite a few Hirst pieces in my young art journey: at the landmark Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, and up to recent appearances in Gloucester Cathedral and Bath Abbey – see Artsy about him. I’m always conscious that it’s impossible to ignore him on the British art scene, but the

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The shock of the new

It feels slightly odd marking this post in my ‘research’ category, but the photograph is such a departure point for so many thoughts, that I can’t help but mull it over:  Up to the point of climbing on the hospital bed for the first scan, the knowledge of pregnancy is somewhere between an abstract mark

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