Death in Corona

  My Dad died on the 17th of May 1996 - a Friday afternoon in a busy hospital, a stones throw from what is now my children's favorite park. I'd traveled up from Uni that morning, jumping on the first train I could get out of Liverpool Lime Street. Mum said he waited, as the …

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Breathing Room and Rainbows

It is the strangest feeling to sit with the cursor blinking, unable to find enough words, the right words, any words to properly describe what is happening in the world right now. I've been writing, deleting, writing, for what feels like weeks. Feeling battered by the storm of stories, like an ocean full of currents, …

Can Hemp Equal Hope? Bringing Cannabis Sativa to The Climate Conversation.

In the time before plastic permeated every part of our lives, hemp was a valuable, sustainable, versatile plant that was cultivated without the hugely negative associations that have been fashioned around it over the last 100 years. A plant that can become food, medicine, textiles, shoes, rope, animal feed/bedding, building material, paper, insulation, bioplastic and …

Make it Better Soup

It's been a quiet start in our little house to this new decade. Much of December and all of January so far has been a blur of illness as one child or other, or me, has succumbed to the coughs, colds and winter infections that fly about so freely as this time of year. We've …

Thirteen. Waving All The Red Flags High. Unpicking the Stitches of Silence.

I've always loved it when the thirteenth day of the month falls on a Friday. Friday 13th, despite the negative patriarchal influence, has always been a positive day for me. Maybe somewhere in my DNA, there is the remembrance of the feminine importance of 13. The number of the divine feminine, representative of the thirteen …

Mending Clothes as an Act of Rebellion

I have often wondered when it was that Western society collectively decided that visibly mended clothes were a mark of reduced status. Of a life worth less. Where a patch or a darn was certainly not acceptable in polite company. Many cultures across the globe value and respect the energy that is used to create …

Patchwork Days

I first learnt to cut and stitch patchwork sitting on the living room floor of family friend Barbara Thompson. Walking into her house, there was always the aroma of cooking spices, books, wool. The walls were covered in bookshelves, almost as though her house was built with stories, not bricks, and the books that didn't fit …

Unpackaging Life

It's been a bit quiet on the blog these last few weeks. I've been struggling to write about the tiny, small efforts we are making at home, because I haven't felt particularly inspired by them, in the great whirl of Extinction Rebellion protests, and the darkening knowledge of what is happening across the planet. The …

Winter Healing From The Elder Mother

When I first moved into the house I live in now, there was an elder sapling in my back garden, brought by birds, and shooting up rebelliously between honeysuckle and philadelphus. The garden was very different then - with only two previous owners, both strong independent women who loved to garden,  it had neat hedges, …

The Boy With The Lead Balloon, and The Girl Who Wouldn’t Fly…

Today we walked in the woods. Two buses from home, across the River in the Derwent Valley, under a grim, threatening sky we walked in the woods. We saw a deer, chatted to some rescue horses, tracked prints along the muddy path and paddled in a river full of all of yesterday's torrential rain. We …