I like it when people have harmless rituals against their fears. She walks past the piano, and plays a G for good. She will salute a solitary magpie. She will never begin a journey without St Christopher around her neck. She will always leave through the same door she came in by. We can’t carry our tattered, smelly toys or blankets with us. There may not be a hand to hold. So these must do instead. I don’t think they are a concession to fear, I think they are a flip of the mi

I have only a finite number of steps for city walking. Glamour, squalor, edification and dereliction crowd me like the filthy pigeons. It looks best from the rooftop, or better still the Crags. Footsore and sticky, we take the Waverley Steps. I’m glad when the train crosses the Forth. The Lomond Hills like a child’s painting. Then the Tay and the sheen of Lunan Bay, the Angus Glens ushering us North to where the soil is Grassic-Gibbon red. We compare notes. Mostly, I have liv

She asks me which branch of the Rural I belong to. I’m just the singer, I say. We share stories. Her husband died nineteen years ago. She was born in 1934, married at twenty, joined the WI to make friends, the farm was lonely. Four children, ten grandchildren, five great-grandchildren. She likes to play Patience on her computer (not one of those hand-held ones, she says), while watching Murder She Wrote. I wasn’t married when I had my son, I admit, I’m not a church-goer. I g

The first time I heard it I recoiled. I thought it meant distance, but it doesn’t. It means just because I have hurts, I can still listen to you. I want to listen to you. I am glad of something new to think about. And I don’t want my peaks and troughs to make me an ineffectual friend, a taker and not a giver. I want to be there for you. I want the scales to balance. Your problems are not mine, and I cannot take the hurts away from you. But let me care, like you do. #Friendshi

Four of us went to a comedy show last night. I forgot how much I like to laugh. We all had things to feel sad about, or scared about, anxious about, or angry about. Between us we have lived a lot of hurt. Four friends who have survived. Who keep stretching out their fingertips, hoping this time they won’t be severed, sliced, burned or broken. History tells that love is like a toddler’s toy, something to be gifted, and then we watch as it’s battered and broken and thrown aside