For my Granny Keith I don’t believe in life after death, hauntings or voices from the grave. I think what we need from people we loved, is within easy reach. Sometimes it is easier to get comfort from them than from the living. Her life was endless gifts to mine, and no one can take her away. And if I feel, her strong hand on my shoulder, or stroking the back of my hand. If she’s with me when I wake alone in the dark It doesn’t mean that I believe in ghosts, just that I loved

Have you lost your mind? Where’s your sense of humour? My mind goes everywhere it can, it loves to travel. My sense of humour is not on call; it turns up when it feels like it. Is your heart really in it? Listen to it, what does it say? My heart is wherever I am, beating in my chest. It says nothing. It beats and thumps and carries on. It won’t break or melt, harden or soften. You’re not yourself these days. I am always myself. It’s the days that change, and I go with them. #

I went to festivals when I was younger, bare faced, muddy and skint in charity shop velvet and cords. No subtlety in our taste for pretty boys and girls with loud guitars. We drank cider, snogged strangers, threw up. We bathed in sweat and lager in the mosh pit. We would not have taken a good selfie. We did not have sequins around our eyes. It’s age, I’m sure, but they don’t look like they’re having much fun. From her boyfriend’s shoulders, two rows from the front, she’s upda

My body is fighting a virus. My joints ache, my head hurts. Through the night I couldn’t sleep for shivering, my teeth chattered, despite a hot water bottle. I fell asleep and woke in the night to peel off my pyjamas, soaked in sweat. I wake up so grateful that the kids are staying with Granny and Granda. I don’t know how I’ll get out of bed, but I do. I count the hours between doses of paracetamol and ibuprofen, drink water, grab a sleep when she’s napping. The thing is, wha

I bought some cream for my face. It was on offer and I’m nearly forty. Snake Venom, it said, will instantly freeze your wrinkles. I dropped it in my basket and moved on to the nappies and wipes. Hang on, Snake Venom? Really? Improved Formula with SYN-AKE, a snake venom-like peptide. That sounds artificial, and toxic, but I really don’t want to look old. Instant Effect Wrinkle Filler, for visibly smoother and plumper skin. Mercury, Botulism, Leeches straight from Medieval Phys

It’s Heathcliff’s fault, and River Phoenix and Pete Doherty didn’t help much. It becomes a habit. Of course, no one is good or bad, there are only shades and flaws. She doesn’t need him to spear a mammoth. She’d like to talk about books and ideas and feelings. Yes. Those. But she stopped believing, and she chose her own cave. The shadows in there are livid and writhing. So, she covers them with cave paintings of the bookish soulmate she doesn’t deserve. Crushing her fear into

Paddling in the cold peaty water, the river stole his left jelly shoe and my right flip-flop. He uses the slimy wooden weir as a slide. She doesn’t like the moss and pine needles touching her tiny toes. She’s hot and sad today. He wades out to a grassy island to share his picnic. I came here thirty or more years ago, with my mum and dad. The memory brought me back, with my own babies, to play in the pools and on the rocks of the Feugh. You can’t make a memory. Memories make t

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

Mummy, imagine if there was a tree as big as twenty-eight million thousand school buses, and it went up as high as the moon? Would you climb up that tree to the moon? Yes, I would climb and it would take lots of days and years. I would go with Polly. What would you do on the moon? I would show the aliens my butt. You’d need a lot of sandwiches to keep you going when you were climbing up to the moon. Cheese sandwiches. When I got to the moon, I would throw cheese at the space

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