I’m typing this in Manchester Piccadilly waiting for my connecting train back to Glasgow from the Peak District where I've been hiking with my oldest pals, so there’s no usual post this week for the Membership, just a few choice snaps from beautiful Brontë country and some bits from this week’s album recording session with my band, wall sun sun. Back next week with actual thoughts and words!

Read more

These scenes are interspersed with footage of a opal-toned skies, birds flying overhead, and corporate Clydeside as seen from a footbridge whose blue and white latticed ironwork I recognise. Eventually, these two narratives meld. A hand appears to chuck the locket into the Clyde. Concentric circles ripple on the water’s surface. A hand then clutches the locket again. The water is still, or as still as this river gets. A hand thinks about throwing it but changes its mind at the last minute.

In other words, the locket is gone forever / the locket hasn’t gone anywhere / the locket’s fate is uncertain.

It’s Friday, and the official first day of Glasgow International, the city’s biennial festival of contemporary art. The above is one part of a multifaceted show called Hard Lines by Glasgow artist Lisette May Munroe, which I’m visiting specifically because it questions what it means to inhabit a body stigmatised by, amongst other things, premature perimenopause.

Munroe is in her late thirties, so hardly your stereotypical perimenopause poster-girl which is exactly the point. I followed two women and a toddler in a buggy into the exhibition space, thinking that they looked similar in age to the artist. They were wearing one of the uniforms of early motherhood in an ethnically and economically diverse postcode, which in their cases comprises of Dad trainers, ankle socks, short boxy jeans, cagoules and hair — a few greys — corralled loosely on top of heads with claw clips. As we shared the space for the next wee while, I wondered how far away they felt from all of this.

It made me think about a corporate session on perimenopause I ran recently for women and AFAB folk in their 30s. Before the session started, I chatted with a few of the organisation’s employees, who were interested in what I had to say but wouldn’t, they said, be attending. It was so not where their heads were at. As single and childfree people (which is not to say unhappily so), they were simply not ready to face that any kind of shutdown might be in the post. They’d deal with that if/when it happened, they said.

I wanted them to get ready just in case, but also I got it. Who wants to identify as perimenopausal in their 30s?

Back to the locket. In a show about betrayal — romantic, bodily — the object’s significance is revealed in the accompanying zine, but watching the film on its own could perhaps be best understood in the context of cognitive dissonance in the midst of a sudden and messy break-up where the fuck-you desire for closure competes heavily with the inability to let go. Before I could over-think it, though, I decided that a here/gone/uncertain story around the locket might also serve as a fitting metaphor for living with premature perimenopause (or its other name, Primary Ovarian Insufficiency1).

The zine that accompanies the films and other visual elements of the show contains an interview with the artist in which an infuriating and all-too-familiar story about the medical gaslighting that happens for people going through perimenopause in their 30s is told:

I was fucked, both physically and mentally, just absolutely fucked. My friend was like, I think you need to speak to the doctor. And I was like, why? And they did loads of tests but never mentioned menopause, because in the traditional medical framework, it’s early for me to be going through it, but actually it’s not really, many people got through it much earlier. It turns out my aunts were on the other side of it by the time they were my age. At one point, they even did an early-onset dementia test on me at the doctors, and I was like, “I don’t think I’ve got dementia”. They’re like, “no, you need to do this test”. And I had to draw the hands on the clock and all that stuff. It was really, really crazy. And then they gave me HRT. Thank fuck. Because I think I would have lost my mind. It doesn’t fix everything, but I could live again which was timely given that the life I was living was falling apart.

Munroe is right: many, many women do enter perimenopause earlier than the media and medics like to tell us. In fact, 5% of women in the UK, Europe and the US do each year, and that figure is woefully inaccurate owing to under-diagnosis and the overlap of symptoms relating to chronic conditions and/or long COVID.

The myriad long-term impacts2 to health from being under-informed about the hormonal shifts that are very possibly happening from your mid 30s onwards make for sobering reading and it’s why I talk about it so much and want to find palatable ways for younger women to engage with the possibility that it might happen to them. A massive part of the problem is that the mainstream is struggling to catch up and I’m still far from convinced that its representations of early/premature peri (not to mention chronic illness) is fair or accurate in the case of younger women’s experiences, which might be partly to blame for why some of the younger women I encounter prefer to stick their head in the sand.

If you watched Riot Girls on BBC One last autumn and remember the red-haired Kitty, who has been described as “near-feral in her rage” then perhaps you know what I mean. Caricatured in the way that older menopausal women have long been used to, it’s no wonder it’s hard to accept that you might be perimenopausal in your late 30s if getting blind drunk, slashing yourself in a supermarket and using a baseball bat to trash your ex’s car is your blueprint. I too have enjoyed, believed and invested in Sally Wainwright’s other midlife women living on the edge, but not Kitty. We might be fucking raging, but I can’t get on board with this version.

Women need new words. We need new stories. And culture that sits outside of the mainstream is where those stories are being told. For now.

For a far more fitting flame-haired premature peri icon, I give you writer and performer Kat Lyons, whose 2019 show, Dry Season, takes the audience on an autobiographical journey through a chaotic year of hormones, mental health issues and NHS visits. It was written in response to Kat’s diagnosis and early experience of premature menopause at the age of 39, following 18 months of undiagnosed symptoms including chronic insomnia, depression, and paranoid anxiety.

Watch this and then tell me in the comments where you are seeing yourself, or your experiences, reflected.

Leave a comment

Looking for more on (premature) perimenopause, hormones, sexual pleasure in midlife? Here’s your reading list:

At the kitchen table the following evening, dinner finished and everything cleared away, it surprises me that they’ve both stuck about to unpack the kits. I realise while I’m running the sink and sloshing the washing up liquid around that I’m now counting in years not months the time that has passed since this is what post-dinner-time always looked like.

Domestic bliss is short lived, though. Someone gets frustrated, there is an altercation over how to roll the clay, some quick tears, a telling-off and thundering footsteps on the stairs. I follow after a minute and though there are hugs until the worst of the crying and shouting has passed, I’m soon doing what I do in this situation. Abandoned socks and vest tops are getting the sniff test and the dirty ones are chucked into the hall. Sweetie wrappers are swept into the bin and used cups and plates are piled up beside the door. I do all this while continuing to dole out platitudes.

I have a habit of running away from other people’s distress. Even my children’s.

My therapist would have something to say about this. Something consoling about how my behaviour is adaptive and that I had to do a lot of quiet sitting alongside my mother which makes it very hard to do it now. What would have happened if you cried, screamed or showed you were scared instead of doing all the rubbing, patting, soothing, she’s asked. I have no answer for her, really, other than to remind her that I’d take any chance at all to escape it, and never failed to find something sock-like to do.

I draw the curtains to block out the late evening sun, which is at its best through this particular first floor window no matter the time of year or when on the clock the late evening sun arrives. From the south-facing window I catch the moon which is nearly full, against a cornflower sky. The midweek radio programme that reports on media news said this afternoon it’s no longer acceptable for responsible broadcasters to talk about “good” or “bad” weather, given that in the climate emergency most weather sweeps in with a heavy subtext and its impact is subjective. Yes, the days have been hot and dry, and those hot and dry days spanned a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK, but it’s only the tabloid headlines that dare to revel in it now. But still, the moon. The sky. The warmth. If I avoid saying it’s “good” weather, can I get away with another superlative?

The cat is at the top of the stairs, sitting beside her basket. In the upset, the pile of folded clothes balanced on the top of the banister fell into her bed. She looks at me and miaows, perhaps in thanks, as I lift it for her.

I make my way back down to the kitchen where I find the floor is wet. Not just wet, swimming and both sinks long overflowing.

Read more

I am no longer alone. A very small foot is resting in the open palm of my left hand which makes sense of the light and makes good on the foot owner’s promise that I’d be joined in the big bed eventually. Morning after morning, my watch persists in telling me I’m a light sleeper and so that she even managed to get in, settle down and fall into what sounds by her breathing to be a very deep sleep indeed, is baffling. Was I that out of it?

I check my watch. 2:30am. I pat the duvet between us to locate the stuff I’d left on the empty side, ease myself out from under it and fumble my way to the toilet and back before closing the door behind me again. Until teatime last night, I had never even set foot in my brother’s new house, so groggy, contact-lens-less and without any muscle memory to speak of, it’s a miracle to be doing this quietly. I get back to sleep eventually and soon it’s 7am and the small person beside me is closer now and saying good morning aunt Lindsay, did you even know I was here?

Downstairs, I boil the kettle and answer a great number of why questions while dodging cartwheels and attempts at the splits. Where are the teabags, I ask the four year old’s big sister. Oh mum doesn’t like tea so we don’t have any, she tells me confidently while I am opening a tin I’ve taken from a high shelf in the pantry. Teabags. I take one out and the four year old looks at me solemnly and says they must be up that high to hide them from her mummy. I don’t think my brother is the type to hide teabags, but I give a sage nod nonetheless.

We place a video call to my own girls, who are busy at that time in the morning at their dressing table mirrors. Why do you have socks in your hair, the younger one asks my older one, who explains the principles of sock curls while continuing to apply her eyeliner. I take a screenshot of the three of them on the call and cannot entirely believe that my children are no longer the age of the ones I’m with this morning. Instagram or Google won’t fail to remind me later of the way they once looked, moved and spoke and this is one of the ways the tech bros have me hooked.

The younger one, who stripped to her pants upon waking beside me, reappears wearing shorts and a t-shirt. There is a clip-on reading light turned to full beam dangling from her collar and she is riding an oversized St Bernard toy dog last seen propped up at the piano, though she is calling it a pony. I have been warned she will refuse the clothes set out for her and think that, despite the weather, I’ll be sending her to nursery dressed as she is so long as she concedes it’ll be trainers, not Crocs. This child is her father’s child who, rain or shine, went about at her age in nothing more than wellies and shorts.

After a breakfast of too much cereal, too much milk, apple slices for one and a peeled carrot for the other, it’s drop-off time. What’s the way to nursery and school, I ask, once we’re over the door. The younger one is scooting ahead, though I know the way since the nursery she goes to was — when I was a teenager — the nightclub, Pebbles.

I tell the older one the story about Pebbles, which she claims never to have heard before, and then I wonder aloud why the nursery (which will no doubt be full of children borne of other parents who danced on the dark, sticky floor when the floor was sticky with stuff it’s definitely not sticky with now) didn’t keep the name Pebbles. An excellent name for a nursery it would be, and she agrees.

To get to it, the children take me the beach way, not the town way. I know this beach well. The route they’ve chosen takes in the stretch of the coast where on my 15th birthday, I got tipsy drinking something passed around in a big plastic bottle and, for the first and last time, kissed a boy wearing braces. The beach is being cleaned this morning and though the smell isn’t exactly pleasant, it is as familiar as my own skin. I take some long, deep breaths as we make our way along the promenade passing the penthouse flat I lost my virginity in at 16 before we head in the direction of nursery which is beside the pub my parents met in almost 45 years ago.

Read more

Earlier, at the marina as we queued to board, there had been no escaping the sun. The bleached pontoon underfoot had no coverage, and I thought about two things:

1/ the grey and flaking wooden guardrail on my grandpa’s boat that — following a punishing Scottish winter on a makeshift drydock — needed lots of tenderness in the form of sandpaper, oil and varnish before its lustre was restored. This was, for a few years, my job.

2/ being in Shanghai 20 years ago where I copied the wizened Chinese women I’d seen and bought an umbrella so that I had constant shade. The humidity levels were so high I was often soaking underneath it.

While I wished for an umbrella, I reminded the girls they needed to keep their hoodies on no matter how hot they were and then annoyed them further by fussing with the hoods which, I said, could provide efficacious back-of-the-neck coverage if folded just so.

“Efficacious”. Speak English, bruh.

Fish were swimming around the pontoon and by fish I mean fish in the general sense since I couldn’t begin to identify them. I worried about them nonetheless, distracted by the idea that they’d be better off elsewhere. There were likely ribbons of rainbow-coloured jet fuel constantly being discharged, settling and remaining concentrating in the still waters of the marina, which despite appearances, must have had a fair amount in common with an urban puddle. I allowed my attention to wander in the direction of a few tanned men yonder, testing jet skis. They were taking them out four at a time for a quick turn, like a mummy duck followed by her ducklings.

I have opinions about jet skis, cruises, half day boat trips. This one had been booked at the last minute, in part to mitigate against the low-level disappointment that had marred the first six days of our week-long holiday and so — on this occasion — I kept my opinions to myself. We had needed to get off the island. Get closer to water of a different quality unlike even that on the sandy coast and most definitely unlike the heated, chlorinated water at the resort. A different quality of wind, too, maybe the sort that could blow away some of the stagnancy that the adults had dragged two thousand miles south and been unable, really, to shake off, sweat out or drink away.

Read more

“You do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking”

from Rebecca Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End

Late on Friday night, after shedding unexpected tears at the finale to Season 3 of Stranger Things, I knew exactly where I was going as I drove the familiar road north-west to drop my daughter’s boyfriend at home. I don’t often drive over the bridge that connects the north and south of the city and not want to take a photo, and since the teenagers in the back seat were consumed by one another and also by something on one of their phones, I had to do as I always do and rely on my eyes and, later, my memory of what I saw, which was this:

Driving towards the light while Glasgow behind me darkens. In the far distance — beyond the silhouettes of 1980s, 90s and 00s-built Clydeside — is the black spire of Glasgow Uni. This, the landscape upon which I map my relationship to the city. The backdrop almost regal. Inky indigo gives way to deepest emerald then cerulean then teal then turquoise then duck egg then — at the point far, far in the north-west where the land meets the sky — there is a slash of white gold.

By the time we made the return trip just 20 minutes later, all of that was all gone. For that day, at least.

Our soundtrack was Radio 3 which is the station I listen to for its soothing properties when I’m the last one downstairs of an evening. On Friday night, however, the bedtime programming departed from form because the station — along with what seemed like the rest of the BBC — was celebrating the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough who has transcended his human form to fulfil a talismanic and unifying function that, arguably, even the late Queen couldn’t quite manage. I suspect that when he does eventually die, we’ll be mourning much more than one man’s passing.

Unlike the sunset, which I had and have words for, I couldn’t then and can’t now begin to describe what I was hearing. It wasn’t music in the way our impoverished ears have been taught to understand music, and music’s not the right word anyway, so let’s call what we were listening to abstract fragments, each of which felt to me representative of Attenborough’s century not just on planet earth but in it and across it. In the show notes, which I looked up afterwards, it said the programme explored what the sonic and the creaturely realms share in common: a freedom from ownership, a resistance to neat categorisation and [created] a space where connection can happen and that felt close enough for me.

Read more

This meant she typed her question into Google and read the AI-generated results at the top so there was no source in the traditional sense for the answer she was given. She wouldn’t have done the thing I try to remember to do, which is to type -AI at the end of my searches so that actual websites appear in the search results, therefore her question may well have had an unfortunate consequence, drinking-water wise. It was a Black Mirror moment the likes of which there are so many these days: Child asks AI if AI is impacting global water security and AI (probably) says no.

I asked her why she searched it up. Had she seen something on Newsround? Her face — which oscillates between the childlike one she has had all this time and the grown-up one that is being chiselled out of it — darkened. No, she said. It was just in my mind.

What was the answer? I asked. Is it?

I don’t know, she replied. I couldn’t understand what it said so I’m asking you.

I remember what it was to be just a bit younger than she is now and experiencing my first wave of environmental panic. It came about during an episode of children’s wildlife programme, The Really Wild Show, while watching a feature presented by — let’s say — Michaela Strachan. The feature was about the hole in the ozone layer which had been mostly caused by CFCs. I’m sure Michaela would have been then as she is now, a comforting voice in globally uncertain times, and would have done an admirable job of watering down the science on the calamitous impacts of greenhouse gases for her young audience, but despite any reassurances, I was a mess.

It was 1992, my family had broken up and now the world was also ending.

Subscribe now

What followed was a time of intense climate anxiety that couldn’t fairly be separated from our vulnerable housing situation. I don’t know if I knew to worry over whether we’d have a roof over our heads come autumn and if I was consciously worrying, it would have most probably been over what roof it might be. I asked for a Friends of the Earth letter writing set for my ninth birthday and got that plus a new schoolbag and an electronic diary which meant my mother was feeling bad about the way things had turned out. She certainly wasn’t thinking that her newly-environmentally-concerned child might object to the purchase of unnecessary extras, particularly those filled with some of the world’s rarer elements. And did I even object? When presented with this battery-operated treasure, most definitely not.

Later in the week, my husband told me he’d WhatsApped me a link to an article by a respected journalist and environmental activist whom we both follow. In between the making and drinking of coffee, the filling of packed lunches, the brushing of teeth and so on, he paraphrased the main point which is that by the end of the century, there’s a 50% chance that an Atlantic system crucial to life as we know it will collapse. It will happen faster than humans will be able to adapt and have consequences for every living thing on earth.

For months of the year, Edinburgh could be -48C he said, recalling the most geographically-resonant example from the climate scientists’ predictions. I said how awful that sounded while moments from the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow came to mind, specifically the scene in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s character is in the New York Public Library feeding rare and antiquated books into the fire so he and his fellow survivors will, indeed, survive the sudden deep freeze. There would be no need of the knowledge accrued and archived from the old world in the new, that was for sure.

My husband told me that the journalist was angry that this sort of climate story is systemically suppressed by mainstream media, and I felt a fresh wave of anger at who the journalist called the billionaire death cult as well. I never thought I’d become the sort of person who would grow to distrust the news as it’s reported on telly and in newspapers but it seems that people and times do indeed change.

Soon after, I was enjoying a final cup of coffee in the garden hearing — variously — birdsong, petrol-powered garden tools and passing cars on the road outside. The familiar sounds of the suburbs were underscored by the constant thrum of motorway traffic a mile or so away. ‘Twas ever thus and ever thus shall be or, in other words, it sounded like it has always sounded at this time of year or, in yet other words, it sounded like it has sounded to me in each of the 14 springs I’ve spent in this garden if not the way it sounded for most of the 165 years that this house has stood at the top of this hill.

The welcome sun was beating down on the peak of my baseball cap in a way that made me feel guilty about the flowerpots, full of weeds at the back door. I reminded myself there would be an overnight frost or two yet, and that I would attend to the pots around the second May Bank Holiday like every other sensible Scottish gardener. It was then that I picked up my phone, clicked through to the article and saw that my husband had misremembered the headline point. There’s a 50% chance of us arriving at a tipping point by 2050, not 2100 when everyone living under this roof, he had said, would be long gone at least.

In the 2050s we’ll be in our 70s, if we’re spared. Our children will be in their 40s. When I was 9, 10, 11 or thereabouts, and irrespective of the state of the ozone layer, there’s no way my mother would have thought to prepare me for an adulthood that would be less prosperous, less healthy and less happy than hers or her parents’ before her. Maybe that says as much about my mother as it does about parenting in the early 90s.

Or maybe it says a lot about what it means to live with any degree of awareness in the year of our Lord 2026. The kind of global cooperation required to phase out and ban CFCs feels very far away in a world where the broligarchy is in charge and furthering the climate agenda is so far from any government’s priority.

Yesterday was my 43rd birthday and I chose to spend part of it in the cinema with my family watching The Devil Wears Prada 2. The night before, I watched the original with my kids and felt newly aligned with the Devil herself. I won’t provide additional commentary to the very important points made elsewhere about how the 2006 incarnation of Miranda Priestley is deserving of a perimenopausal reinterpretation, but I will say that AI gets more than a look-in in the sequel and that the glittering, “forever” future all-but promised to serious journalist Andi Sachs at the end of the first film is, at least for significant portions of the new film, hanging on a shaky (coat) peg.

We left the cinema asking one another whose job we would most like to have when we’re older, since even adults in their mid-to-late 40s can have dreams. I said Andi’s. One of my kids said Lady Gaga’s. The other said Miranda Priestley’s, but mostly because of the corner office, the two PAs and all the coffees. Yet what I was left with was the fact that the film exposed the fragility — nay — the impossibility of any of these roles existing in a recognisable form in the AI world, let alone these glossy, aspirational versions, of course. We don’t know what work will look like in 20 years, I tell them, hoping this vague yet hopeful response would be enough for them on a sunny Saturday afternoon in May, while thinking that the realistic scenario is that AI is coming for their career aspirations, our drinking water and much else besides. The worst case is that we are wiped out by suddenly rising sea levels and/or the arrival of the next ice age. I won’t throw in global conflicts too. Not today anyway.

Back home, I sat in the garden and drank two tins of wine on an empty stomach thinking about how fucked it all is. Oh how 2006 and 2026 of me. If this was a film and not real life, then being forced indoors by an unexpected heavy downpour would be the sobering moment towards the end in which the heroine pulled herself together, opened her laptop and wrote something that might solve or at least soothe the situation, but this is not a film and there really is nothing that will soothe or solve. You might want to blame the pre-hangover for the maudlin tone of this piece but I must tell you, much of it was drafted days ago.

When we watch a romcom, or even a disaster movie, we want and expect a happy ending. Even when we read an article about the probable and catastrophic impacts of climate breakdown, we still expect a glimmer at the end because it allows for our discomfort to pass and means we can get on with feeling the sun on our face, bringing up our children or whatever it is that fills our waking hours and our brains. You're expecting one now, aren't you, since we all perform a version of the billionaire death cult media owners with our “but look at the blossom. Smell the azaelias, spring insists on rolling round again in spite of it all”. Yeah, I can see and smell it too but is telling you that helping?

I know it’s probably not brilliant that when my children talk casually and easily about their futures, I play the devil’s advocate. I say things like, You know you don’t have to get married, don’t you? And you don’t have to have children?

Or maybe it’s worse when I lie and say that it’s exciting to imagine what's ahead? That AI will advance to become less energy-hungry and work for us not against us? That climate catastrophe can and will be averted? That the worst-case scenarios will not come to pass.

Other futures exist, I say like it’ll all work itself out, somehow. But, really, how?

Leave a comment

I joined Memoir in a Month with a sense of curiosity but no real confidence in how to approach it. Imposter syndrome loomed large — who am I to write about what’s happened to me, let alone hope others might want to read about it? The supportive group calls were a great place to share some of these fears and concerns. Little by little, Lindsay gave us some incredibly helpful scaffolding and prompts to begin to nurture and share our fledgling voices. I learned about structure and pacing and all that makes for a compelling piece of writing. But, most of all, Lindsay’s warm encouragement enabled me to discover and own my reasons for writing from life, to show up without apology and to maybe, just maybe, begin to call myself a writer. Thank you for such a wonderful course.

Memoir in a Month participant, 2025

Hi friends,

Tonight it’s our monthly group chat where, for an hour 8-9pm BST, we get together to connect and share how we are and what’s been going on. If you’ve not been along before, it’s like a giant WhatsApp group you’re free to dip in and out of across the hour or you can stick about for the full thing, of course. Sometimes they’re themed, sometimes they’re not.

Tonight, I want to invite you along to chat about your writing and particularly if you’re curious about Memoir in a Month, my group programme on the craft of life writing, returning in June.

More info and sign up here

A reminder of what is included in this month-long course:

• 4 x 2hr live weekly calls (Wednesdays from 3rd - 24th June 7-9pm BST)

• A recording of each call for those who want to work at their own pace / asynchronously

• A 30 min 1:1 call to discuss your work

• Dedicated Slack channel for group chats / cheerleading / sharing

We’ll have a Guest Reader in Week 3, and I’m excited to share who’ll be joining us to talk about their life, their writing and their experience of publication.

Subscribe now

More on Memoir in a Month

Join me and a small group of writers in a compassionate, supportive online space to explore the craft of memoir over four weeks. No matter what stage in your writing journey you’re at, through readings and exercises, you will develop your premise, find your unique voice and explore different aspects of the life writer’s craft from structure and form through to characterisation and the ethics of life writing. You will also work on the nuts and bolts of writing, including how to choose and use a variety of narrative framing devices and how to write dialogue.

The course is open to Members on the Master Tier.

Investment: £225. Flexible payment options available - DM me for more on this. This includes a year’s membership to my publication with access to all other live sessions, monthly group chat, the archive, my audiobook and members’-only posts like this one:

We’ll be in Chat from 8 tonight and you’ll get a ping in your inbox when it opens.

The mirror over the sink area covers most of the wall. Under unforgiving lights, I’m looking at where I’ve caught the sun despite spending most of my time in deep shade. I was in the pool for no more than 15 minutes and it was the only time I was in direct sun. I didn’t have spf on my shoulders, back or chest which seems just as irresponsible in hindsight as it always does. Why am I surprised that I pink up so easily when it’s been the story of my life?

Something curious happens to me when I’m in a place that’s hotter than home. No matter how diligently I’ve looked after myself in the lead-up or how I continue to make broadly sensible food and drink choices while away, I see at least an extra half a stone round my middle almost instantly. I turn to the side to see what my stomach looks like in profile. I breathe in and up and run my left index finger along the old c-section scar. I don’t want to care or even give brain space to the pouchy bit that sits between it and my belly button but it’s not easy for me to be relaxed about it and then I feel ashamed that it is so hard.

I turn further round to inspect my back and remember other hotel bathroom mirrors on other holidays 20, 25 years or longer ago when, after a day of sunbathing, I’d look at this same body noting the white bits, the red bits. I had no better judgement to act against and neither did my friends, but at least they tanned. Oh, to go back and tell that girl no amount of perseverance with the carrot oil and the low factors would turn her skin golden brown.

One year, in Barcelona, on holiday with the friend who has Italian blood, I developed prickly heat which spread from my stomach to my back, then the tops of my arms and my thighs. Maybe I was close to sunstroke since the abiding memory of our day trip to the unfinished towers of The Sagrada Familia is of nausea, chills.

Read more

I'm typing this on my phone on Saturday, which is day four of our holiday. Maybe, finally, we have all settled in and will enjoy the last three days with ease? It takes us this long to adjust. Maybe you…

Read more

I wake from this dream or nightmare with the bathroom light being switched on and my bedroom door being gently closed. It is still dark outside. I check my watch and see it is 5:15am on Monday March 30th which means it is really 4:15am on the day my younger daughter turns 11. At this time on Monday March 30th 2015, I was also awake because of her. I knew I was in labour, which was well timed since that day’s c-section had been long booked. If twice can be called a pattern, my body was known for birthing children early and at exactly 6lbs 5oz. At 30-something weeks and at that precise weight they were both ready to come out even if, at least the first time, I wasn’t.

It occurs to me that parenthood is a very good reason why I don’t write a book a year. Then I think about the successful author who I know personally. As it happens, children or no children, she doesn’t publish a book a year either.

It’s not usual to find a product recall email in my work inbox but today there is one. It has been cascaded from senior management after being received from the Scottish Government, which is also unusual. It reports that tremolite, a type of asbestos, has been found in coloured sand commonly used in children’s crafting kits. And there I had been, concerned about the undisturbed asbestos above the ceiling tiles in the high school and the chemicals in the flea spray I’ve been repeatedly using to try to get on top of a recent infestation.

As in all things, it’ll be years before there’s any potential fallout by which time it will be very hard indeed to tell whether children’s sand, flea spray or any of the myriad chemicals and carcinogens we’re exposed to every day were to blame. All the while, children elsewhere in the world are breathing air that is so thick with toxic matter you can see it and no one will be in any doubt in 10, 20, 30 years or more what caused all the respiratory issues, fertility problems, birth defects and rare cancers.

It may be my child’s birthday but it is also a school day and so one must celebrate in absentia. Everything just comes out when it’s ready, the waiter at the restaurant says to the table beside me as part of the long and tedious explanation of what it means to eat in this place, which is what it means to eat just about anywhere these days. I sip my water and think that in my writing, everything just comes out when it’s ready is true but so is nothing will feel ready until moments before it’s due.

Read more

In Olivia Laing’s 2014 essay, The Magic Box, she describes spending some weeks at Fales Library at NYU where the a…

Read more

There are three people in the salon, none of them paying customers. Near the front, a youngish man on his phone. Further back, at the nail station, a woman who is younger than him. At the very back of the shop an old woman sits in the massage chair. The man welcomes me in English and gestures for me to sit opposite the young woman who is wearing a leather bomber jacket and a surgical mask the likes of which we were all wearing for a while. No, I tell him when he asks, I don’t know what I want exactly. The wall behind the young woman is lined with dozens upon dozens of bottles but there’s no time to look since she’s wordlessly presented me with a plastic box of painted nails on large hoops and is gesturing for me to pick one from this selection as if we’re in a rush.

The choice is baffling I say, in part because my attention is on the nail dust gathered in the inner elbow creases of her jacket. The man translates what I’ve said or something else I haven’t said. Perhaps for me — someone who has been mostly ambivalent about nails — the best choice is plain and light and so I pick a colour that it turns out isn’t a colour at all but the gel they use to make nails stronger before the colour. I can have it on its own, the man says, and I wonder how I’ll explain this to the girls at the end of the school day.

The girls. The way I say it in my head, with two syllables (gir-ills), is not how I ever say it out loud now though a long time ago I probably did. Often, when I think this word, I hear my old therapist or my colleague speaking. I’ve decided they probably grew up in the same place which is a place not far from where I did the later portion of my growing up but far enough away that girls is a two-syllable word.

As she roughs up the surface of my nails and takes a large make up brush to them to swipe off the dust, I’m minded of how I hate nails that look thick or globby but I don’t know whether to say something since I wouldn’t want it to be heard as a criticism of her as-yet-unseen work. She swipes them with an acetone-soaked cotton pad and now I like them far better than I did when I sat down but to get up and leave would be rude so I stay.

She applies the gel with a series of finer and finer brushes and motions for me to put my hand under the lamp when all the fingers on one hand have a coat. The blue light nips and I’m annoyed for not applying factor 50 to the backs of my hands which I do daily some of the year but just now it is March and they’ve been in gloves since October. The UV pen she uses after the next coat is even sorer than the lamp. It must be illegal, I decide, since it takes no time at all to set the gel. The pain creeps in and intensifies long after she’s moved on to the next fingertip. Just like a burn, I think, and recognise that is what is happening and this is what I get for doing something on a whim.

I’m in your nail place, I text my friend when I’ve got a free hand. She jokes about it being her husband’s nail place, which it isn’t at all. This succeeds in making me laugh but then, subsequently, makes me think about the lunch I was at recently. At the lunch, I had become distracted when I noticed that a man I know well had clearly been for a manicure, his nails filed and glossy with clear polish. I didn’t know how to feel about that though of course he is entitled to do what he likes with his own hands.

The girl is finished in no time, rubbing oil across my fingertips that I want to wipe off straight away. I don’t know if it’s cash only in here but I hand some notes to her wondering whether she’ll have to pass them to the man. I step out into the wind. It’s pick-up time.

What did you get did you get cat eye

basic BIAB bitch

V nice tho and is that the first time

In years! THE LIGHT! Prob illegal levels of UVA in her wee pen haha

Yeh it stops hurting after a while dunno if that’s good

LOLZ

I mean it doesn’t hurt me anymore

The man was looking at me like I was a total wimp

I remember the first time I was like WHY IS IT HURTING

You’re an ol’ pro now. I don’t know if it hurt me in the past but 😐 whatever. It looks nice

Read more

Hi friends,

It’s Mother’s Day here in the UK and so, for all who celebrate, I’ve curated a reading list from the archive which you can access straight away by upgrading now. For starters, here’s a song my band of (mostly) mothers enjoy singing…

Read more

The room is in Glasgow city centre right next to Central Station, 111 Union Street.

Studio : 4.16

Entry - Buzzer 416. Please come no more than 5 minutes before your appointment time.

There are a couple of steps when entering the building and then there is a choice of stairs or a lift from there to the 4th floor. When you come out of the lift/reach the top …

Read more

The frost was likely deeper an hour ago, but it still takes me a good few minutes to scrape the windscreen so my fingers are raw and sore for a while after I set off. The news is about, among other things, an iceberg. Scientists have been watching the romantically named A23a for 40 years following the moment it calved from the Antarctic shelf. Back then, it was declared the biggest ever recorded. Bigger than the entire Greater London area. Across the intervening decades, those following it have reported its relative stability, yet over the past year it has finally and spectacularly disintegrated. The curious tone of the news item means I don’t know whether to worry about this in a climate emergency way or adopt a less alarmist perspective. I consider switching channel but then remember they’re all going to offer me exactly the same news from exactly the same source, just packaged up in slightly different language as befits their various audiences.

access every essay for £39 annual

My mother’s house is warm and so as soon as I step over the door I take off the jacket, hat and gloves I needed outside. It was never reliably or uniformly warm when I was growing up. On days like this, even with the Rayburn blazing in the kitchen and the open fire spitting in the back room, you would delay going to the bathroom for as long as you could and hover over the toilet seat when you got there. At bedtime, you’d fight over the portable oil heater then in the mornings, you’d get dressed under the covers with the electric blanket on.

I had hoped it would get easier to untangle my complex feelings about a messy adolescence marked by long stints caring for my mother and grandfather in this house but each time I return I realise again it hasn’t.

Read more

✨Global Top 100 Parenting Publication✨

Hi friends,

Tonight at 8pm UK time, writers who joined the recent run of The Chain will gather online to hear some of the special pieces of flash memoir created in one of our four 40-minute writing sprints. Free subscribers can catch up on each week’s prompt piece now, before they slip behind the paywall.

I’m sharing the piece I wrote in the final session in response to our final prompt here for the Membership. If you would like to read on, upgrade to my new Membership tier, The Reader, which is for you if you’re here for each Sunday’s essay in full including my entire archive and my memoir, Held in Mind:

The Reader £39 annual

Or join The Creator tier for £65 annual to access live journaling and expressive writing courses including Seasonal Sessions and Writing for Better Health, which both return after a revamp later in the year. Our monthly Group Chat restarts at 8pm on Sunday 29th March, too.

Read more

✨#18 Rising and Global Top 100 Publication✨

Asking “What Now?” as we rattle roughshod over the peaks and troughs of midlife.

Facilitating your therapeutic journaling + memoir-writing journey in joyous community.

Hi Members,

Today’s post is newsy, keeping you up to date with a few changes to the Membership.

I’m launching a new annual subscription tier called

Read more

Reportedly, parts of Scotland haven’t seen any sun at all in almost a month which feels appropriate in these times and accu…

Read more

• New here? Hi! Welcome to the final week on this run of our experiment in flash memoir co-creation, The Chain. This week’s prompt piece, written by in a 40-minute sprint last Sunday in response to week three’s prompt piece by , is free for all subscribers to read. Upgrade to paid if you want access to our writers’ own responses, posted to the…

Read more