Forget the turkey. (Poor thing – but that’s another theme altogether.) Forget the presents. Forget the dressing-up, the pomp, the nicely-laid table, and all the stress and expense leading up to this special day. There’s only one thing that really counts, and I’m sure everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving knows what it is. Yes, of course. [...]
My first love? Hmm. That's a tricky one. Was it the gorgeous, dark-wavy-haired Colombian teenager I fell in love with when I was eleven? The one at my international school who said ‘hi’ to me once? Nope. Okay, was it the equally gorgeous Italian waiter in Llandudno when I was fourteen? The one who gave [...]
I first wrote this poem years ago, but it returned to me after learning of the recent death of a young Ukrainian woman following a car accident. She was very close to her mother, who rushed to her side in hospital. I post it now in their memory, and in honour of that bond. NO [...]
I’ve always envied people who live in the present, rather than in the past. People who don’t have nostalgia hangups; who don’t go on about if only, or if I could have my time again, or those were the days … Trouble is, I adore that song: Those were the days, my friend. Gorgeous melody, [...]
When I was a teenager, the wealth of stories my mother raised me on began to resonate more deeply. All of them — memories of her youth — were exciting, romantic, and drenched in settings that cried out to be immortalised by literature or cinema. By then, I was already writing humble novellas, short stories [...]
Peter Fox was my mother’s fiancé, murdered in Cyprus in 1956. His remains have rested in an unmarked grave for nearly seventy years: his bones buried deep under the hard, hot soil of the British Cemetery of Nicosia. These past seventy years, Peter has been nothing more than a missing name, a missing stone, a [...]
It’s Good Friday today. That might or might not mean anything to you. To be honest, it’s never meant much to me — despite my many attempts over the years to feel the solemnity of the day. But today, it does mean something. Today, the weight and permanence of death — and the hope of [...]
Wendy Skorupski 