I don’t know if my brother liked Pink Floyd, but in many ways, he was a crazy diamond. There was a lot I didn’t know about him. My half-brother, to be correct. I didn’t even know he existed until I was eighteen, when my father told me about the son he'd had to a previous [...]
On the eve of my eighteenth birthday, I wrote a sonnet for my future self, so that when I was older and wiser, I could read it and look back on my youth and smile. Several decades later, here I am, on the eve of another significant birthday. So I'm re-reading that sonnet, and looking [...]
Before going any further, full disclosure. If you’re someone who hated your schooldays and never wants to be reminded of them, then maybe this blog post isn’t for you. But on the other hand, why not give it a go? My own schooldays weren’t exactly plain sailing – there were some pretty grim experiences, some [...]
My would-be father was murdered at the age of thirty. Peter Donald Fox, British journalist, shot dead on the beautiful island of Cyprus, the place where the goddess of love was born. But the terrorist who killed Peter was full of hate, not love. I don’t know what kind of gun he used, because the [...]
‘Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget. Should have kept a journal.’ I came across those words while reading Ian McEwan’s latest novel, ‘Lessons’, and they lifted my mid-winter spirits astronomically. Why? Because keeping a journal is at least one New Year’s Resolution I don’t have to worry about, seeing as I’ve [...]
‘Wow, you all looked so glamorous back then!’ my daughter said to me the other day, with more than a touch of envy. We were browsing through a selection of old photo albums from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and happened to stop at one particularly fetching snapshot: the one I ended up selecting [...]
Yes I know, it’s already halfway through January, so why am I writing a post about New Year’s resolutions? Well the thing is, at first I’d resolved definitely NOT to make any resolutions this year, just for once, because I never stick to them anyway and they never work out and what’s the bloody point, [...]
Wendy Skorupski 