February 6, 2009 – 11:19 am
Snow reminds me of home. No matter how long I have lived here, no matter how much I love England, I still don’t feel right here. Things taste and smell wrong. But snow blurs things; the lines between worlds. It smudges time like a thumbrint on charcoal.
And then I am in two places at once. [...]
November 30, 2008 – 5:41 pm
One of my good friends was born and raised in Sarajevo. Before the war came her mother (a cynic by nature) urged her husband to sell their flat, take the children and move to Belgrade. But her husband (an idealist) didn’t think there would BE a war, and if there was any conflict that it [...]
November 1, 2008 – 11:57 am
Looking back, I realise that I lived out my teenage years as though I had not received a vital memo, and that everybody knew something I didn’t. That contributed a lot to my shyness and anxiety, my perpetual nagging sense of being out of place. (This sense was naturally reinforced by my peers in the [...]
January 17, 2008 – 3:13 pm
Suicide runs through my father’s family. Whether it’s the slow doing in of the self through alchohol or overwork, or the more explosive methods favoured by my Georgian cousins, at least once in every generation it shows itself.
Wakes up in someone. The sirensong in the blood. The yearning for oblivion. The long sleep.
On particularly bad [...]
March 26, 2006 – 11:14 am
A few days ago, had he been alive, my father would have turned 60 years old. It is an odd thought – the image of him as a young, fit man is tattood firmly into my brain and I almost cannot imagine him aging. When I do think of him as older it’s simply a [...]
February 17, 2006 – 3:51 am
Z: How was your seminar today?
N:It was good. A bit intense. All about childhood bereavement and how we can bring up death in therapy with children.
Z: Perhaps you could just hand them a balloon on which it’s written “Your Mum’s Dead”.
Death was something that shaped the fabric of my family long before my father had [...]
December 10, 2004 – 12:24 pm
Most days the surface of my mind is placid and still, turqoise, cobalt and indigo blue. A sea mind.
The surface stillness may go on for days or weeks or months. And then sometimes, something happens a fragment of thought or feeling or memory erupts from the depths like a leaping marlin.
Today, I was shopping for [...]
August 13, 2004 – 7:34 am
It’s quiet. I tend to miss out on how peaceful the early morning can be because I’m usually doing my best to sleep through it.
Montenegro is the only place where I rise early- mostly due to the combined necessity of drought and heat. In Montenegro 6am is lovely and fresh and a bit cold. The [...]
For me, memory is diving down. Sliding down towards the deep. Surrendering thought of where light and air is and just pushing down, down, down, to see how far you can go, whether there is a bottom you can touch or something tangible to bring up as a prize, like handfuls of sand clutched in [...]
