In the best case scenario, it’s all just getting very dull, isn’t it? Well, really, it’s been dull for a long time. There was a hazy and non-specific light flickering at the end of the Corona virus tunnel after that jubilant announcement of a vaccine in November, but with non-committal information about when we may be able get that jab in the arm that will allow us to hug family again – and whether or not the jab will even work – it feels like we’ve just cracked into mile 21 of an ultra marathon: the cramp and fatigue are...
Last week a friend invited me to join her bookclub. With trepidation, and as a nod to my recent resolution to say “yes” more often than “no”, I accepted. Six months ago, I might not have… You see, for over half a decade, books and I have been going through a rough patch. Since becoming a mum, the prolificness of my reading has suffered. Instead of devouring books in every free moment I could find, I began to read only at night, and then only a few pages before unconsciousness beckoned and my eyes would close. It would take me...
When Back To School isn’t what we imagined
- 18 August, 2020
My last baby is starting school next week, and as we dive into this latest round of “the last of the firsts”, my emotions are bubbling up and spilling out of my fingertips. I feel the weight of the importance of this moment, the bitter-sweetness of something that will never come again. I feel her excitement and her pride, almost as intense as my own, and I feel the space widening painfully between us as I pull back one more step to make room for her ever-spreading wings.
And then, for me, there’s the other feeling. The one that lies dormant...
It’s about now that I start to feel my resolve wavering.
Weeks away from another international move, we’ve reached the stage that I now think of as the special kind of purgatory that lies between decision and action. The days that stretch ahead where boxes are not yet packed and normal service is expected to continue – snacks to be prepared, playdates made, yoghurt wiped from the walls, toys pulled out and packed away again, dinner served, stories read, little foreheads kissed goodnight – all while my mind races on ahead of me. All while my head tells me that to...
We didn’t come here for ever.
We didn’t mean to stay much longer than a year. We never intended to make the Bahamas our home; we didn’t mean to fall in love with it, and we could never have predicted that from the first moment we got that white white coral sand in our shoes it would feel like it had always been there.
But that was what happened.
Two years ago next month we arrived on this island with our belongings in 10 boxes and – as with so many leaps of faith in life – found that the risk had been...
Reader, ‘tis the season. As the mists and mellow fruitfulness begin to gently settle themselves on the hills in the place I was born, here we greet an altogether different season. Here we watch the hurricanes, and here it is the season of fear.
I imagine you too will have been watching the hurricanes this season. Harvey in Texas, where the flooding was as big as everything else in that great state. And Irma across the Caribbean where this weekend the tiny islands that make up paradise were left naked and utterly defenceless against the viciousness of the strongest storm ever...
This evening we’re going to a little farewell gathering for some friends who are leaving the island to go back home. This will definitely not be the last time we say goodbye to new friends here, but it is the first. And as I feel the loss of the great energy they bring to our social circle here and the gap their absence will leave behind – it’s getting me thinking about the nature of goodbyes.
In my adult life I’ve said the word “goodbye” a lot as we’ve moved around from place to place. I live far away from where I...
I have just recently packed up my worldly possessions for the fourth time. My family and I are holed up in temporary accommodation while we wait for visas to come through allowing us to move on to a new country and a new life… There have been a couple of nasty surprises over the last few months – our visas were delayed, our home was let out before we could request to stay on longer, and our new (one bedroom!) apartment has no bath tub and no microwave – two items I would previously have considered relatively indispensable with two kids under...
