Yesterday morning, I led a journaling workshop and started it by reading out Maggie Smith’s poem ‘Rain, New Year’s Eve’. In it, the poet recalls a moment where her young daughter describes the rain as a broken piano, ‘playing the same note over and over’. ‘Already she knows loving the world/means loving the wobbles/you can't shim,’ Smith writes, ‘the creaks you can't/oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,/MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.’
Read MoreIt’s been a difficult winter. The hardest one I can ever remember actually… without meaning to sound too dramatic about it. But, like a little miracle: spring has arrived. It’s here (outside my window there’s a single, skinny daffodil bobbing in the wind). And thank God for it…
Read MoreDear September, you began with the saddest of news. With dark clothes, and borrowed blue handkerchiefs, and photographs that made my heart ache. In your pale light, we cooked up a feast – creamy lemon chicken with mushroom rice, dark chocolate orange and cardamom brownies topped with pistachios – and ate it together: lighting candles, sitting close, lingering long at the table in the golden light, remembering. Because: ‘when you are sad, you need to eat good food’…
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