house of gingerbread

So it's Friday night, I am in my pajamas and baking sticky gingerbread for dinner. About to devour some more of Shirley Hazzard's insightful Greene on Capri, about her friendship with Graham Greene. She calls ...read more

why I blame myself for being raped (hint: not because it’s my fault)

All my life I have been me. I didn't realise it at first. Presumably, as we say of infants, I was an extension of the everything, was my mother, I was the flitting shadows of ...read more

her blonde fall

Today I pulled my ugg boots out of the back of the closet and yanked them on to walk down to the nearest coffee shop. Under the lowered sky the world feels more like a ...read more

stitch grandeur

In Berlin people do all kinds of things out loud in public. You can buy drugs, smoke pot in the street and drink beers, you can walk with your dog into restaurants and boutiques. You ...read more

the dark lit me home

I rode home after writing in a large dim room in silence with four other people. The evening blue was ripening to black, like a terrible bruise. In the dark other, unlighted bicycles hurtled past, ...read more

where it hurts

What a strange feeling to watch Mitch Winehouse, father of the Amy who died young, telling the camera after her death how he felt it was not his place to save her. You can't force ...read more

light at night ja

Sometimes at night I like to talk to myself in the dark, on the way home, on my bike and then Berlin you drive me crazy with desire for you, the trees which flicker over ...read more

blue last

The sun is shining over Berlin today and I feel so glad of the blue it lights. All too soon it will be dark all the time, a world half-awake, candles staining fogged daylight windows ...read more

of wheels & wings

Today a day of wheels and wings. On the high street I set myself an errand, which failed, as the Turkish woman who repairs garments has locked her shop and flown south for the summer, ...read more