I came to visit a Ghanaian friend who runs a very tiny, very humble business. When he had no customers he came and sat down. He saw tears in my eyes and leaned forward to plant his hands flat on the table and make me hear. He said: Cathoel, the strongest woman I’ve ever met. […]
I had a beautiful friendship once, with a woman who is also a writer. We read each other’s works in a kind of ecstasy of communion, making notes at every page. Our conversation was easy and delving, muscular and gracious, exploratory and frank. Then men who wore make up began appearing on the covers of […]
I still spend an hour every morning coughing earnestly and can’t laugh without coughing. I thought I was trapped for life. So I hear you and I just want to say: nicotine cravings last four minutes in the body. The rest is mindgame. If you can ‘delay, drink water, do something else’ for four minutes […]
Yesterday when he asked I told a trans-identified friend over coffee, No: you’re not a woman. I told him how male-privileged he sounded, to me, when he dreamily explained playing around with his prescribed hormones so as to reconstruct the experience of a menstrual cycle. He felt the reason he wasn’t experiencing it for real […]
One thing I love in Ghana is people seem so good and kind. Not all of them, I guess, but daily life seems to me founded in a beautiful mutual respect and helpfulness. I watched the ‘mate’ in a grinding and crowded trotro (a tiny bus) jump down and help the man who was slowly […]
A friend of mine took her own life, from herself and from the rest of us, a little while back, perhaps eighteen months. After a long time another of her friends whom I didn’t know wrote to me in Berlin saying she had left behind a painting for me. We met when he was in […]
A few years ago I was living in Berlin and it felt indefinite. I had not made plans to stay and felt unable to leave. I felt homesick and unsure and one day I asked on facebook if anybody felt like sending me a postcard through the mail. I just love postcards. Occasionally I send […]
Pedalling home along a tree-lined street which is set aside for bicycles, I heard a crash. A man reaching up to put his brown wine bottle in the brown glass bin had tipped forward and toppled like a tree – at first I thought he must be drunk. There was nobody about, just him and me. […]
Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me. It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old […]
My friend has died. She was very courageous and had cancer. She was a photographer, a maker of exquisite works. She was Dutch and chose euthanasia when the pain she was suffering became, after months, too unbearable. Now her partner is left alone to garden. She was wise and quiet in her mind, an insightful, […]
Thinking of love today and how it has such deep transformative power in our lives. I so long longed for people who would understand me and be willing to be understood. Those friends and those loving acquaintances are everything to me, the topsoil on the earth’s surface or maybe the oceans which caress its journey, […]
Imagine a lake. It is vast and extends, if you swim out to the middle and gaze round, at either end as far as the horizon. We set off very early in the morning from town and have cycled for hours, climbing endless sandy paths. It’s ferociously hot, nearly forty degrees, we have left the […]
I was in a bookshop yesterday with my friend just arrived from Copenhagen. It is around the corner from the bookshop where he and I first met. We met because he was standing gazing at the books in the English-speaking section when I visited to see how the ones I’d left were doing, and I […]
In my pajamas at 6pm: pajamas are my favourite clothes. The phone rings. It’s a woman I spent a recent evening immersed in, such kinship, a friend who’s an acquaintance, we hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years. We used once to live in the same tiny village, an island in the centre of town. […]
