Ellen’s Substack

Relief

Ellen Arnison — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 18:35:33 GMT

Clouds hang weighty like udders and grey-soft as bovine bellies.

Stagnant air thick with dirt and the echoes of disappointment. Yet where it bothers to stir out of torpor, it’s is tender, kind even.

On clammy skin like the gasp of a lover, a soothing stroke: A tiny comfort when change is as inevitable as gravity.

Anxiety circles and crows scream, the last revellers, beer-lipped and resentful, fill our slumbering streets.

The party’s over.

Spring lambs amble and bicker, restless as a broken down commuter train.

What’s going on?

The fat drops dot spots on the rocky path.

Petrichor rises.

Photo by Thomas Couillard on Unsplash

Jump

Ellen Arnison — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 17:16:01 GMT

I’ve been on the edge of this pier before, toes bluish and curled around plank-ends. Contemplating the solid block of water that surges beneath me like a breath that can’t be held. Jump, now. Go on. And I did, oh how I jumped. And again I clambered out though the weeds clung to my ankles. Shivering and depleted: When I hauled my clothes back on, they felt strange all day. Everyone could see how wrong it felt. But all paths took me back along the splintered wood. The same sunrise geese formed up overhead. What if it’s different this time?

Photo by Matt Benson on Unsplash

Self care

Ellen Arnison — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 17:09:50 GMT

Because, let’s face it, who else is going to? But how? Is it a bag of crisps, or a sofa-slump telly binge? Is it a gleaming new pair of boots? Might be. A little (or a family-sized pack) of what you fancy does you good, they say. But what do they really know about you? If they did, they’d say ‘do the thing you least want to do right now’, that’s what’ll make you feel the best. Cook with real ingredients (some of which are green), move your body, and see real people in the big bad out-there. Express yourself.

Photo by Mustafa Bashari on Unsplash

School's out

Ellen Arnison — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 16:37:29 GMT

Shiny trousered, too short shirt. Inky tattoo on the forearm. The last uniform hit the floor (short of the laundry basket: the natural flight path). Remembering the first one I bent to harvest (a tiny red sweatshirt 2003 or maybe 4) and the thousands of bendings, washings, foldings, puttings away, findings when lost – apparently – forever, buyings, thriftings, and punctuations of my life. Timing of the purchases around growth spurts. As the last echo of ‘did you put your uniform in the laundry?’ rebounds off habitual apathy, a feature on the landscape of my life gracefully folds itself out of sight.

Photo by Maxim Tolchinskiy on Unsplash

Hamstrung

Ellen Arnison — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:11:45 GMT

My sofa is a life raft, adrift in a sea of uncompleted tasks, bumping up against the debris of cancellations. Not now. Maybe later. I just can’t. Soon. Yet, the guilt skulks like an iceberg on the horizon the bit I can’t see waiting to sink me to the inky dark. Of course you must rest, they say. I jury rig my body grunting and tilted across the room to the shore of the kitchen counter and the light beacon of the fridge. Hold tight. Don’t let go, if it hits the floor, you’ll never get it back up again.

It’s not ‘I’m sorry’, ‘I was wrong’, or even ‘I love you’. I can’t even write the words. My body, for now, has failed. I can’t bend, can’t reach, can’t think. Forget nipping here, popping there or running around. A soft-flesh piece of me has frayed, rended like a pocket caught in a door handle and, as well as a bruise, I’ve got a dilemma, one I’m-ill equipped to tackle (even with an NHS crutch) do I take step after deep-breath-swear-quietly step to continue my tasks or do I, could I even, admit I’m broken and ask for some help?

I have been diagnosed with a chronic inability to ask for help. Ideopathic, they say, possibly epigenetic. Yes, it’s serious. Sometimes life-limiting. Mostly managed by bloody mindedness and a somewhat obsessive tendency to control all variables. Occasionally though, there’s a flare-up. No one knows the reason - could be stress, dumb luck or simply the Impact of Other People. Symptoms include hibernation, seizing the TV remote not the day, and, in extreme cases, contemplating the dating apps to recruit someone whose job (theoretically) might be to help, despite no evidence of the success of this approach. Currently, no known cure.

Written in the aftermath of a very inconvenient hamstring tear.

Photo by jurien huggins on Unsplash

First Cut

Ellen Arnison — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:16:26 GMT

First cut

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, intentions or behaviours to non-human entities. Derived from the Greek words anthropos (human) and morphe (form), it spans everything from giving a pet a “funny voice” to assigning human motivations to weather patterns.

Grass heads nod in the kindly May breeze. Doe, a good mother, is patient as her kid feeds. A long gaze and I think we see each other. Then, dainty as a dancer, she hops the fence. Take care on the road, lady.

I tell my children – off in their own lives, beyond the reach of magical thinking – about the deer and her baby. They humour me and I miss them, hard, briefly. Regret a passing cyclone. Take care in the world, boys.

Silage is a fermented, high-moisture fodder primarily used to feed livestock like cattle and sheep, especially during the winter when fresh grazing is unavailable.

I hear the tractor before the sun ricochets off the cab roof. First cut, fair forecast. Of course. My doe, dashing clear, heard it too. The field turns green corduroy before the early coffee cools. The grass came up fast, a generously damp start to the year that’s sensing the squeeze. Compensation.

She comes back, bolting wild from the shelter of hawthorn foam. Leaping windrows. She stops and paws the ground. Through my binoculars I see her heart breaking. She can’t make him move. Nuzzles, licks. It’s hopeless. She sinks to her knees. A vigil. Restless corvids waddle closer, malice in black feathers.

I tell my children: He’s dead: she left him in the long grass and he didn’t know to run.

Roe mother circles, nudges, circles, nudges. And there’s a pebble in my heart that turns and turns: Did I leave them in the long grass, do they know when to run? Are they taking opportunities while watching for danger? Making good choices?

A buzzard scatters the crows, hunches. The deer watches.

How will she survive this grief? I ask my children.

It’s sad mum, but it’s just another deer. Forget about it, they say.

The day recompenses with a soothing sundown the colour of fading bruises.

Post script: Days later a doe, dead on the verge next to the rolled wreck of a young man’s vehicle. Beside her the young man is frantic with escape and the replay of thud and the final look in the deer’s eyes. He will never tell his mother how it felt.

Photo by Ella Baxter on Unsplash

Inheritance

Ellen Arnison — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:01:21 GMT

That’ll be the extra log on the fire, a pantry hoard.

The stocks laid in, set for a drifted white stranding...

or some other inevitability.

Her heart-race at the door slam.

A future safely corralled. Freedom’s flight.

A stab of bitter joy at a song carried over the valley...

twisting with the branches, stroking the blossoms it passes.

My hand on the earth. Listening.

That knowledge.

When they fear you for a witch, though their mouth says ‘good morning’.

Dog by the hearth.

A tail’s wary beat. Watchful.

The dark wakening, the realisation.

This time, they aren’t passing on by.

Photo by Jack Taylor on Unsplash

Gruntled

Ellen Arnison — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:45:55 GMT

You’d have thought, after considering ruth, kempt and couth, that gruntled folk would be somewhat contented. I was going to write wry words and bring my dog’s satisfied grunting on receipt of a belly rub to support my thesis. But no. In the 1600s gruntling was a what you did when you were not pleased (cousin to a grumble) and the ‘dis’ was an intensifier. It was only when P G Wodehouse had a fiddle in 1926, that gruntled came with a grin. So there you go – a little gruntled that I was wrong, but pleased to learn something new.

Photo by Jacqueline Munguía on Unsplash

Parliament

Ellen Arnison — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:40:47 GMT

Owls would be much better. We have benches full of liars and sneaks who squark, flail their feathers and fling mud in the face of truth hoping that no one will notice how far they fall short. Their cry: ‘it wisnae me.’ What huge heads on narrow shoulders to think themselves special enough to deserve whatever they want while the rest of us sob through shrunken impoverished lives. Ambitious elbows akimbo. They try to cover their opportunist arses with such diligence they can’t possibly have any time or energy left to serve their constituents, which is us, by the way.

Photo by Sonder Quest on Unsplash

Trim pickings

Ellen Arnison — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:26:18 GMT

Photo by Daria Andriianova on Unsplash

It grows; I cut it. Or rather, I visit a young woman who flashes her scissors and seems to care about my holiday plans. In between, I wash it, apply ‘product’, realise grey hair even feels different. I resign from the faff of hairdryers and squinting in mirrors to see the back. The back of my head is an undiscovered territory, yet it couldn’t be closer to me if it tried. And on it grows until the next time I’m on that big chair recounting the edited best bits of the past weeks to the young woman and her scissors.

Swipe. Right?

Ellen Arnison — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:34:40 GMT

Once upon a time people learned to write abs were very happy with thesis. For many years if someone wanted to pass on a massage they wrote it down abs the recipient would reed it. Everyone was very happy. Then one fat someone decides it woods be better if we threw our pens away and did thongs more quickly on our phone. In order to hell they invented autocorrect because machines were now cleaner nice to know what we really meant. Soot all the pebbles on the lands started getting extruded upset at the nonsuch they received on those phobes.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Life and soul

Ellen Arnison — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:33:12 GMT

When you live with a drinker you learn to spot when their focus has shifted to an internal, eternal happy hour. All senses vigilant: smelling sour spilled stuff, hearing a booze-fat tongue, feeling the shame, inevitability of plans awry. Until, no point in making them in the first place. But still there is the power to shock. A lie so bald it’s breathtaking. A stash when you thought you’d found them all. The times you bargained with yourself – thinking magically – and find a way to put up with it for a little longer: Things might change. Things don’t change.

Photo by Charles "Duck" Unitas on Unsplash

Missed connections

Ellen Arnison — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:24:13 GMT

I slept in for the prime of my life: the alarm didn’t go off. Instead I woke to the accusation of the sun scornfully mid-sky. The numbers on the clock blur and form and I see it, clear as day, I’m late. While I was messing about with the many bad decisions and unanticipated consequences, living for the moment, before it was fashionable, my train left without me and it’s not coming back. I’m here on the draughty station peering down the track until an unsuitable hulk belches to a halt. Of course I’ll climb aboard. Where to? Who cares!

Photo by Adam Chang on Unsplash

AI and some men I have known

Ellen Arnison — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:02:20 GMT

Confident and quick, or at least quick to step into the spotlight… ‘wait, I’m thinking,’ it says, like you’ve got nothing better to do than watch it ponder. Ubiquitous. Appearing, entitled, in palm of your hand, at work, in your house. ‘I’m here to help,’ it says, but somehow you aren’t sure. Sensing doubt it flatters ‘great question, fantastic idea’ when all you want is a way to get rid of rodents. And so assertive – tenuous conclusions delivered as fact contaminated with imaginings, but ‘how dare you even accuse me of fabrication, of bullshitting, I’m simply not capable of it’.

Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash

Flash of drama

Ellen Arnison — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:40:14 GMT

A lighthouse shrieks: ‘Stay away, do not touch me, I’m making this flashing fuss for your own good.’ Yet the darkness swirls with myth. Stories eddy with tales of sirens singing from rocks, of stopped clocks, dead men eternally waving. Insanity spins the lens, thick as your arm, wooden wheels and their unspeakable grease to the rhythm of an Admiralty Chart. Polished daily, round and never failing, hellish prisms converge. A nautical imperative. Gaze, count until the beam casts shadows over constallations, intimidates phosphorescence. Take your bearing from the towering gas light. Then go about your voyage, if you can.

Photo by Quaid Lagan on Unsplash

My kind of party

Ellen Arnison — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:56:33 GMT

I crave to be alone, sigh out loud at the final ‘bye’. When there’s no one here, I can be myself - let my face say what it wants, tell my secrets to the dog and eat ice cream for dinner. I can take off my identities and ease into blob-being without their constraints. Like unclipping and slipping off the underwires of my existence.

Just when I wonder if I’d ever get fed up with the novelty of shapelessness – where will I ooze off to next? Rules arrive with other people, bustle up the path scattering their shoulds, and ought-tos.

Photo by Daniele Colucci on Unsplash

Too angry for words

Ellen Arnison — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:49:25 GMT

I’m too angry to write about the way that, even years after the witch pyre ash is cold, we are still fighting.

I’m too angry to write about the men who didn’t care enough about the girls to save them.

I’m too angry to write about the women who didn’t care enough about the girls to save them.

I’m too angry to write about the way that everything is run by men who don’t care about the girls.

I’m too angry to write about ‘not all men’.

I’m too angry to write about all the ways we should be better.

Photo by youssef naddam on Unsplash

Once upon your time

Ellen Arnison — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:21:04 GMT

Verum Curriculum Vitae

Tell me your story, won’t you? Your real story: Not the one from your billboard – job, kids, brand new car – not that, no one cares. Tell me the tales you hardly visit. The ones that never feel sunlight. The things that grew thorns in your memory, that live in dark caves guarded by catastrophe dragons. The memories that drip curdling acid and leave footprints in your joy. These are the stories I want to hear. I want to see how brave you are when you chase the reluctant words out into the day. I want to know how it ends.

Photo by Shanti Donato on Unsplash

How things grow

Ellen Arnison — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:01:02 GMT

When a branch is wrenched from its trunk, eventually the scarred bark stops weeping sticky sap. And fewer beasties drown in the ooze. The wound grows, spreads, distorts - hard and rising as the tree grows on. Ring inside ring. Some days, most days, you don’t notice the distortion, the evidence of trauma. It’s a feature of this time’s landscape. Unremarkable. But there are days when it’s the only thing you can see: a wrong in nature. A nesting place for what-might-have-beens, fledging a generation of sorrows to return each spring. Maybe the tree is stronger: it is forever changed.

Today is my brother’s 55th birthday. He died in 2009.

Photo by Jon Moore on Unsplash

A Visitor

Ellen Arnison — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:11:35 GMT

Death walked into the room, set down his scythe, took a seat in the corner and flicked through a magazine from the year before last.

What do you want? I’m not expecting you today. I don’t want to be rude: You’re not on the calendar at this time.

He didn’t answer me. He sat in the gloom and his blank face watched from under his cloak. I pretended to ignore him as I went about my day, my life. His dark breath prickling at the back of my neck as I worked harder than ever at the- business of existing.