I am not sporty! I am however combative. I grew up in a three bedroomed Victorian terrace house in a Yorkshire village - arguing with my father over the kitchen and dining room table. There was no stopping us. We didn’t agree over politics, rock n’roll and everything else going on in the world. He read the Daily Express. I couldn’t stand it. We relished a good verbal battle. Belated apologies to the rest of the family – my sister, brother and mother – who I am certain did not enjoy these extended shouting matches.

Fortunately when I was sixteen, I learnt to play tennis at school. That instantly provided an outlet for my need to fight. The class system already in action. I passed my eleven plus, went to Ilkley Grammar where we had tennis courts plus a very keen teacher, Mr Beringer. I wasn’t any good really. I mean I played as part of the third couple in the second team. But there I was - little me, all of five feet – out on the courts bashing balls about. I am still best friends with one of the first team but she stopped playing years ago.

It wasn’t a straight trajectory after that. College - no tennis at all. Too much drinking scrumpy in Portsmouth. The squat years – no tennis, too busy trying to get work as a freelance journalist and going to late night gigs. And then after my son Marlon was born, I discovered that one of the musicians I’d met – Caralinda Booth who played keyboards with the Thompson Twins – also played tennis.

That was it, we started playing regularly in Regent’s Park. It was funny and painful. We were both competitive and both the same standard. It was intense. We both wanted to win. And then whatever happened – we’d discuss it with passion in minutiae afterwards. I think we could laugh at ourselves but I’m not sure. We had to agree to what constituted co-operative competitiveness as opposed to sheer bloody competitiveness. So no dodgy line calls. That was the late 80s. The coach turned out to be a legendary cat burglar, that’s another story.

By the mid-90s, I had split up with my long term partner and father of my son, Mario, and moved to Kensal Green/Harlesden. Ladbroke Grove dwellers – where I’d been living – were scornful. What was I doing moving up there? Little did they or I realise that there was an oasis of a tennis club just ten minutes’ walk from my flat. Oh Elmwood, little did I realise what you’d mean to me.

It took me a couple of years to join. I was struggling to survive financially on my own. I eventually joined mainly because I wanted my son to be able to play. We’d go up there and hit balls at each other. I really wanted to have an activity that I could do with him. Hmmm, later I even paid to have him coached. Now of course, he doesn’t play. But I do.

Gradually I got to know a few people at the club. There weren’t many members – maybe 150. There was a ramshackle club house. There is still a ramshackle club house but it is going to change. There was beautiful grass, lots of it, six outdoor courts, and a wonderfully eccentric gentleman called Patrick who looked after the grounds and would often have a pocket full of seeds that he would scatter. He got this oasis registered as an SSSI.

I’m not sure how it happened but at some stage – it was because of my organisational skills rather than my tennis ones – I became Ladies Captain and friends with a sense of humour gave me a Ladies Captain badge that they claimed I’d always wanted. It was a struggle to get a team of women players together.

But my dear friend Nikki who was a good player used to help me with food for the home games. We played together every Wednesday because we were friends. She was better than me but we’d always have a good game. And there’d be a lot of very loud guffawing. When we were both on form, we’d run, scream and laugh a lot.

Nikki became a close friend through us playing together. And I really like that. Activities with friends rather than just talking. For year, mutual friends had said I’d love Nikki. And I did. She had a house just around the corner, did yoga, adored dancing – a mutual thang, and was a stylist for the most theatrical fashion shoots in Vogue Italy and Japan. She was a gem and eventually in 2021, moved to Frome to a gorgeous cottage. She died at the beginning of 2023 from an aggressive form of leukaemia. It was crazily unexpected. And unbearable.

I often remember how many times she saved me in style crises! She created a head dress for my 60^th – I’d hand dyed the grouse feathers pink, bought sparkles and a head band but dared not stick them – Nikki took it all in hand and added her own velvet pansy magic. Oh and the time that I needed a vulva painting on my back for a Feminst Armwrestling party, Nikki got out her lipstick and hey presto.

The thing is I’ve always been freelance and worked from home. Elmwood has provided me with life and community when I’m not in my hermithood. For me, it’s perfect to play singles in the morning. It frames my day in a good way. Sometimes at 8 30, sometimes these days at 10. And I still play singles at almost 73. I’m still an average player but I am proud to be still running around the court. And screaming a lot when I miss a killer shot.

I am thankfully no longer Ladies Captain – I did it and sat on the Committee for six years – but I organise the occasional Ladies Plate event and have connected the club to the local boys’ secondary school Newman Catholic College which is just behind my flat and that is proving to be a fruitful relationship. Now a group of students play every week at the club and one of the Elmwood coaches, Will, is getting increasingly involved with them.

I play singles at least twice a week and doubles at the weekend if I can. My Tuesday partner, Di - I met at the local gym in the early 2000s, she was a deputy head who has become a psychotherapist - and she’s absolutely brilliant at winning. The psychology of winning is often the answer. We have lots of battles. We are both determined but somehow she gets there more often. It’s a subject of deep frustration for me, but also I guess continues my love of the constant battle. Thanks dad.

And Di has always been there in the times of crisis with a compassionate word, hug or words of good advice. She’s from Manchester so there’s that Northern thing going on. There have been arguments over scores, over line calls, but we find a way to get over them. And I do have to laugh. I may play singles and I may be combative but I do forget the score. Sometimes it’s like the Carry On Across The Courts.

And my Wednesday partner is Louisa who also happens to be chair of the club. I hope I have her ear from time to time. I remember when Louisa – post-divorce – arrived in a house over the road ten years ago and seemed shy. Not so now. Louisa is a mediator and we have gradually discovered we are both fascinated by group dynamics. And flowers. And our children. And questions about society. We became friends over post-match cups of tea at her place and walks around the local park when it was too rainy to play. One of our favourite activities in the summer is to go around the neighbourhood literally smelling the roses. So it was brilliant when she gifted me a David Austin Gertrude Jekyll - which smells heavenly - for my seventieth birthday.

Annoyingly, Louisa has got much better at tennis. At first for months on end, I always beat her. Now she beats me more often than not. All of us try to get the psychological edge on each other by out-thinking the other person, or anticipating their shot and delivering a devastating return. One of the most satisfying shots is one where your opponent has suddenly run in one direction, you see that and hit the ball in the space they left behind. Quickly before they get the chance to run back. We are both competitive and the best games are when we’re both still in the battle and not doing endless unforced errors.

Tennis, tennis – you really have helped keep me sane. All that primal screaming, swearing (mostly when the other courts are empty) and running around. Even if I resent it when I’m getting up and it’s a cold, damp January morning, I recover when I’m actually there. And I’m so grateful that I can actually still do it. And having played, my day is improved immeasurably.

Marian Farrugia is Maltese and has lived in London for over 30 years. She started off as a nurse and later her love of Cuban music and her own experience of growing up in a colonised island prompted her to pursue an academic career studying and later teaching Latin American, Hispanic and Caribbean Studies in her mid-thirties. The late-forties saw another transition to community involvement and then further study of Urban Planning at the end of her fifties. After retiring in her mid-sixties, her focus has returned to music and dance.

This is a lock down poem. She says - ‘I started writing during my COVID lockdown forays after visitations from words describing things I felt or saw while roaming aimlessly around the neighbourhood. These words became my travelling companions in the lonely scary journey that was the pandemic. And strangely, they were in Maltese, my mother tongue which I rarely use. With time I started looking forward to these literary guests, and the writings became a journal of daily experiences, a practice that I still keep, though more sporadically because I’ve found that people get in the way. Originally written in Maltese, this pigeon piece below was also concocted during the pandemic closures, but has been a seasonal experience since I moved into my flat, because it seems that word of my balcony enclosure has yet to get through to the local pigeon forum!

Balcony Muse(ings)

Three pigeons

peering at my

shadow dancing

staring at

a body

locked

in a living room

behind a balcony

shrouded in

a net

specially woven

to stop birds

from approaching

for a closer look.

A fence

forcing them

to flap

spin on their tails

and join me

in a futile circle dance.

Tlett ibċieċen

jissindikawli

iż-żifna tad-dlam

iċċassati fuq ġisem

maqful ġo salott

imsakkar wara

gallarija

mqarsta f’xibka

minsuġa apposta

biex żżomm l-

għasafar

milli jifluni

aktar mill-qrib.

Allura

bħal irdieden

dawn ll-bċiċen

ikollhom

idawru denbhom

u jingħaqdu miegħi

f’żifna vojta

ta’ ċirku vizzjuż.

One’s destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things Henry Miller

I’m not one of those people who like to travel alone. I like to share my experiences with someone else. However, I don’t underestimate the difficulties of being with someone else for 24 hours a day. I know it’s a testing experience. There are many areas for conflict. It can break a close friendship.

After two years of not just Covid-prevented trips but also working on projects that needed all of my attention, I was keen to go away. I’m always interested in exploring new places and I’d loved going to Senegal in West Africa with my son a couple of years ago. I wanted to do more in that part of Africa. Ghana arrived by chance – I was chatting to someone who worked for the same charity as me. He happened to have built an eco-lodge on the coast in the Volta area of Ghana called Meet Me There, I looked at their website and decided then and there that Ghana would be my new destination.

That was summer 2021 and of course, I had no idea what would be happening with Covid and it was pre-Omi. I invited my partner, Asanga to come along. January is always my favourite time to get away, a long way away; to flee the pervasive grey, the post-Xmas blues, to lighten the emergent year.

Eventually, Asanga declined. A few years ago, he and I faced our differences on this front. He declared that he was no longer – he’s 78, has a major climbing injury and is happy with the heavenly landscape of sea and mountains in North Wales – interested in long haul trips abroad. But he was supportive of my continuing enthusiasm.

I was stumped because none of my usual travelling companions was available. And then I happened to be talking to an old friend, Ruby Millington – we met when we both worked as freelance journalists for the Evening Standard’s Metropolis 30 years ago – and she confessed that she’d wanted to go to Accra for some time to check out the style and the art. That she’d read it was the new New York.

We’d never been anywhere at all together that lasted longer than an afternoon but in September, we booked the plane tickets. It was a commitment and a leap into the Covid unknown. We booked a recommended hotel/hostel in Accra and the eco-lodge for a few nights and then we did nothing except rest in a kind of uneasy contentment about our future plans.

There was a flurry of worry amongst my friends as Omicron arrived in South Africa. I explained that South Africa was a long way from Ghana. Ghana, in fact, had very low Covid deaths – just over a thousand according to their official figures. For some reason, I had faith.

In mid-December, I realised that I needed not only my Booster Covid vaccination but also diphtheria/typhoid, tetanus and yellow fever. Not just one vaccination but three. I tried to get out of the yellow fever one – I managed to find proof that I’d had it in 1978 in New Orleans and these days, it’s meant to last for life – but Ghanaian regulations stipulate that you need to have it in the last ten years. I had it. I have survived so far.

This was the beginning of the tenaciousness that was required before we even set foot in Ghana. A whole trip in itself. There was the visa situation. There were umpteen conditions to fulfil – a written invitation from our host, proof of a hotel, proof of money, flights, a vaccination pass etc. Ruby and I almost lost the will to live trying to fill it in online. And then we had to get the Ghanaian High Commission in Archway – after a lateral flow test in the morning.

Finally, just before Xmas, we had our visas. Hurrah.

Ruby was looking after her incredible 96-year-old mum, Maria – who (has now died) was really keen for her daughter to get away for 18 days – and was organising for a lovely local woman to go in every day, as well as preparing meals for the freezer and a multitude of other tasks. I hadn’t realised what a superwoman, Ruby was. She actually managed to ring her mum every day while we were away – from petrol stations (Ghana’s petrol stations are often like palaces, they have oil and are proud of it), from the side of busy roads with a Pentecostal choir singing nearby. It was one of her many travelling feats.

And then there were the British Airway requirements. As well as the PCR test to do. Uploading vaccination passes, Travel Codes that took hours to obtain from a Ghanaian-approved website - we spent hours trying to work it all out. We failed to upload them and arrived on Jan 6^th 2022 at Heathrow feeling weary and anxious.

It was a good sign that it was a pretty smooth check-in, after all. A six-hour flight and then there was a mini-crisis for me. I could hardly walk as I arrived in Accra. My ankle had been affected by sitting in one position on the flight, I wasn’t sure what was going on. But I had to hobble up and down the airport getting the incredibly expensive Lateral Flow test and the results. And then my bag was one of the last to arrive. Luckily Ruby was there to help out. We both took it as a good sign that a holy man from Senegal was arriving at the same time to chants and hoots from a group of local Muslims.

BUT WE HAD ARRIVED IN ACCRA. We celebrated with a beer at midnight amid the gorgeous equatorial heat next to the pool at our travellery hotel/hostel. We had booked separate rooms aware that we hadn’t voyaged anywhere together and as a space precaution. In other words, we might need that space from one another.

I really liked Somewhere Nice – mostly occupied by young people backpacking or working for NGOs – there was a big breakfast table for the sharing of tales and I found out from a couple of Parisian-Cameroonian women some good local places to eat – but Ruby wasn’t so keen. She saw the layers of untended dust and dirt, I saw the communal thing.

Accra was confusing to navigate at first – not to mention my difficulty walking which thankfully only lasted a day – lots of duel carriageways and am not sure Ruby was convinced by the ‘new New York’ description. But something happened on the second day that cemented our travelling relationship. We had decided to look at art galleries; in the evening, I suggested we go to the 1957 Gallery (the year of independence, Ghana was the first African country to leave its colonisers under the socialist vision of President Nkrumah in 1957) which was located in the five-star bling Kempinsky Hotel. We visited the bold figurative works on the walls and then cocktailed at the pool bar. Afterwards, we, unlike everyone else, didn’t have a taxi waiting for us so we actually walked down the road. There was a daunting black James Bond-type armoured Hummer outside too. Just as we were about to hail a cab, we noticed that there was music emanating from the National Theatre nearby. We decided to check it out.

The next moment, Ruby was taking photos – she’s an ardent Insta woman – of what seemed to be a band on the red carpet. Within seconds, the lanky be-dreaded, be-hatted, be-shaded main man had ushered us onto the red carpet as well and then into what turned out to be The Young Ghanaian Achievers’ Awards. Losso Saabele – king of afro-pop and dancehall – was up for Artist of the Year.

Here we were in our casuals amidst Ghanaians dressed up to the nines in sparkly shoes and sequinned dresses. The award ceremony was slightly shambolic – sorry Ghana – nominations were missed. And sin of all sins – our man should have won and he didn’t. It’s now being re-awarded to him. Talk about La La Land. Anyway, he did invite me for a little dance as part of his performance which of course I rose to the occasion for!! And Ruby recorded!

And then Losso, his crew and the Rs went back to the Kempinsky Hotel for a little after-party. It did it give me great pleasure to witness Losso with his unicorn-like front dread wandering around this ultra-shiny hotel occupied mostly by foreign military-medal-adorned dignitaries.

This was only Day 2. The rest of the trip saw us continuing to have a blast. Ruby turned out to be a perfect travelling companion. I was the guidebook queen – I like actually reading about the places – and she was the savvy tech queen. Which meant we both organised but in different ways. I researched places to go, she was able to book hotels and guide taxi drivers (we wondered how anyone ever got anywhere in Accra because none of them had a clue where we were going). She had a local SIM card, I opted not to.

There was a sense of equality. She is good at snooker, and I am good at table tennis! The snooker was in a nightclub, the table tennis at Meet Me There. Payments were shared easily. Phew. Ruby is more than generous. She lent me 3,000 local cedis (about £350) when I couldn’t withdraw enough to travel East.

Meet Me There turned out to be a delightful destination – we had the best rooms (one each still) right on the lagoon. Every detail had been attended to – gorgeous décor, carved wood tables, amazing food, compost loos, ever-friendly staff. And we were actually in the middle of the local Dzita community. Local fishermen/boys were all around. There was a dispute one morning which MMT staff went over to successfully mediate. An older man had accused the younger ones of overfishing the lagoon and he was probably right. And there were deeply expressive church services that went on next door. Don’t go to Ghana if you are uncomfortable with noise!

All the profits from MMT go to their Dream Big Ghana Foundation. One morning, the co-manager Christian took us to see the magnificent compost toilets – purple paint and tiles with showers too - that they had built in the local school. And they also had created ones in the local villages. There are big public defecation and urinating issues in Ghana. The NGO also does educational workshops about the ‘compost’ which can be used to fertilise crops and that is the whole circular point. Great activities as well as an educational centre with books and computers for local children. And tree-planting.

Next was the mountains of the Eastern Volta region – the river was dammed in the 60s to make a huge, huge lake which provides most of Ghana’s electricity – and here in these much more basic lodgings, we decided to share a room. It was a big dormitory room and it went well. This was the new Ruby and Rose sharing a room period.

We loved the mountains. Cooler and more innocent. On the first afternoon there, in the highest village in Ghana, it was a Friday and there were about five processions going on. They were transporting their dead loved ones - often in ambulances with the sirens blaring out - to their homes for a wake. The atmosphere was celebratory. Everyone ignored us which we were very happy about. And they didn’t seem to mind us being there either. The next day, their loved ones would be taken to the cemetery. This was happening all over Ghana.

There were a few difficult moments later on in the trip but we dealt with them well. Ruby – with her tech-savvy – booked us into a dodgy hotel where we actually had to share a bed. That was fine in the end but the hotel was a guest house in the middle of nowhere. And then there was the characterful Rasta in Cape Coast in the West who charged us 60 US dollars for a shared room that turned out to have no water (yes it was a serious local problem but other hotels had paid to have extra water). And he had omitted to tell us. We had to get angry and demand our money back for the other two nights. We managed it and remained united.

We shared a sense of curiosity and desire to learn about Ghana and Ghanaians. We both like to mix up our experiences. And we both loved travelling around – that on the road feeling.

Our new ways of seeing included appreciating the Ghanaians for their eagerness to connect, their friendliness, their expansiveness, their grace. One of my son’s best friends is just like that, but I hadn’t realised that it was because his grandma is Ghanaian and she looked after him as he was growing up. She passed on this sense of ease and generosity.

Well, it was a wonderful 18 days. We packed so much in. And I haven’t even mentioned how intrepid Ruby is. I found her inspiring. I ended up doing something that I would never do – using a rope to descend some rocks. I only did it because she had already done it.

Northern India has been mentioned for our next trip

.

Monique Roffey, Jan Day and Marianne Power

I’d been resisting the idea of the Vagina Museum, I think because I heard that its first iteration in Camden was a bit basic. Of course, it was, there are no glossy sponsorships on board. Anyway, author Marianne Power – who wrote the best seller Help Me about her mission to improve her life as a single woman in her 40s without a partner or children and more recently Love Me where she explores her sexuality in a way that the Catholic Irish woman she is, would never have done a couple of years ago – got together Costa Book Award winner and tantra practitioner, Monique Roffey, and the UK’s most successful (read safe) tantra teacher, Jan Day for a conversation about Tantra and Modern Love. At the Vagina Museum in Bethnal Green. It was sold out plus the streaming was sold out too.

There is still a lot of interest in love and relationship and what tantra actually consists of. And how it fits into the contemporary world of sex and love.

Both Monique and Marianne are Jan’s students at the moment in her Living Tantra Training, in fact Marianne is assisting Jan, something she would never have imagined herself doing five years ago.

And I have also participated in Jan’s Tantra workshops mostly a decade ago, and I now work with her doing her press and PR.

The Vagina Museum is in Bethnal Green now and is under some railway arches, behind the shutters is an impressive venue funky gallery/museum. There are a lot of brightly coloured – red and flowery – vulva posters and goddess postcards, there is information about the menopause and a possible 65 seats. There is a simple bar/café. I have a feeling it’s all run by vagina volunteers.

One of the highlights is the bathroom tiles – many have their individual vulva design which is a great extra.

Monique – who mostly writes novels but has written a memoir With the Kisses of his Mouth which is about her experiences of tantra and often Jan’s work – was asking the questions. She delved into the origins of classical tantra but the most affecting answers were about vulnerability.

Jan, Monique and Marianne talked about how scared they were in tantra groups in the beginning and illustrated how brave you have to be to step into these deeper waters of intimacy and sexuality and all the shame we have around what we think we should be doing or enjoying and are not. Jan, when she was much younger, married a man who didn’t want to enjoy sex with her and she thought that was an advantage at the time. Eventually they split up and Jan started to explore her sensual nature. After 20 years of workshops, she became a teacher.

Monique signed up to tantra with Jan initially reluctantly because her armour was strong, whereas Marianne was scared first of all and then delighted that she’d found this tribe. She says she’s had some exquisite sexual experiences in Jan’s workshops and that has been a profound change for her, as a woman who grew up thinking sex was wrong and dirty. Now she emanates joy and honesty.

Meanwhile Monique has signed up to her second training and is sinking in to it in a way that she couldn’t initially. She’s got the love thing going on with her fellow participants.

Monique talked about how hard it was – there was a lot of media shaming – to publish a memoir about her sensual explorations and that the world wasn’t ready for it in 2012. Whereas Marianne’s books have been welcomed. It’s a different era now post me-too. Women writing about their sexuality are no longer shamed.

Jan talked about how expansive the term tantra is and how it can include so much – from learning to feel and welcome our feelings, to allowing ourselves to be more grounded in our bodies, to being able to say yes and no to touch and understand what is pleasurable.

Often Marianne opened up about her own struggle to let her feelings out and name them. And she is so joyful now, it pours out of her pores.

I think mostly it was evident how much support students get from their community. And how loving and funny and a tribe they are.

One young woman at the end asked about what happened if you weren’t attracted to someone that you were working with and what would the outcome be. That was a brilliant and fundamental question. And Jan said that tantra was different to working with others that you were attracted to – although this can and does happen – and an opportunity to truly see the person that is sitting opposite you in a way that you haven’t before and vis versa. It’s also an opportunity to give more than you’re used to and understand how that nourishes you.

Of course, there was a lot more… there will be a recording… but the essential part was the soft hearts at the core of it and how we can bring that tenderness into our daily lives.

A lot of hugging was de rigeur and gorgeous.

I’ll go again to the Vagina Museum, it’s a great space and it’s a great way of supporting women’s sexual and different stage health.

Personally I’d like to see more aimed at older women – ie after the menopause – and conversations about older vulvas. But I’ll mention that when I go again…

Jan’s book is Living Tantra out on Watkins.

Monique’s memoir is With the Kisses of his Mouth and recent novel Passiontide.

Marianne’s books are Love Me and Help Me.

This week I thought I’d feature a poem by contemporary poet Raymond Antrobus again. It’s from his collection of the same name - The Perseverance. It’s really an exploration of his relationship with his father. And the name of the pub that his father frequented. He is a brilliant poet. Thoughtful, playful, reflective.

The Perseverance

I wait outside the perseverance.
Just popping in here a minute.
I’d heard him say it many times before
like all kids with a drinking father
watch him disappear
into smoke and laughter.

There is no such thing as too much laughter,
my father says, drinking in the perseverance
until everything disappears —
I’m outside counting minutes,
waiting for the man, my father
to finish his shot and take me home before

it gets dark. We’ve been here before,
no such thing as too much laughter
unless you’re my mother without my father,

working weekends while the perseverance
spits him out for a minute.
He gives me 50p to make me disappear.

50p in my hand, I disappear
like a coin in a parking meter before
the time runs out. How many minutes
will I lose listening to the laughter
spilling from the perseverance
while strangers ask, where is your father?

Bio

Raymond Antrobus is an award-winning poet and author whose work explores sound, identity, and belonging.

His work has won the Ted Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and his poems have been added to GCSE syllabi.

In 2019 Raymond became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed an MBE in 2021. The Quiet Ear is his first work of prose.

“Raymond Antrobus is as searching a poet as you’re likely to find writing today.”

Kaveh Akbar Poet and author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf

1) I am still alive.

2) It’s peaceful here in comparison with so many former ages. All that angst has melted away. I am still anxious from time to time – I have abandonment issues despite my exploration and acknowledgement of them – but in general the weather is temperate. I used to rage and fight and worry. In fact, I couldn’t imagine a life where there wasn’t a continuum of outrageous storms but it is here. The internal waters are calmer. Phew.

3) I am more me than I have ever been. That means I have people around me that I can be more of me more of the time. I don’t have to swallow myself back inside. For example, I play tennis three times a week and my partners know me well enough to be there for me when I’m upset and vulnerable. And I for them. This week, something my son said to me – disturbed me enough for me not to sleep. I arrived on the tennis courts with not a smidgeon of the combative spirit I usually ooze. Tears even appeared as I hit the ball. And I was thankfully regaled with warmth and empathy. In the past, I would have postponed the game. And okay, I did get slaughtered in tennis terms but I did get outside and my partner was lovely to me. I didn’t have to hide myself away.

4) The loss of libido. Is it a big deal or not? It happened gradually and mostly I am content about it. Because I’m not always hankering after sex and sexual attention. That’s a relief. And here’s the loss of libido myth – just because I’ve lost that core sexual yearning, doesn’t mean that I don’t like sensuality and sexuality. And I can have orgasms. It’s just all a lot more languorous. And I know some women have decided to use HRT and vaginal oestrogen to keep themselves stimulated in this way but so far I have opted to just be au naturel with a little almond oil.

5) I am still dancing. OMG I am so grateful that I can move my body. I don’t really have any aches and pains. I can roll across the floor. And I absolutely love it. Dance is one of my richest places to occupy. Okay, I’m no longer – well not often – an evening dancer, I’m more of a morning and afternoon dancer. And that’s okay with me. Cuba really is my favourite place to dance, there you can dance anywhere – by the sea, in the street in Havana – and musicians appear. Plus no-one thinks I’m too much, it is welcomed. Everyone joins in from the young to the old. Gosh, it’s such a delight. And a lot of mischief goes down.

6) Developing an active relationship with death might sound morbid but it’s rammed with vitality. The more I plan for death, the more my urge to live now and well is increased. I write poems about death – I’ve just written one called Moving To Love’s Other Shore which is from the perspective of my deathbed and it’s upbeat, at least at the end. I did a dance project/film about death, I often discuss death and dying with my son, I’m crazy about Kensal Green Cemetery. I acknowledge death in every way that I can without it being unnatural. It’s a way for me to embrace the idea of my death even if it’s a long way before the actual event. Death is part of life and life is so much richer that way.

7) Invisibility. I have a love/hate relationship with visibility. No, men don’t chat me up any more. Although to be honest, last week – I was in a I am determined to give compliments to people who do challenging hard work – I went up to a refuse collector and told him what a magnificent job he was doing. He pulled his balaclava off and gave me a very sexy look– when was I coming round for tea, he asked! I hooted with laughter at his flirtatiousness. He was probably in his 60s! And I do make myself more visible by piling rose clips on my head like a wayward British Frida. However, I am invisible mostly to younger people and men. And you know what - I don’t mind. The youngers can have the visibility bit, it’s their time in that kind of sun. I’m in a different stage of the sun. The sunset rather than rise. And it is quieter but also colourful.

8) New adventures. Now I know you can still keep on having adventures. It’s your spirit that counts here. And curiosity. My newest adventure is doing an MA in Poetry Writing. It is not easy but it is stimulating and I feel full of ideas and creative projects. I’d been thinking about applying for a few years – my last venture in the academic world was fifty years ago. Having a cohort of other eager students to discuss stanza lengths and line breaks with is heavenly. It feels fresh, and I feel fresher for it.

9) I can pace myself. When I was younger, I was always the last to leave the party. I simply had to drain every dreg of excess from the situation. I couldn’t leave early. These days I know just how much I can take in terms of my well-being. I hate that word but you know what I mean. My balance in life. The MA cohort always go to the pub after our session, I find myself not wanting to go. I don’t want to drink alcohol because I prefer to be able to play tennis in the morning. And after intense sessions, I just like to go off and be alone. I’m delighted that I can actually do that.

10) Life doesn’t have to be full of extraordinary moments. At last, I can be happy with if not an ordinary life – whatever that is but I’m not retired, I’m not doing a 9 to 5 etc – then a much less desiring of the intense and dramatic. For example, there was a time in the late 90s – I was in my mid-40s – when I thought it was ravishingly exciting to be phoned by the man that I was sometimes having sex with and thought I was wildly in love with… and he demand that I get in my car with a steak and drive to Milton Keynes for him. I was so deluded that I did it. He was an alcoholic and there was absolutely no fun, although there was some drunken sex, involved. These days, I’m profoundly content to visit a bird hide in North Wales with my partner and watch the spectacular blue streak that is a kingfisher in flight…

Leonard the little dog with the deerhound by Asanga/Peter Judge

This week, I am sharing a poem by my friend and poet/writer Caroline Bobby. The illustration is by my partner, Peter Judge who is also a friend of Caroline’s. She has a book Postcards from a Little Life came out at the end of April 2025 and it combines fragments, poems and prose. You can buy it here at all the usual online outlets.

Love & Gratitude

Woke up, buried under sand bags and bricks

Was rescued by Leonard the Dog.

He finds me under the rubble, every morning

Employing various techniques of retrieval.

Dog kisses

The Bark of Longing

Throwing his bed up in the air

Hunting down the sheepskin rug.

Finally, he pulls my bedding off

And I give up, give in, give myself over

To serving my dog.

It makes me laugh

How he gets me moving

Like no amount of therapy, or prayers

Or any manner of good intentions

and useless will.

Today, we walked in the colours of Autumn

He fell in love with the most enormous Deerhound

And lost himself completely in the joy of it.

He shows me stuff like this, every day.

Thank you, Leonard The Dog.

Bio

In April 2025, Caroline published Postcards from My little Life - a sometimes tender, sometimes brutal weave of her take on being human from the frontline of her direct experience. Her book is a bow to all the unwritten, and covers her specialist subjects that range across the continents of death, love, depression, solitude, psychotherapy (she is one), dogs, community, longing and social commentary. It is about things that matter in this world of escalating separation. She is a subversive comedian, and without having found the doorway to tragicomedy, the perspective of all us humans doing the best and the worst that we can as we stumble about between the first and last breath, she wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.

Mum and me not long before she died. She had Alzheimer’s at this point.

I wrote this article some years ago and it documents my evolving relationship with my mum.

It never used to happen like this. I’d arrive home – my former family home, a detached 1970s house in the West Yorkshire village of Menston, not far from the quietly salubrious and much better known inclines of Ilkley – immediately my mother and I would have to jump in the car (one of my eternal old bangers) and travel to a town.

Were we trying to avoid the gentle space of actually being together? Probably. My mother – she was 82 at this time, she died in 2018 at nearly 92 – and I occupied polar positions re our ways of living, for much of our relationship. She was in the all-knitting, all-gardening, verbally restrained corner; whilst I was in the all-partying, all-reading, (not at the same time, obviously), hysterically over-expressive corner. And rarely did the twain meet.

However, over the last decade, a welcome blurry middle ground has appeared. I’ve witnessed her courageously battle and overcome cancer, then get over the death of my father, and then how she learned to live her own freedom without him. I’ve come to admire her Yorkshire feistiness (I’ve noted that she’s passed it on to me) and I’ve observed signs of her all-dancing side too. On those frequent cruises where she is apparently keen to rumba every evening.

I’ve also started to understand more about scented stock seedlings and composting. I’ve got to know and like her friends in the village. We’ve also taken to going on little adventures together, for instance exploring the savage beauty of the Northumbrian coast and the quirkiness of Whitby.

Bolton Abbey, one of our favourite places to go together.

Yes, there has been a mother/daughter melting. Although I, thankfully, have yet to learn to knit.

We’ve also started to re-visit old family walks. Now when I get there from the urban madness that is Harlesden, we have lunch and simply step out of her front door and carry on walking. There’s no longer any need to visit a town.

At the end of August last year, we decided to go blackberrying. We’ve always been a blackberrying family. I remember taking French O level revision out with me, there’d also be the corned beef sandwich-centred picnic, the tartan rug and lots of empty Tupperware bowls for those juicy berries. Oh, the exquisite pleasure of mum’s blackberry and apple crumble as the dark, red juice seeped into the custard like a pudding version of bonfire night.

First of all, we wandered down the main street, past the distinctly non-contemporary Menston Arms – whatever happened to that handsome doctor’s son that I used to meet here? – and up the moor road. On the right, there is a spectacularly mundane, little park where I know my grandmother used to bring me in the pram. I’ve seen the photos. It remains untouched by modern park aesthetics.

We reach the beginning of Bleach Mill Lane on the right. Ah, the memories. Of course, it’s the lane that was dug by the owners of the 19^th century mill so they could get their vehicles down here. But the mill never entered my head as a child. To me, it was simply the way to the pond where I’d find sticklebacks with exotic red bellies and three strange spikes on their backs. I’d fill a jam jar full of pond water and try and keep them forever as proof of the mysterious ways of the universe.

Mum’s house in Menston

As we’re walking this time, mum says: “You know your grandmother used to walk down here as a 9 year old school girl. She took her father his sandwiches at the mill every day at lunchtime.” Maybe, she’s told me before but today, they seem now and shiny. Like coins pushed into my imagination’s slot machine. For a moment, I see my grandma skipping down this uneven track to the mill where yarns from local mills and linen were bleached. I’m reminded that my grandmother’s grandfather, William, originally came over from an impoverished Derry in the 1860s to work there. His son, Isaac, followed him into the mill.

As we walked and talked, I realised that six generations of our family have made their way down this track, but for two different reasons. My great, great grandfather, Isaac, my great grandfather, Ralph, my grandmother, Jane, then my mother, Nancy, and her three children, me, Rowena and Clive, then, finally my own son, Marlon. The first wave came to work, the second for leisure.

There’s something deeply reassuring about walking this often, muddy lane, which has been trodden by so many generations of my family. As my and my mother’s feet keep touching this earth in the same dips and puddles as our forbearers, I get a whoosh of permanence and stability in a world that seems to offer less and less of those particular qualities.

At last, we find a few blackberries but they’re dried up and hard. Victims of a bad summer. To the right are endless fields across to Otley – where I was born – and to Almscliffe Crag, one of the everlasting, gritstone boulders that marks this west Yorkshire landscape. Standing and gazing is an integral part of our walks.

Very little has changed. We walk for a few minutes, and there it is on the left. The pond. Where so often as I child, I’d bring my fishing net and scoop out squirming tadpoles as well as those enchanting sticklebacks. And when my son was a toddler, I’d bring him to this same Bleach Mill pond to encourage him, to appreciate and understand more about nature. To be able to distinguish flag irises from king cups and milkmaids. But this late August Monday, there are bulrushes and water boatmen instead.

Inevitably, my mind’s eye casts itself back to carefree summers. Both my mother and I experience a frisson of recall delight.

The lane ends at the still existent, 19^th century Bleach Mill House. We peer over the hedge to see speckled hens and the disorder of a smallholding. The house itself looks a little rundown. They used to do B n’B and cream teas but it seems no more. There’s a solitary sign for freerange eggs.

Now we’re on the narrow footpath, which takes us up the glen. Just round the corner, in a place where the tinkling beck turns into a flat pool, there are one or two millstone grit stones. These are probably from the mill’s chimney, incidental reminders of a big past.

Today, we’re more interested in finding some decent blackberries. We’re in luck at last. Next to the holly bush – this is the very place we used to visit every year every pre-Xmas to gather its very special, red-berried branches – stands a bush with a late summer treasure, succulent blackberries.

For half an hour, my mother and I stand amongst the cow pats and thistles, immersing ourselves in the job at hand. These juicy jewels fall into our hands mostly without bruising. We chat about the 1930s holiday homes in the next field, little wooden huts, which meant so much on these walks. Magical little houses in the nearby Hag Farm’s fields where people from Leeds and Bradford would spend weekends in the countryside. During my childhood, they were still there, proud and tidy. Now, they’re falling apart.

It’s 24 years since my father died, but here we are, mother and daughter, former enemies, now firm friends, continuing this family tradition. I’m sure William and Isaac must have sneaked over and sampled some of nature’s best gifts a hundred years ago.

I smile as I notice the look of contentment on my mother’s face, and as I realise that blackberry and apple crumble with custard is definitely on the weekend menu.

This week, I’m featuring a poem by friend and writer/poet, Nadia Chambers. Nadia writes with an openness and warmth that make you want to go round to her house for a cup of tea.

Girlfriend

I caught the eye of a

friend once dear

not seen since we

waited at the school gates

with children running

around us as we

talked and talked.

Then life intervened

and work

and time sped up

as we, fading, lost touch

until the day at the

checkout when each

shrieked the other’s

name embracing, a

hug of forgotten warmth.

And as we exchanged

promises to catch up

on messenger

I felt a surge of

memory. Mums

keeping one another

going

when times got tough

and only a night out

with the girls bought

lightness of spirit.

Now here we are, four

sat round a table

in a Christmas clad

pub exchanging lives

and recognising faces

unchanged as

we grow older

together

knowing that even

now we grandmothers

could laugh at our

love of the comfy and

wintry sea swims or

rainy runs.

And I thought of all

those other tables

around which

friendships are forged

and sustained.

Kitchen, canteen, cafe

and dining room.

Not the corridors

of power for us.

Just the small spaces

of women and love.

Bio

Nadia was born in 1960 and has previously enjoyed a successful career in nursing and health care development.

She is now a free as a bird retiree, navigating a life living with some health challenges. She has always loved the written word and turns to writing when those challenges become difficulties from time to time. She enjoys creating prose as well as poetry and draws on her deep connection with our natural world.

This was written in 2017 as I just published my pamphlet, Tantric Goddess. Now in 2026, I am just finishing an MA in Poetry Writing and starting a new phase of writing…

Twelve years ago, I’d never written a poem. I wasn’t – so many say this – one of those people who started writing poems in their teens. At the time, I was a journalist whose paid work – the internet and falling sales of newspapers – was on the wane. I was unsettled, gloomy and undermined.

I decided radical action was needed on the writing front. I have always been a fan of lyrical language so I decided to try out writing poems. I knew – and this is key – that writing poetry was never going to earn me my daily bread but I wanted to do it for love. I had been on the hamster wheel of feature editors’ ever-narrowing commissions and instructions, this way I would re-discover writerly freedom.

Not that I expected it to be easy. I was in for the long haul. I signed up to City Lit’s Beginner’s course with contemporary poet, John Stammers at the helm. I’d never heard of him. His collection Stolen Love Behaviour had just come out and I devoured its post-modern bite. Here were poems that were crafted to the hilt, witty and John’s degree in philosophy drove the undertow.

Through John, I discovered so many poets – from Wallace Stevens to Clare Pollard – but most importantly, and this is a rare feature, I found out that John can actually pinpoint what works and doesn’t work in his pupils’ poems. Over the years, this has been such a boon as well as a pain.

For a long long time, my poems were embarrassingly bad. I’d have a few sizzling one liners, or a good title here and there but the struggle to write a decent poem was arduous and humbling. Luckily, I expected the climb to be arduous and was willing to plod on.

By Christian Palen

What is a good poem? Ah ha, there is the subject of many a book and author. Basically the content should be fresh, the voice should belong to that poet alone, the attitude should be ‘show rather than tell’ (ie cut out any of those literal lines), a big no to the overly poetic (John has a list of forbidden words and they include iridescence and meniscus!) and then the most difficult, something should emerge magically without the poet even knowing. Helen Mort who is well-known in the poetry world, has just won the Mslexia (a magazine for women who write) poetry prize and the judge, Sinead Morrissey said; ‘there’s a vortex in the middle of it that works like a spell.’ Exactly.

Funnily enough, I am still in one of John’s groups, now an invitation-only one with some damn fine poets – including Barbara Marsh, Judy Brown and Beatrice Garland who all have collections out, won poetry prizes and more. Wednesday afternoon is often the high point of the week for me. We meet in Covent Garden above a pub in Betterton Street while the Poetry Society does its refurbishment re The Poetry Studio.

The format is like this. We hardly ever discuss our personal lives. Only through the poems. John brings in three poems as photocopies, he doesn’t tell us who the poet is. He reads the first one and then we analyse/criticize them. He will bring in these poems for all sorts of reasons – they are badly edited, they have something but not everything, they sing with edge and vim etc – and we are in constant pursuit of what makes a good poem. This is a life’s work!

In the second half, we hand out photocopies of our own new poems to the group, read it out aloud to them and then stay silent while they discuss every aspect in terms of meaning and structure. I have squirmed many times in this position as it became apparent that my new poem didn’t make sense, was overegged – I have a proclivity in this direction – and just plainly did not work. Oh the ignoble position of the bad poet!

However, over the years, I’ve been in this group for five years – we published a group pamphlet Sounds of the Front Door in 2014 – my embarrassment has subsided and I now relish their comments even when they are constructively ruthless. Because that’s exactly what my poems need ie outside voices looking in.

In January, I’d just come back from post-Castro Cuba and written a poem Finding My Inner Orisha. A lot of it was in Spanish and through the group, I learnt that actually there was too much for people to understand so they suggested that I translate lines in both Spanish and English. I have now done that and hope it lends an incantatory aspect to the poem. Although I also decided that I didn’t want to do it all in that way as that was too much. The poet always has the last word. Although as we often discuss when reading other poets’ work, a good editor is also worth their weight in gold.

Killing your own darlings is such a useful lesson in life as well as poetry. Poets often have a proclivity towards something that takes them out of balance. Personally, I go for florid language and this can be so easily overdone. Restraint is needed. Going to The Group helps me refine my own editing skills. If I see that extra ‘fecund’, then I force myself to remove it.

This year, I found a publisher for my first poetry pamphlet – 20 poems and these days often called a chapbook - Tantric Goddess at the age of 64. It’s never too late to start. And I’m not giving up now, I intend to get a collection – around 60 poems – together next.

Tantric Goddess is published on Eyewear.

https://store.eyewearpublishing.com/products/tantric-goddess

Sometimes I share my own poems, and sometimes other people’s.

This week, it gives me great pleasure to share Loudness by Judy Brown. Judy is in the same longstanding poetry group as I am - called simply The Group and taught by John Stammers. Judy uses wonderful images and ornate embellishments. Loudness is both this poem which won the Hamish Canham prize and a second collection published in 2005.

Loudness

by Judy Brown

After bad news, and its pulled-back fist,

flows in a sound that’s not a sound. It’s not

the brain’s tide beating blood in propped

and shored-up workings, not the tapestried

texture of attended silence, the goffering

of quiet air folding and unfolding

in a house where nothing is happening.

After bad news, you tell the seconds,

hungry for the hurrying thunder

that never comes. Instead a chemical fizz

fills the ears, before the descaling. An angel

rides the stirrup and anvil, spurring on the drum,

works like wild weather in wet sheets,

flapping and cracking the body’s flat muscles.

Long after the bad news, when it’s bedded in,

you notice most clearly the mild loudness

of the not-so-old man in the foot tunnel,

drumming and drumming and biting his mouth.

The posed coins in his blue cloth

are tiny, like a cast handful of earbones.

Bio

Judy Brown was born in Cheshire. She grew up in Northumberland and Cumbria and studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She has worked as a lawyer in London and, in the early 1990s, in Hong Kong. Her pamphlet, Pillars of Salt (Templar Poetry, 2006), won the Templar Pamphlet Competition. She received the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize, and won the Poetry London Competition and the Manchester Poetry Prize. Judy’s first poetry collection, Loudness (Seren, 2011), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize. Her second collection, Crowd Sensations (Seren, 2016) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Second Collection Prize. Her third collection Lairs was published by Seren in 2022.

Judy now works as a freelance tutor and mentor and gives Poetry Surgeries in London and online for the Poetry Society.

Photo by Ruby Millington

I wrote this piece last year and now I find myself - well more Suzanne Noble than me on this subject - organising a panel at our Rebel Later Life: the ideas party on Oct 10th at Cecil Sharp House which asks the question what do we do if we haven’t got enough pension?

Talking about pensions – my own or other people’s – is not something I do. I’m 73 with a State Pension and I still work a couple of days a week too. Maybe it’s the era that I come from – hippie/punk. We were fiercely independent and anti-establishment. Pensions fell into the latter category as planning for the future was uncool. Money was uncool. Maybe it’s because I worked as a freelance journalist and keeping on working was always the main focus as well as actually getting paid. With hindsight, I didn’t plan my pension because I didn’t dare to look that far into the future.

When I started reflecting on this piece – it made me smile that I should be in this position now. How could the rebel in me write about pensions? I put a question into our Advantages of Age – Baby Boomers and Beyond FB group to see if our members had planned their pensions. Some had, some hadn’t. This was one of the comments – ‘As a WASPI woman I really wish I’d have planned a lot better… I do have a small private pension that pays for my petrol and hairdressers every month so I’m ok but I do rely on my husband for most of our big outings and events… I really don’t like being dependent on anyone! Worked hard not to have debts so that’s a bonus.’

And someone else said this – ‘I was of the working class generation that married really young, and shortsightedly, saw the ability to pay what was then called the “married woman’s stamp” as a useful saving on weekly deductions from a wage packet. I changed to paying full insurance and was enrolled in a workplace pension scheme when I regained my single status, and as I grew older, took a keen interest in keeping track of both NI and workplace contributions and projections. I carefully considered the benefits and disbenefits of any action I chose relating to my pension, remarriage, deferral, taking a lump sum, etc. and still keep a keen eye on my finances.’

My son and his partner are both 39 and work as freelancers in the film industry. They have one son. I was discussing money one week with them – very unusual too – and she said she’d already signed up to PensionBee because they seemed so contemporary and flexible. I was amazed that she knew about them as PensionBee had just become the headline sponsors for our AofA Awards 2025 ceremony.

I read pieces on their website which were all about pension confidence and seemed to include pensions as part of our whole adult wellness. Makes sense when I think about it.

So how and why did Moira Aitken, 65, a retired vet who is not entirely retired, and lives in South East London, sign up?

‘I wanted to retire because I didn’t want to be worrying about animals any more at the weekends,’ she says explaining that it was Covid time and she’d been working for 38 years mostly in a surgery in New Cross which was hectic and wonderful. ‘Initially in my life, I didn’t think about a pension, however within my workplace at a large animal charity there was a non-contributory final salary pension scheme which I was automatically enrolled in. Later this changed to one where I did have to make contributions from my salary and later still it changed to a ‘defined benefit scheme’ which was no longer linked to my final salary. I would not have received this pension until I was 65, so in order to retire early at 60, I asked for the ‘transfer value’ where you get a lump sum. At first, I had a Financial Advisor to arrange and manage this, but after a year I decided that I’d like to manage it myself.”

So that’s where PensionBee came in?

‘I googled and they came up. The great thing is that it’s so easy, you can manage your pension fund with a phone app. You can take out money when you want, from the age of 55 (rising to 57 from 2028). You can add money when you want. I transferred a small pension pot first of all to see how that went and then after it had gone well, I put my bigger pot in.’

Moira doesn’t have her state pension yet but it is arriving next year. In the meantime, she’s topping up her private pension with part-time work. Initially, she took on work as a film extra. What kind of work did she do?

‘Well I walked up and down stairs one day for a TV programme called Black Ops, which is a cop series, but I could never find the episode! And then I was a stand in during the pre-shoot of an advert, so they did the light testing on me before the more expensive actor turned up. The trouble with film extra work is that it’s unreliable and often at the last minute.’

So have you found something more fitting?

‘Yes, I’m an exam invigilator now. I can work chunks of time like 12 hours which suits me better. I am Scottish and I visit my 102 year old dad who still lives independently, when I can. My mum lived until she was 98. I have siblings that live nearby but I like to visit for a week at a time.’

Ah ha, so your pension pot might have to last some time?

‘Well, my family do seem to have those genes so yes, that is a big consideration. When I get my State Pension, I will carry on working and try to top up my pension pot with PensionBee because I’m not sure how long that will have to last for. What I enjoy is being able to manage my funds myself.’

Has it made you more aware of financial markets?

‘Yes, absolutely. Because I see on my phone how much my funds have gone up or down.’

How many of us, older people, engage actively with our finances? Well, maybe, I’ll find myself engaging a little more confidently just from having this conversation. You never know…

Rona Luo is an extraordinary poet who is in my cohort at the Poetry School doing an MA in Poetry Writing. Am choosing Rona today because she’s just been chosen by Dirt to collaborate with another poet, Linda France on a collaboration which will be planted. Literally. The portrait is by Rona herself.

Rona Luo is a queer, neurodivergent poet and acupuncturist based in London. Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Honey Literary, Magma, Propel, fourteen poems, ANMLY, and more. She received the Creative Futures Gold Prize in Poetry in 2024 and has exhibited visual poetry at the Royal Festival Hall. She has been supported by Tin House, Kundiman, and Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective.

Men of Might

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.” Carl Jung

For quite a while, I’ve been the sort of person who recognises my inner Hitler. Seriously, I do not pretend to be little Bo Beep. I believe that I’m on most spectrums from love addiction to violence.

I also see that separation – it’s you over there that is mentally ill, not me – is the key to a culture of blame. I don’t want to be part of that. I want to be part of relationships, friendships and a society that cares deeply and takes responsibility for our own fuck ups.

Which is why I was attracted to going on a Shadow Work weekend with my partner, Asanga. Him again! I’m blessed, I know, with a partner who is equally drawn to these kinds of conscious explorations. Going with a partner meant for us both - an extraordinary opportunity to witness each other in a way that we had never done before.

What is Shadow Work? Well, it was developed over 25 years ago by Cliff Barry and Mary Allen Blandford. They integrated and correlated their work with other disciplines such as Gestalt, Voice Dialogue, Accelerated Learning, Metaphor work, Bio-Energetics, Family Systems theory, Addiction Recovery work and other personality systems such as the Myers-Briggs Type indicator and the Enneagram. They are also indebted to the pioneering work of Robert Bly, Robert Moore and Doug Gillette, David Grove, Ron Hering and Hal and Sidra Stone.

What is the Shadow? The shadow parts of ourselves are the aspects of our behaviors and feelings that we have put into a compartment labeled not acceptable, that must not show or express in everyday life. They are not all negative, there are often positive or golden parts that we are repressing.

And so one July afternoon, I find myself driving down the lanes of Warwickshire. Although I have never done Shadow Work, I have done a fair amount of group process work – from the Hoffman Process to the Path of Love to Malcolm Stern’s year Courage to Love to Pesso Boyden – so I have a certain faith in what is to come. However, I know I will be dealing with something to do with my jealousy – an aggravating old wound which lurks painfully within me – and that will mean revealing desolate parts of myself, so I am also nervous.

And guess what - a situation has arisen that very week to intensify the Rose shadow fest. It is to do with the despairing place that I visit when, for instance, Asanga flirts with my friends. Perfect material for the weekend.

The house is called Holycombe in Whichford. It is an idyllic location, useful in terms of soothing fears. There’s an assistant, lovely Jane, who helps me with my bags. I love being helped with my bags. It’s the legacy of having been a single mother. Asanga has already arrived and is sitting on the hill near the labyrinth. We live five hours apart by car. He’s in North Wales and I’m in Harlesden, London. We keep in touch via text, email and sometimes phone. And there is trickiness re communication from time to time. This week has been one of those weeks.

Meeting each other after a couple of weeks’ apart is also often challenging. We have to find a way to come together again. Somehow we manage it this time with sweetness and a tender walk around the grounds that are full of love seats, tree houses, yurts, a pond and meadow flowers…

The group are gathering – nine participants, six men and three women which is unusual – and we meet at 4pm with the facilitators, wife and husband, Nicola and John Kurk who have been teaching this work for over 20 years in that time-honoured fashion. The circle. A talking stone is passed round. We introduce ourselves and say a bit about what we’d like to happen here and what’s important to us in our lives and how we’re feeling. Oh, yeah, that bit.

“I’m Rose,” I say, “and I’m here because I want to take off some protective clothing in my relationship with Asanga, I’d like to melt more of my heart towards him. I’m a writer, I’m passionate about my walks around Unsung London. I’m a mother. I’m feeling nervous but excited. I used to be a rock n’roll journalist.”

I mention the latter because John mentions that at heart he’s still a rock n’roll guitarist, and then Nicola adds in that she’s a classical pianist, and it becomes a theme. And makes me laugh.

As for the others, I promised not to divulge anything about them as part of the confidentiality agreement, but, of course, they have come for all sorts of reasons – from marriage difficulties to wanting more confidence in relationships to dealing with past abuse.

And then it’s straight into learning about the Four Quartered Model– Cliff Barry chose four of Jung’s archetypes as the basis of this work, they are the Magician, the Sovereign, the Lover and the Warrior as an aid to self-awareness - and also creating a safe container for the group through various partnered and group exercises. It is full on for a Friday evening.

Don’t Nicola and John realize that we’re meant to be doing some quiet movement and a little light sharing for starters? No, seems not! Here we are, thrust right into the flames… Each corner of the room has an archetype in it.

Firstly, we visit the wizard’s hat and the Magician who represents taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture. Strategy, analyzing, perspective, they are all characteristics. I’m instantly – as the overemotional one in my family – attracted to the Magician. In personal development work, the mind often gets a bad rap, dismissed in the mad rush to find the body and feelings, but in Shadow Work, it is lauded. Hurrah. There’s all sorts of extra information, for instance, fear is the gateway emotion so facing it ushers in the Magician, and if you have an overinflated inner magician you might be hyper-vigilant, or deflated, you might be confused and therefore blinkered. The core shaming belief is – I am rotten to the core.

We do some partnered work to help create a safe group environment, which is vital for this kind of deep sharing group work. This exercise is Tell Me Who You Are. One person keeps on asking Tell Me Who You Are, and the other sits and speaks spontaneously. For two minutes. It’s an unraveling. You can be as honest and untamed as you choose. I say – “I’m a mother, I’m a lover, I’m a wild woman, I’m shy, I love poetry, I’m afraid that my partner will abandon me etc.” It’s always a privilege to hear from the other person.

And then on to the Sovereign which is that place of authority within ourselves, the one with the vision and the moral knowledge. The sparkling crown is in this corner. The Sovereign also is the heart and the service and the blessing. This queen/king figure is represented by fire and the gateway emotion is joy. The core shaming belief is I’m not good enough. The inflated Sovereign always knows best while the deflated is unsure of her/himself.

The next exercise is one where we kneel and are blessed by two of the others. I go first. They put their hands on my bowed head and I imbibe their gift gently. Then I stand and they kneel while I bless them. One of the men is in tears at the enormity of the receiving. It’s a place where we can practice giving and receiving. And nourishment of all of that. It reminds me of the six of pentacles in the Rider Waite Tarot pack where there is a gentleman with scales, and there is a person on either side, one is giving, and the other is receiving. In balance.

We do manage to fit a gorgeous evening meal in here. It’s all lightness and Nicoise salad. Perfect for this sort of emotional/spiritual work.

Last for this evening comes the Lover. Fragrant sweet peas, a bowl of exquisite chocolates, another of grapes and dazzling textiles are all in this sensual corner. Play, spontaneity, the senses, sexuality, connecting to the body and feeling. Creativity. Intuition. Relationships. This is all that Lover energy. The gateway emotion is grief, tears lead to that opening that let the melted heart in. Listen up, Rose. Surrender. Listen up, again. If overinflated, then life is a rollercoaster of emotions. And there will be addiction in there. Deflated is a lack of feeling and connection, isolation, physical self-abuse. The core shaming message is I don’t love right.

Before bed, there’s a visualisation taking us from birth to the future. For me, the most important part is enjoying the lullabies that my father sings to me as he’s getting me ready for bed when I was about three. Somehow, those innocent, splendidly playful times have been cast aside by me. This time, I get time to appreciate them.

In the morning, after one of those fruity/home-made bread breakfasts, we’re back in the room and on to the Warrior after a quick sharing of how we are. The Warrior is the perfect archetype before we go into the ‘carpet work’ – basically a one hour-ish process that includes role play– because he/she is the doer, the- make-it-happen part of us. And also the gateway emotion is anger, which propels us with its dynamic force.

I identify powerfully with The Warrior. The Warrior is the rebel too. It’s about boundaries and courage. The Warrior does what needs to be done. In inflated form, they are bullies, and deflated, they are victims. I know both intimately.

Not everyone – especially of course, the British, can do anger – I can. And sometimes I can overdo it. So in the exercise – Tell Me What You’re Angry About – I’m loud and full of the outraged anger that I feel when Asanga flirts with one of my friends. The anger of betrayal and abandonment. In fact, it’s often good for me to practice containment. But in this case, it makes me feel alive and ready for the group process work.

There are nine of us and so that’s at least nine hours. We start before lunch on Saturday and then it’s go, go go. Funnily enough, fuelled by his anger at me – I criticised him on the Friday evening after the sweet reunion and as a result he slept in the car - Asanga goes first. He’s in Warrior mode. John asks if he would like me to leave the room as they don’t want partners to cause an editing or censoring of what they say. Asanga says wants me to stay. That’s what we’ve both agreed. And to be honest, we don’t edit ourselves much in our ongoing relationship. We’re not polite.

It is deeply moving to watch your partner work in this way. And informative. I could really see now how like his mother I could be, in my unpredictable anger. And that made me reflect about my own behavior. It was a privilege to be there.

I decide to wait until the next day before I do mine. Majorly because I’m someone who can get overwhelmed by my feelings, and when I’m triggered, I long for some rational perspective. So I make my mind up that I will wait and let my feelings of anger subside a little.

On Sunday, I’m ready to rock and roll just before the sumptuous lunch. I’m full of anticipation rather than nerves. I stand up and walk into the middle of the carpet. Nicola asked me – “What would you like to have happen here”

“I would like to take off some of the protective layers around my heart with regards to Asanga, I want to allow myself to melt more in love,” I say.

And what is preventing you from doing this?

“I don’t feel safe. I feel often overwhelmed with feelings of fear, despair and abandonment when Asanga flirts with my friends?”

And then we’re off into role-play and the dynamics of the process. Nicola asks me to choose someone to play that little girl part of me that is overwhelmed. I’m invited to put her in a position and also to choose some material – dark green in this case – for what energy she emanates. I ask her to crouch down on the floor and take up very little space. I’m then invited to say what she will be saying.

“I’m overwhelmed and helpless,” I say, and my little girl performer repeats this.

I’m invited to choose someone to play Asanga. I do. And then demonstrate what he would be doing physically. I demonstrate a kind of dancing looseness and his sentences are – “I’m available to everyone else but not you.” Obviously, this is my subjective perspective when I’m triggered rather than the ‘reality’.

And then, quickly it goes back to my raging father – I pick someone for him and wrap him in bright orange – and his apoplectic violent anger against me, in other words, I felt abandoned in this place as a ten year old child and so this is still a place I travel to. I felt in those days as though I was going to be killed so this father says – “I’m going to fucking kill you” as though he means it.

Just as I’m getting carried away with that violent force – as of course, I have it within me as well - Nicola invites me into my Magician energy (in other words, to use my intellect for a bigger picture and perspective) and to the Lover corner of the room for relationship.

Who else would I like to be there? I say that I’d like other parts of my father that tend to get forgotten – to be there. The tender father who sang sweet songs to me when I was three. I choose someone for him. And the inspiring father who taught me about books and debate. So someone comes out to be him.

And then there’s me, as the pre-teen who physically fights my father. Out comes another participant.

This is a key moment. Nicola asks me if I’d like to push him – ie the angry father - out of the room. I am immediately clear that I don’t need to. That I have done this already in other group work and that’s not where my focus needs to lie. It would be better spent on the positive parts of my father and getting the cherishing that I need.

She asks me what I would like to happen? I say that I would like to be held by my father, and explain that my ideal father is actually the raging one at the moment.

“Realistically, he would never hold you, so we’ll have to de-role him so that he can become your ideal father.”

Magic can happen here.

First of all, I get to hold my own overwhelmed little girl and tell her all the wonderful aspects of herself, and stroke her hair and face. It’s exquisitely tender.

“You’re gorgeous,” I murmur, “You’re a great mother, you’re beautiful.”

Nicola asks what advice I can give to this little girl. I tell her that she can call upon those positive parts of her father in times of need and abandonment, and that they will be there for her.

Finally, I get to be my own little girl and I dissolve into the willing body and arms of my ideal father. I cry and breathe deeply. I drink in this gift of nurture and relaxation. It’s such a huge, huge relief.

John calls on everyone to join me and gently touch me. Again I breathe it all in. It is divine – floating in that sea of unconditional love. Plus Asanga is there somewhere in tears himself.

I realize that Asanga can also be this ideal father to me from time to time, when I need it. He has that energy. That’s reassuring.

I get up in bliss and dance with them. That’s my way.

Finally a couple of hours later, after incredibly intense group processes, we gather again for a graceful goodbye. Our sharings of how it has been for us. Our honouring of the group and the incredibly skilled facilitators.

What have I taken away? A sense of new calm around this, the nourishment, the witnessing and the knowledge that I have been seen in these places by my partner. That is a Big Wowee…

You can find more information about Shadow Work and weekends led by Nicola and John at goldenopportunities.org.uk, shadwwork.eu and shadowwork.com

This week I thought I’d feature a poem by contemporary poet Raymond Antrobus. He’s one of my favourite modern poets. It’s from his collection of the same name - The Perseverance. It’s really an exploration of his relationship with his father. And the name of the pub that his father frequented.

The Perseverance

I wait outside the perseverance.

Just popping in here a minute.

I’d heard him say it many times before

like all kids with a drinking father

watch him disappear

into smoke and laughter.



There is no such thing as too much laughter,

my father says, drinking in the perseverance

until everything disappears —

I’m outside counting minutes,

waiting for the man, my father

to finish his shot and take me home before



it gets dark. We’ve been here before,

no such thing as too much laughter

unless you’re my mother without my father,



working weekends while the perseverance

spits him out for a minute.

He gives me 50p to make me disappear.



50p in my hand, I disappear

like a coin in a parking meter before

the time runs out. How many minutes

will I lose listening to the laughter

spilling from the perseverance

while strangers ask, where is your father?

Raymond Antrobus is an award-winning poet and author whose work explores sound, identity, and belonging.

His work has won the Ted Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and his poems have been added to GCSE syllabi.

In 2019 Raymond became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed an MBE in 2021. The Quiet Ear is his first work of prose.

“Raymond Antrobus is as searching a poet as you’re likely to find writing today.”

Kaveh Akbar Poet and author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf

Before my niece’s wedding recently.

I became a grandmother in 2023 at the age of 70. I have one son so am very grateful that it happened. Santi has just turned one and it’s been quite a year.

A year of joy – the exquisite feeling as an exhausted moan-cry changes to the gentle slump of sleep as Santi rests against my chest in his carrier – and reflections.

Santi’s mum, Lina – my son Marlon’s partner – asked me recently about my own grandparents and whether I knew them. I didn’t know my Tooting-based ones who died before I was born but my Yorkshire-based ones (my mother’s parents) lived three miles away and we saw a lot of them. They were a boon to our childhood in terms of practically supporting my mum – she had three children – and making us feel loved.

They were classic old-style grandparents. They always looked ‘old’ to me. They were both tall which is strange because we were all small. Harry, my grandfather, wore the classic flat cap, was bald and lived in his allotment. He was a direct, no-nonsense kind of Yorkshire man. Jenny, my grandmother, wore long skirts and looked old-fashioned, she was always baking. They didn’t have much money. Harry worked in various engineering factories up the road. They had a two up and two down just outside the market town of Otley where my mum had lived most of her life. They never had a car and walked four miles to a farm to have Sunday roast then four miles back when they were younger. They saved up all year in a Christmas club to give us treasured presents. I love that they lavished us with so many gifts (and they were small but significant) despite being poor.

My wonderful Yorkshire grandparents probably about 1960

They were very important to us as a family. They held us with their quiet devotion. They lived down East Busk Lane – that lane provided us with so much inspiration as children. We went down to the stream with our grandfather and collected the red clay from the bed, then fashioned pots out of it. These clay pots became part of the mythology of our childhood. As well as the names of wild flowers – the yellow toadflax that popped up in crowds beside the railway track or the palest pink milk maids in the boggy meadows. As did the divine smell of baking bread as we entered their home – the loaves were in tins in the ovens beside the open fire. And the chrysanthemums that grandpa grew, magnificent plant creatures from another planet and he knew all the names, of course.

Saturdays were the zenith of our child week. Treats galore. All home-made. Meat loaf, egg mayonnaise on bridge rolls (remember those), and cakes ago go from marble to fruit. Then the games. Housie Housie which was Bingo. Lots of shouting and laughing. Grandpa watching the wrestling on TV – they had a television before us so this was a highlight – with tag wrestling and all those old legendary wrestlers like Mick McManus, Les Kellet and triumphantly, Giant Haystacks. This was the 1960s and there was Dixon of Dock Green, Laramie and the Voice too. Heaven. And a little bit disturbing watching the drip on the end of my grandpa’s nose tremble precariously.

*

My mother with my son, Marlon when he was about 4 in her garden in Yorkshire.

By the time, I had my one son, it was 1986 and I lived just off Portobello Road with my now ex-partner, Mario, in a housing co-op that had short life properties from Kensington Housing Trust. My mother was 60 - my father had died two years before – and was still residing in the Yorkshire village where I grew up. Mainly, our grandparent relationship relied on me driving up there and staying with her. My parenting style was very different to hers. There were a few incidents – like when my two year old son was learning not to wear a nappy resulted in a poo accident at the children’s museum we were visiting – and me receiving an admonishing letter afterwards. There was a spiky silence between us after that - for some time.

And we did see her in holiday time. And Xmases. But there wasn’t the hands-on grandparenting that I had had. Now I feel for her because no doubt she would have loved it if we’d been round the corner, and she would then have been able to grandparent in the way that her parents had. The distance made that impossible for her. She never had my son for any time on her own even when he was older. She really missed out.

Fast forward to 2023 and the birth of Santi. I am in a Living Apart Relationship – my partner resides in N Wales and I’m in Harlesden, London – and one of the reasons that I’ve been so adamant about staying here (there are other ones) is that I want to be near to my son and now my grandchild.

The different waves of grandparenting styles are flowing back and forth. My mother’s experience made me want to be able to do more, to be there more. And I am able to because we all live in London. They are in Bermondsey, I jump on a tube and am there in an hour. And his other grandparents, Lina’s parents, are even closer. Plus he has a great grandmother in London too who also came to his first birthday party.

The way it is now - me chasing Santi to try to get that stick

What is modern grandparenting? What do we have to offer? I knew that I wanted to offer a day a week childcare at least. And his other grandparents offer weekend childcare. According to Junior magazine, 60 percent of the childcare in the UK is done by grandparents. I was amazed by that.

According to an Australian study which followed 10,000 families over four years – ‘simple intergenerational-friendly activities like reading or shopping together also boost child development. The study revealed that children aged from three months to 19 months had higher learning scores if they were cared for by grandparents as well as their parents.’ Junior magazine. Which is all great but I want him to feel utterly loved and supported the most.

I relish Santi Mondays. The other week, I was taking him to Southwark Park in the pushchair when I happened upon Bermondsey Carnival. Santi already loves music. His parents took him to Colombia – where Lina was born and lived until she was six – for two months earlier this year and he was regularly swaying to the sounds of Cumbia. And as soon as he heard the Wild Violets – funk and jazz – his hand shot in the air and he started moving.

Modern grandparenting also means having respect for different childcare methods. And being open to learning some new ones too. Hands up, there were a few difficult moments in the first few months. Tiny babies are not my forte. I felt a little unsure. His new parents seemed a little over-preoccupied but they were new parents. There was a lot of Ssh mum as though I was eternally being too loud.

I felt the division between their X Generation and my Baby Boomer one acutely. We just left our babies in the middle of noisy restaurants and expected them to sleep. We made them fit in with our routines rather than the other way round. I was a little worried.

But gradually I realised what a great job they are doing together. That they really do parenting together. They are so much more of a team that we ever were. They discuss their different approaches and reach agreements. My son has stepped up into fatherhood in a very hands-on way which makes me feel proud.

They might time activities like sleep in a more disciplined way than we did, but they also already negotiate with Santi. Lina speaks only in Spanish to him which is so brilliant. I hope he does grow up to be bi-lingual, it’s such a great skill to have. They explain to him why he should be gentle or why he can’t do something. This seems to be the heart of gentle parenting. And he has the freedom of their flat and regularly pulls everything out in his explorations. And they let him go almost naked to eat so that he can fully enjoy his food!

Lina, Santi and Marlon

And they are still keeping him away from sugar. Which is such a good idea. There is so much more information about nutrition now. And they make it simple by giving him what they’re eating often but without the seasoning. It so wonderful to witness him loving fritters, or mango, or oats. I confess Marlon ate a lot of baby food at this stage and it certainly had sugar in it, and then spaghetti hoops.

I’m interested in their philosophy of parenting and how it goes. We certainly didn’t have all the answers. I was more liberal, much more, than my parents. They are a mixture of flexible and thinking about Santi’s needs.

Another mistake I found myself making he other day was to call some of the sounds – am observing them and what they mean – the bad ones! I immediately put my hand to my mouth in shame. Grandma – yes, I’m grandma rather than granny – had judged his sounds. They didn’t say anything. But Lina had already explained that babies just have needs, they aren’t trying to get one over on us. Of course.

This modern grandma aged 73 is all ears and not half as mouthy as she could be. I’m learning that being a modern grandma is about listening and watching…

My mum was in her late 80s – she died in 2018 at almost 92 – she had Alzheimer’s and she would often mention wanting to go home. As many people with Alzheimer’s do. She was in three care homes – one in Yorkshire, two in Oxfordshire – and she would say with urgency in her voice – Rosemary, I want to go home.

The impossibility of her moving back literally to her old house tugged at my heart strings but eventually I came to realise that she wasn’t talking about her home in the village of Menston where she’d lived for thirty four years, she was talking about somewhere intangible inside. It seemed to mean an internal peace because Alzheimer’s made her anxious and she felt lost. She’d often to say to me how strange it was to be in the place that she was. I admired her for being able to say that. It was entirely reflective of the pragmatism that imbued her life.

It’s not so obvious to me where my home is. Of course, my flat in Harlesden, London, is my beloved home and has been for the last thirty years. Yet when I go to Yorkshire, when I get blown about at the tarn below the moors in Ilkley or eat fish and chips at the Maypole in Otley, I settle down internally in a way that feels like home. My waters relax, something inside my body tells me I am home now. And yet I haven’t lived there for forty seven years!

At this point, I have to mention a regular strange occurrence. Without me knowing on a conscious level - friends in London - often turn out to be people who come from the North. I am wont to say these days that there’s an underlying geographical attraction going on. The pull of the Northerners. Do Southerners have it too? Take one female friend – I met her at a Tantra Festival in Catalonia which was wild to say the least… one divine pleasure after another plus so much laughter – and I discovered she’s from a village a couple of miles away from where I lived for the first eighteen years of my life and that she went to school in Otley where I was born. Another friend from my tennis club mentioned that her sister lived in Yorkshire. Yorkshire is a very big place – I said. It turned out that her sister lives in Menston, yes, the very village where I grew up.

I could go on.

It’s uncanny and a thing. I am attracted to people who come from up North and often very near to where I was brought up.

And now I have a second home in North Wales where my partner, Asanga, lives. I’ve been travelling up to his fourteen acres of wild land near Criccieth for thirteen years. And there’s a moment when I turn into the track that leads to his farm house - where I sigh for a few seconds and imbibe both the beauty and the familiarity. It feels like another home. A place of solace and reflection. I often feel contentment in that coming-home-to-self-way as we sit on his outside sofa and listen to the abundance of birdsong. His home feels like a little bit of heaven and like my second home.

second home

living in my lover’s house

is like learning latin in the dark

the drawer for his measuring spoons

the dials on the hob electric not gas

the practice needed for wheelbarrow and wood

how to recognise a bill hook

undo the squirrel-proof birdfeeder’s rusty nut

parse the ancient heating system

undo the debris of his family

interpret the nuts in the stair cupboard

the etymology of the log burner

the painted lady behind the heavy curtain

Often when I’ve been away too long – I have a yearning to go home to Harlesden to be surrounded by the objects that make me feel safe. When my mum died, one of the only objects that I took – because I don’t have much space – was my dad’s desk. It is so reassuring – he died in 1984 – to have it with me. I am working on it right at this moment. It was in our living room for over forty years. It has a soothing presence in my life.

Even though my father, George Henry Rouse, often didn’t have a soothing influence on my life. In fact, his violence towards me as a child is what makes me feel unsafe sometimes. But this is how memory and magical thinking works. Now the fictious memory of him as someone safe and something that belonged to him – is able to make me feel safe.

I’ve got a wire egg cutter in my kitchen drawer. I took that from mum’s house when we cleared it out while she was in a care home . I hardly every use it for sandwiches but I adore having it there, it takes me right back to our first home, a Victorian terrace house and shared raucous meals or the picnics that we so often had with our grandparents around Otley. It is soothing.

London, Yorkshire, North Wales – where is my home? I feel as though they are all my homes although Harlesden is my main heart home and place of solace .The sort of home 340,000 people In Britain do not have. It is more than the physical bricks and mortar. It is a place of safety.

Motherhood as Refuge

by Kim Moore

In the next life, if you’re a mouse,
I’ll be tall grass so you can run unnoticed,
or if you’re a brown rat, I’ll be a garden shed
that you can burrow under, if you’re a seabird
I’ll be an island you can nest on, if you’re a fish
I’ll come out in colours as a coral reef,
if you’re a spider, I’ll be a brick wall
with a creephole for you to hide in,
or if in another life, you find yourself
to be a bat, I’ll be the dark you need to hunt in,
I’ll be the barn you need to roost in,
or maybe you’ll find that you’ve come back
as a rarity, a Walney geranium that grows
only in one place, in all the world –
then wait for me, I’ll be that place, I’ll turn myself
into Walney Island, a strip and spit of land
grey seals can haul themselves upon,
and if you become a buff-tailed bumble bee,
I’ll be the compost heap you sleep in,
and even if you come back as something darker,
something harder – a tumour perhaps,
maybe you need a body to live inside,
I will give you mine, here is my bowel,
it will keep you safe from harm, I’ll put myself
to the bottom of every waiting list, turn down
the operation, this was the bargain,
the promise I made, my life as refuge,
my life as harbour, my life for yours each time.

© Kim Moore, creative writing lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Manchester Writing School.

A new poem by Kim Moore in her new collection The House of Broken Things on Corsair.

Kim is one of my favourite contemporary poets because she mixes a devotional kind of commitment with lyricism and the political.

Kim Moore was born in Leicester, England. Her first chapbook, If We Could Speak Like Wolves, was a winner in the 2011 Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition, and went on to be shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award and the Lakeland Book of the Year. She is the author of the full-length poetry collections All The Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021), which won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection, and The Art of Falling (Seren, 2015), which won the 2016 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She published a nonfiction book, What the Trumpet Taught Me (Smith/Doorstop, 2022), and has written a hybrid book of lyric essays titled Are You Judging Met Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism (Seren, 2023).

Moore’s work has been translated into many languages as part of the Versopolis project, and she was a judge for the 2018 National Poetry Competition and the 2020 Forward Prizes.

Moore earned a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University, where her thesis was on “poetry and everyday sexism,” and she was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Bursary to carry out her research. She won a 2011 Eric Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2015. She won the 2020 Ledbury Poetry Competition and placed third in the 2021 Mslexia Poetry Competition.

Moore lives in Cumbria, England, and is a lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She also serves as the codirector of Kendal Poetry Festival, hosts a reading series for Wordsworth Grasmere, and runs regular writing workshops for young people and adults.