Sparrow

Today my daughter walks into the room after banging her head on the floor because our indoor swing tipped backwards. She is wearing a towel around her shoulders and strutting like she thinks she is Queen Elizabeth. Her hair is a frizzy mess all over her head. Last night’s plait loosely pulled together behind. “Mama,” she says, in her most important voice, “What a wonderful day” “Certainly…

I am tired. Perhaps I would say I am more tired than I have ever felt in my life, ever. The butterfly of energy flutters evasively before me, and sometimes I catch her shimmering little self in a net, and she lends wings to my feet and fingers, and I fly here and there picking things up and adorning things with other things and turning the kettle on and making sure my five year old is bathed..…

I made it to the other side. For a long time I was repeating the mantra ‘there’s no way out but through’ – there’s no way out but through, through, through! I had to just get through it. The next few weeks, the operation, healing from the pain, the PAIN, the anxiety, the fear, the hormones… just had to get through. Well, I made it through! I made it through the last week of feeling like my…

I heard my children designing a garden for me. I happened to pass by their pretend play, and their conversation fell upon my ears. Their little childish tones often blurring into a background hum for me, with my mind racing as it always does, to-do lists and next steps.. but this time their sweet little high voices filtered through the chaos and I heard them loud, bright and clear. And it will…

I am tired. I don’t know if I have ever felt this tired in my entire life. My very bones are exhausted. They scream at me when I roll/haul my bloated self out of bed. I feel like each day gets harder and harder to get through, but still I pull myself through the days. Dragged by the ragged rope that is my sense of responsibility towards my family and children. Otherwise, believe me, I would be…

There is deep exhaustion everywhere. The kind that climbs onto your shoulders, places warm sweaty palms on your eyes, and rests its long tentacles along your bones. You can’t shake it off, no matter how much you sleep. You long for the respite of the cool night air, but it never comes. Perhaps there is a moment of happiness in a new ice cream cafe, a walk with a friend sipping iced lattes at…

I staunchly defended this director’s right to create an ‘interpretation’ of a lauded classic, for many weeks before I actually sat down to watch “Wuthering Heights” as it is so named. I said, people must be allowed the freedom of expression to express their creativity on a piece of literature such as this! Mind you, I am a purist. I love Emily Bronte’s dark and insane work. It spoke to me at…

I don’t know if my brain is becoming smooth. Ideally it should be more wrinkly, the wrinklier the better, I am told. AI usage, mental convenience and delegation and short-form content on the regular are making my attention span shorter. I feel any information I do consume stays in my short-term memory box, and I am left on a weird intellectual loop. Saying, thinking, planning the same old…

I am thirty two today. It slipped my mind entirely. I am expecting. Guests and a baby. I am also so exhausted and burnt out. I feel like I don’t know where I begin and end. Where does daily life meld into anything to do with myself. Am I just a blob drifting through this life? Do I want to live this kind of life? Maybe it’s got to do with my perspective. ANYWAY. I didn’t mean to get all…

One of the nicer moments I had with my mum before her recent lapse into severe anxious depression happened in the summer of 2025. We were at Manchester Airport’s Runway Park, one of my son’s favourite places. There is a real retired British Airways Concorde in a hangar there, and he got to see up close the mighty point and the smooth, seamless majesticity (is that a word?) of it. My mum was…

In today’s episode of ‘Things I Want to Remember my Child Saying’, we have my daughter, newly turned 5, self proclaimed ‘Princess Flower Nice Doctor Giraffe’, not easily embarrassed, with starlight in her eyes and sunshine in her steps.. I was brushing her hair, and happened to mention the voice note she sent to a friend containing a joke she had newly heard was received very well by the friend.…

Stephanie Meyer published a book called ‘Midnight Sun’. It is a retelling of her famous Twilight novel from the perspective of the male love interest, a vampire named Edward. In 2009, when the Twilight series was all the rage, I was fourteen years old. I was enamoured, to be honest. My parents forbade me from reading vampire romance so reading in the dark, in secret, made it all the more…

Today I fried samosas in ghee. I didn’t know I could do that, but given my newfound knowledge about the inflammatory effects of refined oils and seed oils, and the fact we only ever use olive oil, butter or ghee for cooking – I was so averse to frying samosas in the only way I ever knew we could fry them; in sunflower oil. So I avoided ChatGPT, and went straight to Google, to ask if I could fry…

Daily writing promptIf you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?View all responses Why, it would say, look for the beauty in nature to ground yourself. That is what it would say. I find myself yearning for cold winds over rugged plains and hills, scraggly rocks, hours of exploration through misty woods and amid raging shores. I find myself yearning for the silence of the hills,…

In an attempt to bring joy back into my life in what seems like a season of ill-will, misfortune and tired depression, I will talk today about something that brings me joy. It’s my daughter’s penchant for naming all her toys – apt names sometimes, or names that simply tickle her fancy at the time of the naming ceremony. Her first named doll is a little bald thing with the most intense eyes and…

I am off coffee. Off standing in a little coffee bar in some obscure coffee shop somewhere in Italy, ordering an espresso with whipped cream and one of those triangular pastries that are a hundred layers of thin crusty sweetness filled with a delicate custard. Off an iced spanish latte on a hot day. Off a hot Americano in a paper cup from a self-dispensing coffee machine which, for the equivalent…

Daily writing promptTell us one thing you hope people say about you.View all responses You know, I always tell my daughter that she is my sunshine girl. The sun shines out of her large beautiful eyes and beams out of her gorgeous big smile. She always thinks good of others, even the mean little four year olds at school who say hurtful things to her. ‘I think she forgot she was my friend Mama,‘…