Photo by Ugne Vasyliute on Unsplash I woke this morning with a twist of anxiety in my belly that tightened rather than loosened as I went through the early rituals of the day – washing, dressing, taking kiddo to school. I went to my morning yoga class, and felt my mind running through all the potential reasons I could feel this way. I brought myself back to the practice with a mantra I’ve found very useful over the past few years – let it be difficult – because something I’ve learned about my anxiety in the time since Kieran’s death is that often it is a precursor to a deeper knowing, that if ..read more

This weekend I was fortunate enough to be funded by my institution to attend and present a paper at COMFAS 23 – the International Association for Comparative Fascism Studies‘ annual conference. This sixth meeting of the conference was based around the theme of Radicalization to Violence: Paramilitarism in Fascism and the Radical Right, and it was an excellent opportunity for me to introduce my new research into medievalism, masculinity and the emotionology of the extreme right, with particular attention on accelerationism. There are lots of academic buzzwords there! What that means for my gen ..read more

“Joy is not made to be a crumb” wrote Mary Oliver, though ironically it is this crumblike fragment that is probably her best-known quotation – and it’s a good one, delicious in the mouth, but it hardly gives up the whole of the power of her poem “Don’t Hesitate“, which has within it a great cry of grief, as well as of an upswelling of optimism: If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility lef ..read more

It’s been a while I since I was last here, which is explained quite easily: three days after my last post, I was readmitted to hospital with a bowel perforation caused by my previous acute diverticulitis and sepsis. I very fortunately avoided surgery, but I was very unwell. I’ve had sick leave, worked on reduced hours, and am only now shortly due to return to my “normal” workload. Today, and two days after my first hospital discharge in February. I thought quite carefully about whether I wanted to share the photos I’ve included here. People often praise me for my honesty in this space, but it ..read more

Nearly two years ago Kieran ended his life; it will be his anniversary on Monday. But this isn’t his story any more, so let’s begin somewhere else. Eight weeks ago I lay hunched up in the dark, with abdominal pain that was worsening, moving from something horrible but bearable into something terrible, a pain that lies on another side of a dark gate. Some time in the small hours, not long before deciding I would call 999, I thought: why would I bother loving someone again when they could just leave me to this by myself? Healing isn’t a straight line, as the crow flies from point A (little broke ..read more

Back in December, I had a positive FIT test. In the UK, this diagnostic test for bowel cancer is routinely offered to everyone between the ages of 60 and 74. This was too late to save my uncle, who was diagnosed at stage 4 in his mid-50s and died in 2019. And it wasn’t a test that existed when both my grandfathers died from bowel cancer in the 80s and 90s. I’m obviously much younger than any of them. But of course I feel quite aware of the potential risk of developing cancer, given my family history (my uncle’s young age at diagnosis is considered a particular risk factor), which may predispos ..read more

Hello everyone! A practical sort of update, intended really for those people who mostly follow me on twitter. As I wrote in my last post, I’m locked out of twitter, and now I am getting an error message like the one above. Emails to twitter support have gone unanswered, and I’m not feeling terribly optimistic I’ll get back in. So, what to do? I could start a new account, and try to manually follow a bunch of you. I could actually use the mastodon account I set up when everyone was scared twitter was melting (feel free to follow me there, in case I do). Or I could accept that this tweeting bit ..read more

When Twitter started going squiggly, I activated two factor authentication, as various experts advised. However, I didn’t know about this glitch – which as of Saturday evening means I’m locked out my Twitter account. I’ve been trying to spend less time on Twitter anyway, but I’d rather do that through choice than because it’s forced on me! Anyway, I’m fairly easy to find in other places, so if you want to say hi just get in touch. (This post will auto feed to Twitter. I still don’t have access ..read more

Open book. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash. Today I read Up Late by Nick Laird, which recently won a Forward Prize for poetry. It is a poem about the death of his father from covid; a poem about grief, and the shape we try to give grief, through elegy, through the shape of our bodies, in the day-to-day. Not all of the poem quite works, I think, but that doesn’t detract from its power. Perhaps in fact it needs moments of stuttering, of losing pace, because that too captures the bagginess of grief, the empty gap of it, as much as any tight stanza. It’s a poem I’ll return to, but ..read more

We – my daughter, my sister-in-law and I – have recently returned from a half term break in Cyprus. The weather was glorious, hot blue-skied days followed by sunsets of brilliant orange and night air as mild as milk. It’s the first time I’ve been abroad since 2018. We – this time meaning me, Kieran and our daughter – had planned to go to Tenerife in April 2020, but covid put paid to that, as to so many things. On the first night of our holiday I had a panic attack, worse than I’ve had in a long time. Sharing a room with my daughter, I lay in bed with a thundering heart, telling myself this to ..read more