Our maps shift and move like water
All of us hold in our minds a shifting map of our life. An ordinary, modern map renders three dimensions into two and confidently fields outlines right to the edge of the paper. An online map, like Google Earth, just keeps on going forever. But our internal life maps are more complex, and simpler. They…
Digging a Hole
Today I dug a hole. That’s not a metaphor, I actually dug a hole. In the ground. Not being a fast digger, I had plenty of time to think. It was hard work but strangely meditative. Hole is not a beautiful word (unlike hope, for example, which is one of my favourites) but it is…
Vale Josephine Pullein-Thompson
Perhaps I’m a little late to the wake but I was saddened to learn that one of my very favourite childhood authors died a few weeks ago. The Pullein-Thompson pony books (Josephine had two sisters and between them they apparently published around 200!) were dated even when I devoured them, in the 1970s and 80s. …
Bridgerule
Elizabeth Veale, as she was then, was born in 1766 and raised in the English village of Bridgerule, on the border of Cornwall and Devon in England’s southwest. The time I spent in Elizabeth Macarthur’s birthplace was absolutely the highlight of my trip to England. But, as I always seem to find, the place mattered…