Tag: winter
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52and40/14 Benediction
We saw Collateral Beauty. The film whisked me back ten years to a hell of a week. Mum had been admitted to hospital in Aberdeen with a DVT. My son had his sixth birthday party. I hadn’t organised a thing for Halloween. The morning after cobbled together trick or treating, Mum called from hospital and gently explained…
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52and40/10 Air In Your Hair
I’ve never seen a Scottish Autumn and Winter as beautiful, so far, as what 2016’s given. The beauty in these seasons is going a long, gentle way to keeping breathing through the humanity shitstorm we’ve seen happen around the world this year. It’s easier to believe we’re not all doomed when nature’s on its best behaviour. As my…
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Of Mice and Men
Internalised misogyny’s kinda like the rat who lived in our back garden. Every now and then it poked its head out of a small hole in the dry stane dyke and scared the living shit out of me (but thrilled the dog). For soooooooo long I believed the rat was simply a large mouse. Then, faced with…
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52and39/50 Changed Days
Years ago I read that the things we struggle with in other people are usually the things we most need to work on in ourselves. I think we all have a thing or two that we do which doesn’t serve us well, is easy for others to spot and yet rarely (if ever) bleeps on our…
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52and39/48 Your People
Strangers are stranger, in someone else’s city. The smokey stains that gather on stonework seem darker and the chewing gum stuck to the pavement seems stickier and more defiant, in someone else’s city. The dirt that collects in dried tide on walls, windows, bus stops and doors seems dingier. People seem colder, ruder, less helpful, too forward…
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52and39/47 Sky Takes The Soul
We chased the light yesterday, finding it first in Helena Emman’s incredible work from Skye in The Line Gallery at Linlithgow, then leaving it at the Forth. We stood at Port Edgar, freezing, looking up and out at a world of massive Lego sets, listening to the ba-doom, ba-doom of traffic crossing the joints on the road…
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52and39/5 Wild in the Aisles
I’m walking, inspired by Cheryl of Wild movie fame. In my version there’s vacuuming, friends, reading, writing, husband and kids. So I go home for pit stops. I relate to resetting through walking, thinking and experiencing. It’s cathartic, like I imagine shedding a skin feels – you, but new, too. It’s a very literal way of…
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52and39/4 A Tale of Two Cities
When we decided we were moving to Edinburgh we heard a lot about how there are so many people and the city is so vast. I looked at maps, comparing Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Not an awful lot in it, to my eye. More people though? Yes. So more stories, too. You get to know the…