Archive for April 2020

One day I thought I saw a falling satellite but it was probably just a seagull. When I was very little, legend has it I looked up at the sky and informed my mother there were stars but no moon, so she should buy one in the shops. My brother (because he was younger and…

About 45 minutes from where I grew up, in sniffing distance of the River Alde, is the Snape Maltings concert hall. Inside the varnished room are taught strings and shiny brass, outside a reedy forest, oozy mud and ducks. Concert-goers in jackets and dresses sip interval wine with herons and frogs. It’s known for its…

When I was about three, I was terrified of collapsing sandcastles. It was the kind of terror that infiltrates every cell. It was visceral and it was total. Even now, I remember my utter revulsion when I saw the structure crack. I don’t know if it was the destruction or the denaturing that bothered me…

A friend once told me that the way to walk busy city streets was to fix your gaze ahead, focused on exactly where you wanted to go. With such an eagle-stare, sidewalk pedestrians would part to create a path. I tried it and it works. You just have to imagine you’re the only one there…

At the age of 11, I started high school, two bus rides away into another world. I was a fish scooped from his cozy bowl, poured into the ocean with its sharks and eels, currents and waves. None of this was friendly. I was Nemo lost. Each day, I was trapped there from 8 until…

When I was eight years old, I went on a school trip to the British county of Derbyshire. Our youth hostel was in spitting distance of the village of Eyam, which in 1665 quarantined itself to stop the Bubonic plague spreading elsewhere. But let’s gloss over that for now. It was one of my first…

At the age of 16, I was sent to see a career counselor. She made me fill in a form and then the computer spat out a list of suitable careers on a dot-matrix printer with the holey edges you had to tear off. I was to be an accountant or a librarian. There wasn’t…

My last silent meditation retreat lasted seven days. There were clouds of mosquitoes and deer flies that bite your head. The food was good. Life gets small on a retreat. There’s no phones and no internet. There are no outsiders. There’s no news. No movies. Even books are discouraged. Instead there is meditation and breakfast…