I was once lucky enough to be awarded a writing residency in France, in a village where Robert Louis Stevenson had spent time with a colony of Swedish landscape painters. At last, I could fulfil my teenage fantasies of being a writer in France, a country, unlike Australia, where creative…
Category: Blog
The interior landscape: sitting down
In London, I lived for five years in a tiny bedsit with no couch and a single bed. There was no room for a table, either for dining or work; the obliging landlord installed a small benchtop that I used for both. When eating, I lifted my laptop to its…
Zozo is back
I went into my office for the first time in 18 months. The university set up a mandatory ‘return to work’ Moodle course last summer, but the requirement to work from home was only lifted on 1 September. It was a warm, sunny day, possibly the last warm, sunny day…
The flag in the window
When I first arrived in Glasgow in the summer of 2017 – an unusually hot summer for Scotland – I spent my lunch breaks wandering the streets around the university department where I now worked. Transplanted from rural Australia to lodgings in north London to an ex-council flat in Maryhill…