Category: Blog

Returning through Central Station on Saturday afternoon, heading home after an 11-mile walk with a group of women I’d met through Facebook, I was stopped short by the sound of a piano. Public pianos have become a feature of stations and shopping malls, an invitation to contribute to street life…

On the first day of my first post-COVID holiday, on a Greek island, I got the post-COVID ‘super cold’. I’d booked the trip nine months earlier, and it was to be my first overseas trip in over two years, my second beach holiday ever. I did not grow up with…

Wandering through a community fete, held in a small, locally tended garden in the more middle-class zone of my very mixed neighbourhood, I spotted a boy standing behind a little table. To my child-free eyes, he could’ve been anywhere from eight to fourteen. On the table—his wares, I assumed—were a…

Since last October I have been badgering the factor about the cessation of stair cleaning. In the Good Old Days that weren’t so good, the women of the stair took turns to sweep and scrub, putting a card through the door of the next (female) person. Now, part of my…