Back to black

I woke up this morning sick of being a redhead. I don’t know why, exactly. When I went to bed, I was feeling a little Joan Holloway; when I woke up, Joan Crawford.
A quick trip to the chemist equipped me with a box of L’Oreal approximating my natural colour (‘Darkest Brown’, since as far as [...]

Valentine’s Day

We had a quiet housewarming on Saturday night – Valentine’s Day, as it turns out. Although the sky was still yellow and bleary with ash, it was nice to just be with friends and eat sausages and lie on what’s left of the grass.
The Boy helped me drag our old bed into the backyard, beneath [...]

Ring the bells

Last Thursday, my mother and I went to see Leonard Cohen in concert. She’s been waiting since she was sixteen to see him. (I have, too, but she was sixteen first). The stadium was packed, and our seats were high up in the air. I could have squashed Leonard Cohen between my fingers, but I [...]

Ashes

A few years ago, a bunch of us piled into various cars and drove to a house in the Cathedral Ranges. It was the middle of winter, the sort of frigid where we all slept in our sleeping bags in the one room with a fire despite there being plenty of semi-comfortable beds elsewhere in [...]