What a year! The events of the last week must surely form the icing on a 2016-cake built of bullshit, bitterness and death. I’m increasingly convinced that David Bowie may have been the glue holding our entire world together. It’s been a toughie on a personal level, too – losing two people to irreparable disagreements, after
Alternative title for this post: everything I know about life I learned from Ani Difranco. If you’re not getting happier as you get older then you’re fucking up. If you don’t like abortion don’t have an abortion and teach your children how they can avoid them. But don’t treat all women like they are your
Dear Orla, You might not enjoy them or even finish them, but the following books are all worth trying. These are the books that helped me understand the world – and possibly even myself – a little bit better. If I get hit by a bus and turn into a tragic absent-mother-figure, I hope you can
Orla appears to thinks Miffy is Death. Or Deff, as she says it – like he might have a twin brother called Jeff. It’s been a bit of a difficult month, you see… It started a few weeks back when our lovely old house-chicken Matilda died. It was a sad and shocking loss, and in
Oh Sunday – day of crumpled sheets, pastries & jam, coffee & sunshine and white floaty dresses. That’s my take on it, anyway – yours might be entirely different. & so I’ve teamed up with Kate from Netherleighblog to find out! We’ve started a hashtag over on Instagram called #mymonthofsundays and we want you to
H is for Hawk is a book about madness. Not the institutional kind, but the madness of grief, and the long, slow process of recovery that follows. It’s a process millions of people undertake every day, quietly, in countless ways; For Helen Macdonald, it involved buying a hawk. I had little interest in reading this
These are recipe books that have changed the way I cook & eat. They taught me my entire memorised repertoire, all of my fancy tricks, and I owe them a whole heap of thanks – so here it is.
Read more books – the first resolution on my slow living list. Easy, right? Books have always been a part of my identity. I tend to read fast and furiously, churning through novels the way Orla does bowls of pasta. A friend once joked my book collection was in danger of burying me alive; “It’s
My friend Helen writes & illustrates the most wonderful books for children. She’s also one of my favourite people ever, a hugely inspirational mama and has a wardrobe full of Things I Want to Steal, but they don’t seem to mention that much when they read her stories on cbeebies/Blue Peter, or when she illustrates