The regulars were arriving for their slap-up Christmas dinner. Some faces glowing, others uncertain and sad. Damp coats steaming on the hooks above the radiator. Winter-chapped hands fumbling with paper hats. It was the monthly meal for the homeless provided by our church and I was one of the team. Every month we served a […]
I have a bright red hand-written postcard on my desk. It reads: “Dear Merryn, How lovely to write, write, write! Everything is online at the moment, which is so fantastically useful, of course, and also rather dull! I was so amazed at the wonderful three way coincidence that Askival created. What a lovely thing. Wishing […]
A long time ago, I wanted to be an actress. (Or an acTOR, as I called myself at the time. ‘Actresses’ were either decorative fluff or the screen idols of a bygone era – not the serious performers we female drama students took ourselves to be.) So finishing up my Uni course in Melbourne I […]
Though the Glen Tanar Health Walk group love where they walk and were very happy to have me join them, it was made clear that they did not want to do any writing. I said, ok, I could certainly work on that understanding. In fact, most of my engagement with the Health Walk groups for […]
At the start of this year, I decided to embrace my term as Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park as a kind of pilgrimage. Certainly, I would be covering a lot of ground delivering the project, and that has proved true, and fascinating. More significantly, I knew I would be on a personal […]
Losing my wallet was the last straw. The final sign, if any were needed, that what I was really losing was my marbles. It was the climax of a catalogue of cock-ups and memory lapses, of a comedy of errors that had been playing out for several weeks, but long since stopped being funny. I’d […]
The Writer has not been in Residence in the Cairngorms this week but gallivanting down through the capital cities on a Grand Tour. The Pilgrim has digressed. It all began on Monday in Edinburgh with a day of meetings with the Society of Authors in Scotland team, joined by our SoA CEO (don’t you love […]