Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher, radio Turn it up, that’s enough, so you know it’s got soul. ‘Caravan’, Van Morrison, 1970 The transistor radio came out between the vacuum tube in the fifties and the Walkman in the seventies. I spent many hours on our braided area rug prone upon my…
Tag: family
My Mother’s Quilt – Clare Reddaway
This is my mother’s quilt, but many other women have had a hand in it. It was started by my mother in the 1950s, and she made it for most of my life, in admittedly rather a desultory fashion. I remember her sitting on a freezing, pebbly beach in Suffolk, with the grey North Sea…
Roses in the Attic: Ruminations on Moving Back Home – Abby Connolly
It had almost been a year. This night, a year ago, was when I had had to come back. The realisation was a rock in my gut that nauseously listed every now and then to the side, keeping me awake. It was the sensation of motion in the deprivation-tank stillness of night that displaced me…
The Other Half-Orphan – Thomas Stewart
I was not the first. I knew that when it happened. But you feel like the only one it’s happening to. Because it’s happening to you, and there’s only one you. My father died when I was 23. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in July and died in February the next year. For the…
Fiachaire — Shannen Malone
“We can’t take it all,” her brother had said, tossing memories in a bin bag like kittens for drowning.
Mick Jagger Used to Call Me Mum – Jacqueline Ellis
When I was little, the dark staircase between the front and back rooms of my grandparents’ two-up, two-down terrace house had been a mountain. Each step a jagged, granite foothold; the shadowed landing a dark cloud hiding a kingdom of giants, or a castle encased in twisted branches. Their bedroom glowed yellow; the edges of…
ART: Natalie Bradford
Through countless retrievals, our memories of precious moments lose their ‘truth.’
ONE POEM – Iona May
When did writing
become such a warm meeting place?
ONE POEM – Sarah Degner Riveros
Mama hugs
her son. Can we get
horchata? No. Not today.
It’s Tuesday. Treinta tacos?
De asada? Para llevar.
The wait’s worth it.
ONE POEM – Elizabeth Wilson Davies
The unconsidered diaries of family life fall open at once favourite recipes,
bittersweet imprints on the page of stained, smeared, sticky memories.
COMFORT FOODS // While You’re Still Here – Yasmine Jessy Amr
You scribble on a piece of paper, pausing every two minutes to remember. Your memory isn’t what it used to be. But you try anyway.
TWO POEMS – Natalie Crick
I want to feel
the warm milk of your smile.
I want to see your reflection
in the moon’s mirror, polished like spring bones.
Porridge 