“The line then that separates people who kill themselves and people that don’t is vague and uncertain, it is a line within each of us, not between us.” I recently performed a monologue, a ‘verbatim piece’ made up of extracts of the last written words of people who had taken their own lives. I was […]

It is Remembrance Sunday, 1030am and we stop, my family and I; two kids, two dogs no excuses, prompted by a display of parochial magnificence, poppies, flags and a sign reads “hot squash” these two words mashed together enough to make us ignore the double yellow. We pull up at a bus stop (no busses […]

When my Mum first got cancer I must’ve been around the age Jade’s eldest son is now. Too young, in fact, to properly comprehend what was happening, only old enough to sense the tingling presence of fear, the averted looks, the stifled, thin lipped sympathy and muddled, neighbourly compassion. My Mum, Thank God, did not […]

The foreward I wrote for Martino Sclavi’s book: It is eerily joyful to write a foreword to Martino Sclavi’s book The Finch in My Brain, because five years ago I accepted that he was going to die. Not in a cosmic ‘You gotta go sometime’ way. No, I observed the face of the man in […]

“It’s coming home” has become a summertime idiom, replacing “Hello” as my standard greeting, the “Under His Eye” of this heliocentric inversion of the Hand Maid’s hell in which we are all now blissfully residing.This World Cup has created, as festivals are supposed to, a temporary utopia, this rare and beautiful English summer, scored by […]

Well I wasn’t expecting that, were you? The mad and sudden flux of adrenaline, the gush, the knackering rush. Together alone men took their tops off and Love Island was fucked off for Gareth Southgate’s post match interview. Domestic life was interrupted as the TV-cum – campfire lit up our shared homes and the primal […]