Liz has a nice followup to my post about kinds of honesty in which she neatly collects links to the discussion – I’ve been shockingly lax about that, I just read things and was appalled and didn’t actually link to them. Jonathon […]

Ah, this is a good one from Mark: Tragedy requires that the characters be blind (as we ourselves, at times, are blind), and if you let a sane and sensible reader into the room, everything is bound to collapse. Take Hamlet: it’s […]

I just finished reading Vigdis Hjorth’s novel, Om bare. Having studied literature at the University of Bergen I’d heard all about the novel, which the literary crowd at the university and CafÈ Opera agreed was a malicious act of vengeance against Hjorth’s […]

Just like Halley I’ve asked my gynaecologist whether it all looked, well, normal. You know that fear that you’re freakish, because as Halley points out, once a girl’s own pubes grow hairy they’re the only example of the species she’s likely to […]

I’m in a foul mood today. You may invent your own backstories to that.

OK, now when I wrote about war and protests I wasn’t actually deliberately cloaking “the real point” in a tent of metaphors, no, only in retrospect did I see the slippage of meaning from emotions to blog. In retrospect I might as […]

It’s summer. Yes, I know it’s only Easter and there’ll be rain and maybe even sleet before it’s really, truly summer, but today was a summer’s day. My good friend B is in town for the holidays and my daughter and I […]

Um, there’s this thing called the penisblog where you match the penis to the blogger. Found it via Metafilter. I don’t think I’d sign up even if I had a penis, though they kind of parallell the honesty discussions of recent times: […]

Sometimes spam is brilliant: NEWSFLASH!!! INCREDIBLE DISCOVERY Based on 2000 year old recipe HOUSEWIFE IN AUSTRALIA ACCIDENTALLY INVENTS A BREAD THAT MIRACULOUSLY STOPS YOUR APPETITE AND HUNGER The bread is delicious and miraculously stops you being hungry for at least five or […]

daffodils in the garden the smell of mint ready to grow the blue bench I painted, warm in the sun twenty degrees glass of wine child asleep quiet