Category Archives: Mental health

Dunblane

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Thirty years ago this coming week, Sarah and I were on a short break in the Lake District. We had been together for ten years, we were living in a beautiful place, our respective careers were fulfilling, the children, aged … Continue reading

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Accentuate the positive

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Music is on my mind. Making, not listening. In truth, it’s seldom far away, but right now it’s more than usually present. I’ve spent the morning trying to figure out set lists for a concert in May at our local … Continue reading

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Webster’s Day

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February is a month to be endured. As a student in a drafty rented farmhouse outside Aberdeen in 1970, we were visited one freezing February day by a particularly foul-tempered tradesman who had come to do work on the house. … Continue reading

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Witness Blanket

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I recently watched a clip of a Native American elder in a wheelchair being jostled by New York police during a protest against ICE. Speaking to a reporter he said that it pained him to be there in a moment … Continue reading

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Waterfall dreams

My first waking image yesterday morning, well before I opened my eyes, was of a magnificent jungle waterfall, cascading down through several levels and widening symmetrically as it went, the whole scene fringed by luxuriant green leaves. It was so … Continue reading

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Alternative realities

(Also available as a podcast here) When I was three or four years old my mother used to get me to sleep by telling me about the animals curled up in their burrows and the birds closing their eyes in … Continue reading

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No return

(Also available as a podcast here) Two weeks ago I wrote about how I was experiencing life in lockdown. This post reached the second-largest number of readers I’ve ever had, the largest being for the post I wrote the day … Continue reading

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Perfect lives

For the final day of our recent The Stories We Tell course at Cortijo Romero, in Spain, we invited people to write or tell a personal story that had not previously been told. The only rules were that it should … Continue reading

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Poetry path

In the hills a few miles outside our village of Birnam is a Camphill community. Here, on the Corbenic estate, 27 adults with learning difficulties live with their carers and a number of volunteers in 50 acres of agricultural land, … Continue reading

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In memoriam

It has become a cliché of the information age that we remember where we were when we learned of certain events, the death of JFK or John Lennon for example. On each occasion there was something so shocking in the … Continue reading

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