Skeleton Architecture

My Instagram feed is full of protest marches I'm not on, and I feel like I'm letting the side down. Truth be told, I don't want Theresa May to cancel Donald Trump's visit to Britain, and I don't see why the Queen would be embarrassed, she's kind of used to dealing with powerful bigots. However, I hope that Theresa is challenging Donald's policies, I hope she considers them when she is in trade negotiations. I hope Boris was right when he said that Britain would not quail from voicing differences, even if they are voicing them in private. Anyway, with Trump sticking by his hateful policies and getting up to who knows what else while we're all reeling from that, with hate crime in Quebec, and with Peter Capaldi leaving the TARDIS, I was feeling pretty hopeless last night, so I wrote a note to dear Theresa: Dear Theresa I know it's hard when your friends disappoint, and you want to keep what you had, but Theresa, he's not the same. He...

I've been listening to talk about dress codes and sexual discrimination on Woman's Hour . It's taken me back to the years when I worked in offices. I tried to dress 'appropriately' but was constantly getting in trouble about my appearance. My hair was the wrong colour, my shoes were the wrong height, I wasn't allowed to wear trousers in court, I needed a tailored jacket, and so on and so on and so on. I once had a workplace appraisal (joy) wherein my line manager told me that I was scruffy and wouldn't be taken seriously. She was wearing a waistcoat so I chose to ignore her sartorial advice. It's incredibly difficult to find clothes that are deemed suitable for an office and which also fit chubby bodies... I suspect that it's actually the bodies that are deemed suspect.  Anyway, according to recent research discussed on Woman's Hour women, espeically young women are still being required to dress for other people's gaze, to wear high heel...

I haven't shared a fabulous five recently, but it seemed the time for one, considering the other things happening in the world today, so here are five poems that have stopped me in my tracks lately, caught my attention, burrowed into my imagination, all that stuff. First up is a poem by Mandy Sutter , a poet who won the New Welsh Writing Award last year, I've got her pamplet, Old Blue Car, which you can buy on Amazon here , and from which this poem is taken. Many thanks to Mandy for letting me reproduce it here. The day  - by Mandy Sutter you hitched home from Woolley Edge in a van of evangelists going South saying I won't kiss you to stop me smoking hiding my lighter inside your shirt saying small isn't it, Leeds - one bedroom, one pub - having time for one last coffee because of the lighter evenings making me pay because you'd brought me a bottle of red - what more did I want - and I was half relieved you were leaving I didn...

Hello! The prompt over at Mum Turned Mom is History , which immediately makes me think of Herstory, and how History is written by the victors, and there are many stories to explain the same event, and even one person's story changes over time, and memory is malleable and all that stuff. I wasn't going to do it, because I didn't want it to be too big and too heavy, and I've had so much fun working on a short story I'm submitting to a competition, which is weird because I usually hate writing short stories, but this was perfect, so I celebrated that story with a cup of coffee, in a cup my sister gave me which she didn't realise would match my new wallpaper/curtains - I can't remember, I was pretty sure it was wallpaper, but have no memory of wallpapering, although I am still pretty sure there was wallpaper, particularly on the wall with cupboards and a fireplace, because that was a total pain to do. There must have been wallpaper, but there were ...

Did you know that I have actually had proper jobs? Not that this writing biz isn't a proper job, but I mean something that people actually expected to pay me for, where I was employed because I was clever and had certificates to prove it. Where people in suits (and people in uniforms) listened to my advice (I'm not saying that they acted on it, or listened particularly attentively, but they were quiet while I was talking, sometimes). Poems like this are basically me saying "you're alright, Civil Service, I don't really want to come back." (to which the Civil Service would probably say, "and you are?"). I still feel like I shouldn't say it, and I'm not going to argue poetic beauty for this one, it's just something that I had to say, so I wrote it down in my notebook and then realised that even though I'd not written it as a poem, it was one anyway! So here you go (written as a poem this time): Tories are Wrong The Tories wer...