Creative non-fiction portfolio
‘There must’, we said, ‘be a back exit’. But a mental scan of the corridor outside revealed no discreet service lift. Just a series of hotel-like rooms and, opening up in the other direction, the bland living and dining area, then through that to the large lifts down to the ground floor and further below, … Continue reading Through the front door
Lists are not the bane of my life, far from it. Without lists, my life would be as bereft as a day without music, as soulless as a world with books, and as empty as a fridge without cheese.
Kahil Gibran wrote that your children are not your children. Even as a student in the 1970s I recognised the truth in what he said. And it turns out, bringing up children is a series of letting go's, from taking your hands off the back of the two-wheeler bike to walking away on the first … Continue reading Letting go of the children (or, I’ve not got Alzheimers yet)
After years in the corporate world, I was more than ready to embrace the role of earth mother. Of course, that's not quite what happened.
My efforts to pin down the family connection to the poet William Wordsworth have been like the clouds that float high above the hills and vales of the Lake District which inspired him. They’re real but constantly moving; they seem sometimes to come together, then they change direction and are off again. Like family history research, they are quite unpredictable.
An ode to Wellington where despite the winds, spring brings quiet exhilaration and exuberance.
Two small-town girls go to stay with their Nana and Pop in the city and discover they live life in a much richer way.
Clara Wordsworth Sargood grew up in comfort and affluence at Rippon Lea in Melbourne in Queen Victoria's time. She vividly recounts stories of a happy childhood, the heartbreaking loss of her mother, and the thrills of sea voyages to England and New Zealand.
I'm glad to be rid of plastic in the home for aesthetic as well as planetary reasons. And it's not so long ago that my mother and grandmothers managed without it.
In 1912, a well-brought-up young man on a new motor cycle knocked a young boy over on an Auckland city street. And so the lives of two families from different social worlds intersected as police and civil court cases plodded on and were reported on at length in the Auckland papers.
Fragments of an ordinary life 