Tag: kindness

thing 40: ‘skies of couple-colour’: St Hilda’s Way, part (ii)

Two moulded plastic chairs, one grey, one a sort of institution pinky orange, stood in front of Hilda’s spring; another lay on its side at a distance away, under a tree. The grey one was covered with flies. The chairs were that low budget, stacking sort: curved, with metal legs, and a cut out section at the base of the back which is, I suppose, designed to make lifting and stacking easier but which my young self, at primary school, believed to be a vent to let the farts out.

There was something oddly touching (more…)

thing 33: ‘feast on your life’: being a counsellor

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’…  I find myself thinking that a lot, these days. How fortunate I am, then, to have a job which acts as an antidote to despair and fear. I write thing 33 in celebration of the joys of being a person-centred counsellor.

It’s true that washing up, vacuuming and ironing are three activities which only become interesting when the alternative is writing up my client notes. Never mind that notes are an essential part of the work, being a place to reflect, self-supervise, allow feelings and ideas to come to the surface, get a meta position on the work… Meh. As (more…)

thing 30: ‘we are the wood drake’: reading together

‘… and then you’d think aha! something interesting is going to happen and then someone would mention Derrida and it would all be over…’

Thus my friend Simon, speaking about his time reading English at Oxford and the death-by-theory thing which can so often happen during formal study. I know what he means. In my very first group supervision at Cambridge we were issued copies of a poem—I have repressed the knowledge of what it was, if I ever knew—and the Director of Studies’ opening gambit (more…)

thing 27: ‘and thus the whirligig… brings in his own revenges’: a water park

… Only this was the whirligig of space, not time. And boy, he must have been holding a serious grudge against me. His revenges were a surprise. And they went on a really long time.

I was bidden to Blackpool, accompanying Eleanor (goddaughter) and her friend, plus Jane and James—the abseil crew, minus Izzy—on a birthday trip to the water park. I’d been to one with Lem and Susie on the Ancient Mariner trip to Corfu, and again more recently, and had loved it both times. Water, sunshine, what film censors would probably call “mild peril”, and (more…)

thing 24: ‘the marvellous journey’: St Bega’s way, part (iii)

You know when you’re driving along in the rain—the kind that your wipers can’t really cope with, and they go into a sort of frantic ineffectual fastwipe which is slightly silly, somehow, in the way that a powerwalk is—and you see walkers trudging along the verge, heads bowed, sheathed almost entirely in rustling nylon, their huge packs, also nylon-sheathed, rearing behind them like a doom they can’t shake; and you think casually, in passing, ‘Poor bastards’? Well. On day three of the pilgrimage, those poor bastards were us. (more…)