Manchester: a long overdue postcard from music box days of rainy wordy delight
My dearest,
I’ve never seen the shape of my laughter before.
But here, in this little pocket of England’s northwest where my life seems to have taken root and is in a bloom of ice flowers, I see it every day; tumbling paisley swirls of steam that paint little clouds around me and float away on the plu…
Paris: j'adore... a postcard from the city of love
My dearest,
I was four years old the first time the perfume of France filled my head. I grew up in my grandmother’s garden; a tropical awning of blooms tucked behind a mango tree on an acre of central Queensland coast. I remember the smell of dark damp earth …
London: reflections from the looking glass... a postcard from Wonderland
My dearest,
I am sitting in citrus sunlight wearing a cotton summer dress and my favourite sunglasses. I just bought a tub of freshly cut pineapple and peach slices and a steaming black coffee with a vanilla shot for two pounds from a market across the street. I feel the kind of contentment that makes cats stretch a…
Seattle: I dream in green... a postcard from The Emerald City
My dearest,
Wide-eyed, with my suitcase full of disbelief and bewilderment, I stole the witch’s slippers and took it upon myself to begin my trek to The Emerald City; lions, tigers, bears and all. Twenty-three gruelling hours after leaving the warm clutches of Australia’s love behind, I stumbled into the marble art deco sto…
Eve
I have always been held in rapture and fascination by the word eve for the intense fragrance its imagery fills my head with.
At the sound of it, of the word eve, my mind twitches with the intrigue and suspense of something spectacular to come.
I think of all the different night before stories; the eve of their wedding, the eve of full moon, on the eve of battle, Christmas Eve, b…
Under my skin and in my notebook: one last hurrah of extravagant loveliness with Melbourne Bubbles
It happened a few weeks ago. I was at home writing, flicking and clicking through old work and journals when it all of a sudden became incredibly clear: it was a physical impossibility for me to leave for Manchester without whisking myself off to Melbourne one last time to be like a sponge and soak, soak, soak up the goodness and good love of many people who have been elemental cheerleaders in…
A little bit of news...
There have been word clouds brewing in my sky for some months now that I’ve been impatiently waiting for to burst so I can run out and meet them, these big fat plump clouds, and stomp in their puddles pooled around my toes, squelching and plodding in their absolute joy…
I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions, I never have been. However, at Christmas time last year, something wild and hung…
A girl of bells, cocount rapture and red canaries...
When I joined Red Bubble just over a year ago now, the first person on my watchlist was a writer who called herself Bellmusker and went by an avatar of red and black swirls. As anyone who has read Bell’s work knows, after stumbling in raptures through a few lines of her prose, her word hooks were well and truly under my skin and I was completely hel…
A weekend of Melbourne bubbles amidst the country air (it's good for the constitution...)
There were plane trips, train trips, road trips… wine, words and wonder… regular air gun salutes, pizza theft, cat naps, bathtubs in dappled backyards… hysterics, jelly bean overdoses, truth or dare, reconnaissance missions, a chicken hat… early bird speech impediments, reject shop plundering, book shop treasure trove hunting, launching words in print and pride, juicy word workshopping …
A wish for autumn equinox
Wouldn’t it be lovely… if every day was somehow made of…
book-shopping
seashell collecting
aromatherapy massages
following paths through wild cedar forests
cooking pancakes for dinner
reading in a red velvet chair by a window
daydreaming
yoga
diving in the sea
cloud-watching
doodling pages of inky art
being in the same moment as my be…