Grief experts say grief has a shape; they have charted its pattern. First there is shock, then denial, then bargaining (for more time), then guilt, anger, depression, and finally acceptance. The experts disagree over the number and order of the stages but they all agree there is a pattern. The experts could probably track the … More Elegies by Douglas Dunn
Hoylake Community Cinema is no more. After 10-ish years and several awards it closed its doors in September, purportedly to make way for a commercial cinema that will almost certainly fail. HCC succeeded because it was like a film club with no membership subscription. It screened one film a month. The programme for the ‘season’, … More Emily Dickinson – poems selected by Ted Hughes
Biographies are like busses, you wait for one for ages then three come along at once… My Uncle Bobbie died earlier this year just under two weeks before his 96th birthday. It seems strange to refer to the death of a nonagenarian as a shock, but it was, because he wasn’t ill. On the morning … More Somewhere Towards The End by Diana Athill
Last month I went with hubby to see comedian Richard Herring perform his F**k I’m Fifty stand-up show at Liverpool’s Hot Water Comedy Club. In one bit of the routine Herring compared being a child to being on the beach with your back to the sea. Then when you’re older, … More Inside the Wave by Helen Dunmore
When I was a child, and resisting sleep because I was scared of ghosts – I grew up in a formerly haunted house, but that’s a whole other story – my mother would tell me, as her mother had told her, that good people are in Heaven with God and don’t want to leave, and … More Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
My project for over the Christmas holidays was to sort through my old photographs. It was fun to do but also a little sad. Girls at school, girls at Guide camp, a barbeque on the beach with the boys from the Catholic Youth Service, the fun of the fair with a church music group, an … More A Horse Walks Into A Bar by David Grossman (translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen)
whatcathyread 