On postnatal depression

I’m going to file this under “Better late than never”, cross-indexed to “No shit, Sherlock”. Discussion of mental health has over the last several years become less taboo than it was.  It doesn’t seem that long ago (it was 14 years, eep) that I was called ‘brave’ for writing about my own experience. Nowadays it seems natural for people like Henry...

Jun 2022

Girls on film

You will remember, in the Before Times, how Professor Robert Kelly’s interview with the BBC was photobombed by his children (and how ninja-ly his wife, Jung-a Kim, rounded them up). Even then I thought how very humanizing was this little cameo, and that it would be great if we could see more of this sort of candid behaviour. Fast forward a couple...

Jan 2022

On occupational hazards

(First posted over at the day job.) On Christmas Day I received an email. It was addressed to my 7-year-old son, and it told him that his coronavirus test was positive. There were mixed emotions. I was amused at the thought of this strange Christmas present. I was also relieved – ever since his school had closed a day early the previous week because...

Feb 2021

Clampdown

“ Hey Mike. Mike? Mike. Mike, can you hear me? Cannn youu hearrrr meee. Yes, I can hear you, but I don’t think you can hear me. No I’m not on mute. Have you got your sound up? Better? Good. No, don’t worry. We’ve all done it. I think Janice has just jo—ah. Janice. I can—I can hear—dammit—I can hear myself. Try Your Headphones. Let me try it...

Apr 2020

If music be the food of love, rock on

One of the problems of having so many websites is knowing which particular wibble goes to which one. And generating enough content to keep them fed, of course. Confessions has been neglected of late—not because I want to, or am uninspired, but because it’s difficult to find subjects that are ‘safe’, considering the day job. Especially seeing as...

Dec 2019

The Twelfth of Never

I may have mentioned once or twice the collaborative webstory that germinated a decade ago and half a world away (quite [lab-]literally). In fact, I’ve just found on my Mac a file from December 2006, with some notes on how to finish the story—written around the time I was recovering from pneumonia. In Australia. Anyway. Without further ado, A...

May 2019

My blue heaven

Wordsworth lost it when he saw fields of daffodils. I wonder what he thought of bluebells. It’s been a busy 2 weeks—a long-awaited holiday from work, with my birthday in the middle. Staycations around here always end up with a list of things I haven’t done, often seemingly longer than the to-do created at the beginning. Back to work tomorrow, and it’s...

Apr 2019

Alice’s Restaurant Massacree

I fell a bit behind with the shopping lists, which is a shame because I really wanted to show you this one before Christmas. It’s a full-blown pre-Christmas shop. Right at the top we’ve got mistletoe and greenery—both queried though: maybe she (definitely a ‘she’) wasn’t sure if Waitrose would have them, or maybe there was already another trip...

Jan 2019

Twelve days of Christmas

View this post on Instagram On the seventh day of Christmas. #Whitstable A post shared by Richard & Jenny (@rpgjlr) on Dec 31, 2018 at 2:11am PSTSo that was Christmas. And what I did was a little project that you might have missed: a photo for every day of Christmas, from the first to the twelfth. No commentary or explanation, just the...

Jan 2019

There are worse things I could do

Hastily snapped this, as we went into the shop. But to be clear, the mystery shopper wanted the same number of fillets as en croute. Perhaps they were having coeliacs around? An engineer’s or a computer programmer’s brain behind this list, I fancy. Or perhaps ex-military. Eggs, large*. Vanish, small. Tea, milk two sugars. I’m assuming the tin (large;...

Dec 2018