mdm

‘ Allo Vera .......             “I’ve been down so long, it’s starting to look like up” are the chorus lines from a Seasick Steve song. In this case you could just substitute my name as I was lower than a snakes belly just after Christmas this year. A combination of illness, infection, exhaustion, mood swings and general lethargy and depression had seen me lose my joie de vivre, suffer constantly with pain and stiffness, insomnia  and weight gain. A chance meeting in a coffee shop would lead to more than the consumption of pecan plaits. Vera Whelan is quiet. Unassuming, grounded, stable and in fact the polar opposite of me. Which is good. “Come to me for a session, I may be able to help” . (I should at this point add that I had met her before when I signed up and paid for a series of Yoga classes and attended only 2 !  -  Self sabotage  at its finest. Through a series of phone calls where she desrc...

Forget-me-not. “As life grows longer - awful feels softer”, but some nights the mountain  in my chest feels magnificently monstrous.  It was on one of those evenings that my Mother would have described me “ as having my tearbag too near my eye ” that I first saw the Angel of Collections. It was a moonlit evening where the sky resembled a Monet canvas.   A blur of light, a warmth, a presence, he sat slowly  waving his wings  to catch the memories as they flew like butterflies into his outstretched net. It was the formless and  the stillness, in the  maelstrom of dancing lights that surrounded my mothers bowed head.   The water is  always  like lava in the nursing home taps  and I run the soft white flannel under it for a hand-scalding  minute. We all cry in the toilet here, except my brother who cries at home. The Angel is nestled  betwixt flowers and  photographs on the window sill.   Sparkl...