Dementia has become an epidemic in our society. This is a story about my mother-in-law Jean, but it is also the story of countless others in the same situation. CIRCA 1945 A CALENDER OF DEMENTIA APRIL 2015 This calendar had become a lifeline in my mother-in-law Jean’s life.
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WIRE IN THE BLOOD Growing up on a small farm in Tasmania, I often felt that the whole place was held together with barbed wire and binder twine. Most of our fences were made of wire and wooden ‘droppers’. My sister and I quite enjoyed collecting snagged
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There has been some ‘argy-bargy’ on our local Facebook gardening group about controlling what some people see as ‘pests’, not so much snails and slugs, but hungry possums, bandicoots and birds etc. Increasingly, others say we should not impose ourselves on the natural world, especially here in
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‘If you go down to the woods today……sing sing …….Today’s the day the Teddy Bears have their picnic.’ Well I love picnics….I think it’s in the genes of bears really, don’t you? Most picnics require a bit of shopping before hand; bread, wine and stuff like that.
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Some people might say that the best part of writing a book is typing the words THE END. Or that the most satisfying part is setting out on the journey and writing that first sentence. But for me, there is one stand out moment of pure joy
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Every autumn my guardian Pauline Conolly takes me to Mount Tomah Botanical Gardens so we can gather Spanish chestnuts from their big tree. It’s very exciting. It’s usually a bit chilly, but there is a lovely fire in the cafe where you can warm up first.
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The following story on the Launceston woollen mill was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald. On January 8 2024 I watched the movie Mrs Lowry and Son. The images of the industrial landscapes and the mill workers portrayed by artist L. S. Lowry prompted me
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SPRING AT SISSINGHURST House hunting in the spring of 1930, the English poet Vita Sackville-West viewed a crumbling castle in the Kentish countryside. Standing in the middle of a cabbage patch she looked up at its romantic, Elizabethan tower, turned to her son Nigel and said;
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SHAKEN AND STIRRED! Thanks to classic wines such as Penfold’s Grange, Australians are now less likely to be perceived as a nation of unsophisticated beer swillers. However, cocktails are perhaps more generally associated with Manhattan or Paris than ‘the
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It is such a pleasure to host this guest blog by John Paul Bernett, who lives in the atmospheric Yorkshire town of Whitby. One of the joys of social media is connecting with people completely outside one’s usual orbit. I am a pretty conservative Australian writer/gardener with
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