Are you still a feminist?’ – that was a question asked of me last week by a young woman who had read one of my books.
‘Now there’s a question,’ I thought as I stood at the bus stop tapping a reply into my Blackberry. ‘I was a feminist when I last thought about it – about four years ago – but I don’t know if I still am because what would involve thinking and I haven’t got time for that.’ Continue reading “Can you be a feminist if you can’t think?” →
I wrote this poem one Mothers’ Day several years after my mum had died. Recently I lost Arch, aged three, in the supermarket for about five panic-striken minutes. That experience has brought me back to this poem, re-living it, this time as the mum. Continue reading “The night after my mother died” →
When Virginia Woolf famously said a room of one’s own was necessary for a woman to write, she could not have envisaged a room that looked like the one below.
But for me, having my own space on the web in which to doodle my thoughts and write my life feels every bit as important as the hut at the bottom of the garden, for which so many women yearn.
See this woman. I’ve just found out that she is my great great great great grandmother.
Earlier this week, as part of a feature I was writing for The Birmingham Post, I went with family historian Paul Wilkins to Birmingham Central Library to trace my family tree and discovered, amongst other great worthiness, that I am a direct descendant of Elizabeth Fry, the woman who reformed prisons in the nineteenth century and is commemorated on the back of a fiver. Continue reading “Elizabeth Fry is my nan” →