Mental Health Day 2019

So it seems World Mental Health day was the other day and, as is normal for someone with ADD (belonging to this group, as I now know I do, I'm going to admit and proclaim this whenever possible!), I really wanted to post something about it, but didn't get around to it. So here's a …

Experimenting with drugs: mental health, the next chapter

I'm in a bit of a spin right now, feeling a right old mix of feelings, ranging from the daring-to-be-hopeful - maybe this will allow me to be the person I know I can be; to the terrified - but the side effects! What if it doesn't work? What if it makes me worse? What …

MEMORY LANE: Kensington Market

I was thinking the other day about a friend of mine, my age, also a mother (which is so often a shorthand for "responsible adult" and all the frequently erroneous ideas that go along with that) who still dyes - or more accurately, rediscovered dyeing - her hair vivid colours, and looks fabulous on it. …

Mental Health Day

So here it is, folks: I have depression. It's not, as I am learning, that "I AM depressed", or "I'm depressive": I have depression. The depression is not me, but it's with me. Just like any other illness that is in you, chewing you but is not you. I went back to my counsellor today …

Miscarriages, three

It's Babyloss Awareness Week, so that seems a good time to share the words I wrote after my second and third miscarriages, in the hope it helps others who have been through or are going through the same. It's something I had no idea about until it happened to me - how it's incredibly common, …

BAD DAY

Friends, I'm feeling a bit fragile today. That came out as "ragile" the first time; Freudian perhaps? I guess I'm feeling a bit ragey too. What's up? I don't rightly know; I guess an accumulation of different stuff. Yesterday was a bad day - I felt lost and out of control and manic, but it …

Ten Songs

A friend on Facebook recently asked, what 10 songs would represent the soundtrack of your life? These are not your ten favourite tunes, nor a selection of the most musically important or cool, but those which reflect what you were listening to the most at any given time (the original poster's choice of Kylie Minogue …

Mother’s Day

Today is Mother's Day in the UK. Despite having lived abroad for eight years now (not to mention my dear mother being American, though long resident in the UK, and my much-loved stepmum being English, but now an ex-pat herself), it's still the mothers-day celebration that means the most to me. It always shines with …

The Wedding Cake

So there's this thing in Portugal. A really quite endearing character trait of the people (and they have many such traits to choose from). It could be loosely described as eagerness to please, but it's both more charming and more dangerous than that. If you ask a Portuguese to do something - anything at all …

Around the World

I found out yesterday morning, courtesy of my favourite Portuguese national radio station Antena 3, that Daft Punk's "Homework" album has just turned 20 years old. The station was celebrating the fact by featuring stand-out tracks from the record; the one I caught on the way into work was "Around the World", which brought me …