On Thursday afternoon, I received an email. It popped innocuously into my inbox when I wasn’t looking and I only discovered it later whilst sitting in a car, killing time, checking my phone, waiting outside the school gates for a child who needed an emergency braces repair. …

The American girl was neither encumbered by children nor baggage. She had a small cross-body handbag, a proper camera slung round her neck, a confidence and a self-contained presence. I yearned to be her. “Where’s everyone from then?” asked Peter, the guide, as we started to gather for the English-speaking…

I was at a meeting. I’m not normally at meetings. I don’t get invited to many. Now I am ‘Director of Myself’, I only meet with the inside of my head. It’s a busy place with multiple competing agendas, so, it was a reprieve and a bit of a ‘jolly’…

There were nine of us - Deirdre, a teacher, who had always dreamt of being an investigative journalist but now wrote poetry long-hand in bed at night. She was running out of storage space for her notebooks. Katie was more into filmmaking and costume design but had come as moral…

It is Alice’s 19th birthday, today and I wonder, was that the time of my life - when we first met, when the operating theatre fell silent and they recorded the time on the clock, 4.44pm and there was breath and life. Or later, when they brought me tea and…

It has taken a twelve-year-old boy this week to remind us what true success in life is - how it is only ever to love and be loved. How easily we can forget this when chasing so many other false versions. I have watched the clip over and over again…

If there’s one place guaranteed to strike fear into my heart, it’s a church kitchen. Commission me to go in there and I’m Jonah heading to Nineveh. I admire those who operate effectively in them but I am terrified of putting something in the wrong cupboard, contaminating a sink. I…

“I think I may be experiencing some sort of post-traumatic stress,” I said to my husband when I staggered into the house with my bag-for-life, stuffed with random delicacies I’d plucked frantically from the shelves. I had a fish platter under my arm. I’d been keen to get round and…

The flowers she bought me before she left are still sitting on the table. “Those lilies have lasted longer than you did in Edinburgh, Alice,” her dad jokes. There is a smile but the only way to describe her is shell-shocked. She feels like she’s failed. “Shall we add her…