LEARNING THE ART OF LIVING WELL
As an entirely inevitable conversation unfolds about death, loss and grief this week, I wanted to share a children’s story I wrote some years ago. Many adults feel unsure about how to discuss death with children, and as a result the subject can be avoided entirely or made oblique to somehow soften the blow. I […]
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Three things have been been fighting for my attention this week: The Morning Show (Apple TV’s compelling drama about the #MeToo movement), a diagnosis of superior limbic keratoconjunctivitis (a longstanding eye issue that has made me look like I’ve just been dug up) and Coronavirus. Yesterday, all three of these things, incongruously, came together. Before […]
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This is a preview of the foreword of Lost for Words, a new book created by the Life Matters task force – a coalition calling for better support for bereaved families – to mark Children’s Grief Awareness Week 2019. The book is made up of advice and insights by children across the UK, bereaved from […]
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My late wife, Desreen, was very funny. She had a completely different take on the world to anyone else I’ve ever met. For instance, after she’d given birth to our son she never really spoke negatively about wanting to lose weight or build back the stomach muscles that were cut open during her emergency caesarean. […]
Read MoreWell that was my thirties. Beautiful, fun, life-changing, hideous, painful, purposeful and completely unexpected in almost every way imaginable. I document things so that I don’t forget, so that my son might understand things for himself one day, and perhaps because I regret not preserving more of what we had together when we started our […]
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‘We can do this can’t we, Jackson?’ ‘Yes, Daddy. We can do this together.’ I asked my son this fairly rhetorical question when he was two and half years old and I was totally lost, trying to hold everything together just five months after his mum’s premature death. His response, I’ve since discovered, was characteristically […]
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I used to really hate the job interview question: Where do you see yourself in five years’ time? I think maybe it was because I was more comfortable living in the moment than getting stressed out by the thought of having to work really, really hard to fulfill whatever ambition I shared. If I actually […]
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I used to feel like I was missing something when it came to art, like maybe I’d skipped the most important lesson at school or something. I would go to galleries and exhibitions and pretend to ‘get it’ but, truthfully, I didn’t have a clue what I was looking at or what I was supposed […]
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MAN ALIVE 