The Yorkshire Three Peaks Test

As I cross the footbridge over the River Ribble, I see my first ever dipper. The bird gives one quick bob, a curt curtsey, before it flies away. The very best of omens. We walk past Horton in Ribblesdale’s tiny train station, stepping over the single tracks. There were hordes of hikers mustering in the …

The Corvid Path: Walking the Pembrokeshire coast with friends, birds, and arthritis

When I pack the night before I leave, the most important things I include are ten tablets of Arcoxia: my backup anti-inflammatory medication, should my monthly injection for my arthritis fail to hold the line. This five-day trip is a leap of faith, regardless. I don’t know what my back or hips will do when …

Emerging

“Pay attention to what you pay attention to.” I can’t remember where I read the words, but they ring true. What we see is far more of a choice than we often realise. The act of seeing can be a cyclical, deepening one; when we see what we see, and we want to see it …

A Week of Wild

Grey clouds haul themselves overhead, but the fields are starry with scatters of rapeseed, comfrey, dandelion, forget-me-not. If only the bees would come out. We spread out over a collection of fields and one poplar plantation, a rabble of Masters students here to dabble in survey methods. Left unfarmed for two years now, the place …

Imagining the End

“Somehow, while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things which added up to living, the future had slipped into the present – and, despite the fact that we had known it would come, the overwhelming feeling, now that it was here, was of surprise…” I finished The High House …

Women who did amazing science, then wrote books about it

My appetite for popular science-tied-with-memoir books has grown and grown over the last few years. Thankfully (but also painfully) scientists are writing more of these books than I can keep up with. There's a fairly even balance of gender among the authors I've read. Yet in most cases, my most memorable books have been written …

Book review: My Broken Vagina by Fran Bushe

I have always felt less than a woman because of my vaginismus - a condition where sex is difficult or impossible, and very painful. Starting with sex education at school, I have grown up in a culture that treats (heteronormative) penetrative sex as the only sex that really counts, and as something that women are …

The Me in Meat

‘When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh.’ The above quote from Eating Animals, and all my words below, are not hyperbole. I was a fussy child, to the point that I genuinely don’t know how I didn’t end up malnourished. I loved pretty much any kind of meat, and hated pretty …

When your dream is a burning house

Here is what happens when you write a novel, and you believe in it completely, and then it fails. Or, at least, this is what happened when it was me. I can’t remember the first time I thought to myself that I wanted to be a published author, though it must have been around eleven …

Saying goodbye

My three-month-old Scarpa boots already look three years old. Caked in the mud of fields that grew maize, potatoes, and horse radish, and now catch stars in their puddles. My lungs have forgotten city air. The soles of my feet are tough, cracked, Hobbity. The rails along the upstairs landing have become the Place of …