Category: Memoir
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Handwork love . . .
We spent a lovely hour yesterday ambling through the knitwear exhibition at the Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, from Chanel to Westwood. It was a delight to see that the curators appreciated both hand and machine knitting approaches, but for me the single salient exhibition was this pattern cover that was described as very popular in both…
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The bagpiper at Hexham Abbey
We did a little twirl of the Sele in Hexham, Saturday morning, in a persistent drizzle, so the opportunity to duck into the Abbey was welcome. I renewed my acquaintance with the ancient piper whose carving is part of an irreverent series of nine in the fifteenth century Leschman Chantry Chapel, positioned up to the…
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Memory lanes . . .
Our new task, in one of the writing groups I’m part of, is to write a memoir segment. The challenge, I’m led to believe, is to write something that anyone else beside ourselves might be intrigued to read. As we left it at the end of our session, everybody and their uncle are writing memoirs…
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A trip down memory lane . . .
I had cause yesterday to renew my mental acquaintance with the research fields of my youth, adult and middle-age experience. Now that I am old(er!) I have to traverse back some two decades to remember some of the epiphanies of my research endeavours. After finally being redundified from my postdoc passions at the hoary age…
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Joys of written records . . .
Every few days, it seems, I trawl back through my adventures in daily diarising to retrieve some tidbit of information about this particular patch in the North Pennines. Although I know the diary inside and out, it’s useful to have some tangible pointer for illustration, when I’m relating this or that bit of relevant factoid.…
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Where we belong . . .
I’ve been flummoxed for a week, trying to figure out a fictional response to a WriteOn Galloway task. Finally I ventured into our own lives to create a kind of story-memoir piece about our travels. The challenge of the task was to create the story without revealing the author’s/narrator’s own take on the personal passion.…
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The pleasure of a contemplative review
For beloved friends who do not have internet access, I’ve taken to printing out the previous week of musings from these Roads To Joy. Though it feels odd, looking at the week in a spread like this, it seems that it’s instructive too. Sometimes I’ve been really stretching, grasping and flailing around trying to find…
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The big picture . . .
Funerals are one particular point at which we stop, look back, and consider a life. The obituary is a condensed recitation of the deceased’s odyssey, and in my experience these small and intimate biographies, declaimed from the lectern above the casket, can convey surprising breadth and understanding of where the beloved has come from, how…
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Family stories . . .
Images can capture a lifetime of memories in s single frame. My mother loved her family’s ‘sugar bush’ and she conveyed, onto a canvas, her childhood experience of maple sap collection and its semi-magical rendering into syrup. I think she used a postcard of a late winter scene from a farm near Toronto as her…
Roads to Joy 