I get to the café fifteen minutes early. Always best when you’re meeting a potential client; there’s nothing worse than rushing in late, muttering a breathless apology as you wrench arms out of unwilling coat sleeves. Choosing a quiet corner table, I order a black coffee and glance through my…

Around the middle of last year, something started bugging me about my writing. What, I didn’t know. I was regularly churning out pieces here, there, and everywhere, so it wasn’t about quantity. The problem, I soon realised, was that I had started to write either to try and solve a…

As an anti-social introvert, life as an employed person was challenging for me, my bosses, and my poor colleagues alike. To paraphrase the Backstreet Boys, I want things my way. So when I became a freelance writer in 2016, I found my personal work heaven. I can make as many…

You say “wicked”, I say “stepmother”. Everybody knows her. She’s the evil cow who abandoned Hansel and Gretel in the forest. She poisoned Snow White with a blood-red apple. She used Cinderella as unpaid slave-labour, whilst lavishing love and riches upon her own daughters. The “wicked stepmother” isn’t the sole…

“The younger generation is not used to (a 50-year-old woman) deciding anything, and has never doubted that the pinnacle of her happiness has been achieved waiting on it hand and foot.” Germaine Greer A former boss once told me he’d had “second thoughts about your level of intelligence” on hearing…

Warning: this could be nothing but a long, angry, teary, rant. That’s the mood I’m in right now, but by the time I get to the end… who knows? That’s what perimenopause is like. You can’t possibly predict how you’re going to feel, even in the time it takes to…

Hang on… isn’t this title a bit weird? If you’re going to cut your own mother out of your life, you might think there’d be a clear and compelling reason. But in my case, there wasn’t… or at least, no reason I could articulate in an understandable way. Even I…

There’s almost nothing good about email newsletters. I write each of mine with a loud inner sigh, because I know my carefully-chosen words will be skim-read at best, automatically deleted at worst. Either way, they’ll be wasted. I know this because I rarely read email newsletters myself, even if they’re…

If I said leaving Twitter was hard, I’d be lying. I’d prepared myself by having already left Facebook, back in October 2022. I expected that to hurt, because I’d had a Facebook account since 2009, and together we’d faced down all kinds of life-crap. But I only felt relieved, which…