Category: In praise of women
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What’s Covid-safe behaviour? Ask your hairdresser
Think positive. By coincidence, the inspirational ‘wellbeing’ word etched into my mirror is Positive which these days has negative connotations so I ask if the salon has recorded any infections since reopening in July.
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Putting HER story up in lights
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky; It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by; Robert Louis Stevenson: The Lamplighter My daily walk was later than usual. After five o’clock in January the skies are dark and pavements less inviting. This is Leerie Lamplighter time in Edinburgh…
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The cost of dignity
It should be incredible but it’s only too believable in the dysfunctional state we are in. Headlines in the news stir a moment of dislocation. Where exactly are we? What year is this?
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Island on the Edge
It’s such a gloriously improbable tale. A young woman on the last day of her holiday on Skye spots an old croft house for sale in an estate agents window. What happens next is the stuff of dreams at the end of a hard working week.
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Pioneering women gardeners: visible at last
Girls will be boys? The terms of employment were simple, if a little strange. The first two women admitted to the staff at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 1897 were to be known as ‘boys’ and had to dress like boys too.
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My Irish Baby Box is forty years old
When I was expecting my first baby a parcel arrived from my Aunty Rene in Ireland. Inside there was a handmade book with advice on how to stay well during pregnancy and many practical instructions for making everything we would need in the first few months of parenthood. Forty years later it occurs to me…
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The song is older than the sorrow
Breakfast on a wintry Edinburgh morning to the background melodies of South Uist. I woke this morning with tunes from last night’s show dancing a jig in my head. It’s a sign of a good performance when both the singer and the songs follow you home.
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The unimaginable strength of Chinese women
I could hardly watch tonight’s Channel 4 News report from China; it is impossible to imagine the grief of mothers finding the bodies of their children in the rubble of the earthquake. And now I find it difficult to write about the story of an earlier earthquake in China. Of course it is not my…
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For the sake of dignity and democracy in Zimbabwe
“Ordinary women cannot afford sanitary wear. We are using old pieces of cloth or newspapers. Consequently we’re suffering the loss of our dignity and serious infections, in some cases leading to infertility. Many women are facing violence from their husbands who believe these infections to be sexually transmitted.” Thabitha Khumalo, 2006. Today, when I signed…