My health app starts to crack near day 47 of my menstrual cycle. Since going off hormonal contraception (for good this time!), I’ve started using it to track my periods, and the poor thing is confused. For two weeks it alerted me that my period was due to start. When the window lapsed, it […]
My father appeared in my doorway on the first Monday of the New Year to inform me that my grandfather had died. I responded with the enthusiasm of someone learning their dentist appointment had been rescheduled. Zayde – Yiddish for grandfather, though in our case it might as well have been Yiddish for “benevolent curmudgeon”- […]
There’s no doubt that the possibility of enrolment in what is generally considered to be the world’s most renowned public school should be regarded as a significant privilege in life, whatever career dreams for a young boy may or may not have prevailed in his family prior to entry. Operating under the rules of […]
Part One: Juan-Les-Pins–Comic Books, Cold Chicken, and the Hotel Juana The summer vacation that I was fortunate enough to experience, one school term prior to passing through the hallowed portals of study at Eton College, Windsor, Bucks., I remember fondly as one of the jewels set tight over the gateway of my early adolescence. On […]
From my early childhood Lenny Myers was my best friend as I grew up in Post-War Rushden, Northamptonshire where we had both been born. We went to South End Junior school in Rushden together. We adventured together. We caught measles and chicken pox together. We were inseparable except for the short, sulky periods following an […]
‘To hold each other’s hands is to have balance. Yet it also means having their weight with you, should there be a sudden fall.” – D. E. Chaudron, Your Body, An Altar. I keep wondering now if I could have felt differently about the whole thing as a child. Or rather, to understand why I found […]
I am mixed. Multi-ethnic. Biracial, if you will, although this word is an uncomfortable one for me. While the word “biracial” suggests division, the word “mixed” suggests a dissolution of the borders that divide one group from another. To me, this is a vital distinction: for when I look into the mirror, I see my […]
In the first year of undergraduate school, unable to conjure the words for “homesick” and “lonely” in an unfamiliar city, I wrote ever so often about three cups of tea. I grew up black sheep, prodigal child, “difficult”: different, square-est peg in all round holes. At 18 three cups of tea became the only thread […]
“Filming ma while cooking in Falmouth, UK.” A short film by Gia Singh Arora
“Jack Kennedy, Joe’s second son, had just reached his twenties, and my mother had two or three years on him, but he was soon deeply smitten by her Latin charms.”