Stories About Change

Lockdown has been hard for everyone. But Jessica, 6 years old, carries a particularly heavy load. Her father, Alex, has motor neurone disease (MND). During lockdown, all day, every day, Jessica has been loving him. Sitting with him. Laughing and crying with him. Scratching his chin. Massaging his head with argan oil.        She knows how to be [read more…]

Congo i have never had a seat at the table heard him saying i would like to express my deepest regrets for these injuries of the past the pain of which is now given new life by the discriminations still too present in our societies. congo. captured in 1885 part of the claim game unprecedented brutality shamed later into passing [read more…]

A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days. – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe What are we going to do now? I was in lockdown before lockdown was a thing. A year ago, I stood up from my desk, said ‘I might see you tomorrow,’ and left. I never went back. Instead, I went to a doctor who [read more…]

The band sit waiting on the small, makeshift stage. Behind them, and perched upright against the freshly painted wall, a guitar case is unintentionally lit by spotlight. One carefully placed sticker urges us to ‘Protect the NHS!’        A pink shirt-clad middle-aged white man, well-groomed, well-shod and well-spoken moves up to the microphone, looks around, and purposely clears [read more…]

This Cloistered Time (Remembering Selly Oak Hospital Birmingham, NHS & Military – 2007) I’ve been remembering the time my youngest son lay there in A&E with flattened face, the blood, just trickling from one ear. I’m sorry, Mom, he’d said. That cardboard bowl I took from off the nurse, that careful nurse. Looking back, she understood the simmering, the nerves, [read more…]

Lockdown has given me time to think of loss and for me that word always takes me to one of the closest and most wonderful relationships, the one between my grandmother and myself and here I write for the first time about the journey we made from India to the UK. I must have been told the story many times [read more…]

Doctor (Palliative Care) For Rachel She’s working in the shallow end of life taking care not to splash as she walks the corridors holding doors open for people to talk about life. And all of those letters she’s gathered at the end of her name, right now just spell out the word P.E.A.C.E. And for some, she’s holding the hands [read more…]

The Stay-at-Home! Festival was an online festival that ran in Spring 2020. It was developed by bestselling author and poet CJ Cooke, with Paper Nations as a partner. The festival celebrated the power of writing and reading in preventing loneliness and championed connectivity and community amidst social distancing.        As part of the festival, Paper Nations also supported [read more…]

The four of us on the Mum rota travelled across counties to help her reach her frame as she wobbled to the commode. After weeks of taking it in turns to sleep on her bedroom floor we chose her care home in two days. During those nights she had talked to her long dead sisters about watercress picking, singing ‘it’s [read more…]

The Space Between Us The space between us grows ever wider with each passing second of every passing day. The hands of time, which I cannot still are pulling me further and further away from you. I want them to stop, just for a moment, to catch a breath and remember, and feel that it was real, you were here, [read more…]