Category Archives: Writing

I took these photos over 10 years ago, in inefficient pumps my feet could no longer tolerate – trying, in a repeated fashion, to see how far I could walk it to the horizon on ‘the tops’.  Today I’m up there, on the top, walking the very boggy old Yorkshire/Cheshire border, up to ‘Dead EndContinue reading “Meditations on escape”

On the first day of trying to make the ascent I didn’t even get out of the car. But there was enough time to stare out the window at the towering blackened slopes of Longdendale. to somehow see my life reflected. A story lyrically chaptered by this ascent – through the leafy foothills, the barrenContinue reading “Out of time/into time”

My experience of Mental illness has been of being stuck in a space with your own thoughts about yourself, self-consumed thoughts, swirling around and around with fluctuating ferocity.  The words ‘self-consumed’ will likely produce little sympathy, yet all of my writings, all of my doings have been saying one thing, ‘help, I want to escape this’, overContinue reading “Escaping the weekend carnage”

I can’t have been to this specific spot for over 20 years. Possibly not since my doings were still determined by my parents, and before walking up to ‘the Tops’ became more of a wish for transcendence. In my 20s I’d always stick to the roads which cut through this landscape, because I wanted toContinue reading “Submerged utopias of impossible escape”

I’m back in the same spot, the hills that separate the urban spaces of Yorkshire and the North West. I made a bold admission the night previous: I told social media that I had lived with a mental illness for 20 years. This kind of thing makes my many social masks turn inwards and scowl,Continue reading “One day…”

I did not know how to be a body down there in the towns. I didn’t know how to be flesh. In my younger adult years my guts were saying “take me to the moors, take me to the moors”. It was compulsive thought. Perhaps it was put in my head by words of theContinue reading “Anorexia and the moors”

“Without examples, without modelsI began to believe voices in my head, That I am a freak, that I am broken, That there is something wrong with me, That I will never lovable. Years later, I find the courage to admit that I am transgender, And that does not mean that I am unlovable. This world that we imagine in this room MightContinue reading ““This world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, Other worlds, previously unimaginable.””