The New Version The new version of Eighty Days with David Tennant is such fun that I’m blogging about it this week! The main scriptwriter, Ashley Pharoah, played with some of the realities of that era rather than continuing with Jules Verne’s romanticised view. I saw the original 1956 film as a teenager and loved it. Shocked to learn that […]
That was the way it was
My last blog post was about children of violence. Today I write about how I am also a child of violence and its impact on my family and children. War was always around me but as a child, I didn’t know that. My parents were scarred by it – a normal human reaction after all. As a schoolgirl, I […]
The Children of Violence
Martha Quest The sky is clean, the moon twisted and the temperature zero. Outdoors I would freeze and die. Here in my study, I think of Doris Lessing and the five novels that make up Children of Violence. When I read the first book, Martha Quest, I had the frightening sense that Lessing was writing me into existence and I […]
Journeys of courage and imagination
African people in the Americas Two years ago we visited Belize and Livingston in Guatemala and encountered Garifuna people for the first time. I was interested to learn how the Garifuna came to live in Central America and still retained the culture of their African heritage, while it seems to me that so many Afro-Americans who endured centuries of slavery […]
Margins, boundaries, barriers, borders, thresholds, transitions and liminal spaces
Bordering We were blocked, stopped and stuck at the border between Mexico and Belize for five long hours. It was a strange way to exist – a state of waiting in which nothing happens. We didn’t have the right papers. We were in Limbo, that place of meaningless suspension in which you wait endlessly for judgement on your soul. Being […]