Cats and Chocolate

Weekend Coffee Share: Shakespeare and Wandering

Another week has slipped by, quite a busy one, so at least I have some kind of excuse for not blogging properly this week. On Thursday, my parents, sister, and I were in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace and resting place. My Mum has been a theatre captioner for a number of years, freelancing for Stagetext, and…

Weekend Coffee Share

There’s a first time for everything, right? I’ve enjoyed reading people’s Weekend Coffee Share posts for a while now, and with twenty minutes to go before the weekend is over (in the UK, anyway), I’ve decided to jump in and start writing, and sharing what I’ve been thinking about, doing, and reading. First, I have…

Every Person

Sometimes the world seems unfathomable, and you feel like a tiny speck who has no real power to change anything. Other days, a surge of positivity pushes you through everything, and you’re grateful – to be alive, to love, to do what you do. Recently, it seems that words have deserted me. Except they haven’t….

Perfume by Patrick Suskind

Perfume, as the subtitle of the book proclaims, is the story of a murderer. Specifically, the story of a murderer, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who is obsessed with scent. I decided to read Perfume because it’s my cousin’s favourite book, and she recommended it. I found it to be a wonderful, disturbing, and beautiful novel. It feels…

The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

The Little Paris Bookshop has everything I like in a book. It has characters you can root for, an undeniably bookish theme with Jean Perdu’s wonderful book apothecary on a barge moored in the Seine, and enough depth and emotional wisdom to offset the potential twee-ness of the story. I realise that the English translation…

Purple Rain

I was born in 1984, the year that Prince released Purple Rain, and it wasn’t until I started exploring my own musical tastes as a teenager and listening to different things, that I heard When Doves Cry being sung by a wonderful singer at a band night at Chickenshed (a theatre in North London I…

The Age of Distraction

It occurred to me that the generation born today will never experience a world without the internet or instant access to the internet. It isn’t that this horrifies me – it would be hypocritical of me to be horrified of access to something that has enriched my life and led to me getting to know…

Revolutions and Politics

On Tuesday night, for International Women’s Day, I saw Caitlin Moran and Jude Kelly (the founder of Women of the World festival at the Royal Festival Hall and the Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre) talk about Caitlin’s new book, Moranifesto, feminism, and politics in general. It was a brilliant evening, not least because it…

February Reflections

This month has been one of those months where a lot has happened and progress has been made, but not necessarily in the direction that I expected. For a start, I’ve done a lot of rearranging of our working and living environment this month – because I finally replaced the old, cheap (and reliable) IKEA…

Thoughts on ‘Her’, a Spike Jonze Film

Her is one of those multi-layered films that linger in the mind long after you’ve finished watching. On first look, it seems like a science-fiction technology centred film about a lonely man going through divorce who develops feelings for his newly purchased artificial intelligence operating system. It is all those things, but also an incredibly…

Some Thoughts on the Film ‘Power in Our Hands’

On Sunday, myself, my husband and a friend of ours (who brought it to our attention) went to a screening of ‘Power in Our Hands’ at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley. It explores the wealth of film footage in the BDA (British Deaf Association) archives, and the history of UK deaf culture, language, and…

January Instagram

Occasionally I take part in the Fat Mum Slim’s Photo a Day Challenge on Instagram (my handle is destinyischoice) – I’ve done a few in past years, but this year I decided to start the year off as I mean to go on when it comes to photography. I managed to complete all the days…

Short Story Preview: Feline Invasion

Happy Friday – it’s been a week of ups and downs with writing, but it’s still January and I’m determined to push on with the novel and essay writing. I can’t believe it’s already the last few days of January, but it’s been better than I thought it would be. I finished Chapter 10 of…

Netflix Spotlight

When I first joined Netflix, I didn’t think that much of it, and I’d heard a lot of contradictory things about the lack of subtitling (essential for deaf and hard of hearing people). I remember what changed my mind about it – when I realised that, actually, it is a vast improvement on any other…

Little Shadow

Even when we still had Marmalade, our ginger boy, his sister Chocolat would follow me around the house whilst most of the family went out to work. If I went upstairs to write, she would come along, and either pester me for attention or curl up and nap somewhere whilst I worked. Or she would…