Dear Diary

I’ve been doodling and drawing five-pointed stars all day with a pen that has taken to hanging around my neck; it’s making me look deeper into everything in my path. My head is in another life altogether – I don’t speak the language. This is not a hangover but I am hanging over a cliff, about to throw up all over the town below.

So how do you excavate foreign territory? Answer is with a very small and secret trowel – in case of earthquakes.

I keep thinking about my grandmother; I never slept in a tent but the one she made for me by throwing an old blanket over the washing line. She always let me hammer the pegs through its edges and into the ground. The day that’s haunting me was the one with all the water; my brother and I chased each other with a hose, soaking everything, screaming as the cold hit us.

‘Right – that’s quite enough!’ Granny shouted her theme tune and shepherded us into the tent. It was dark inside and the grass cold against my cheek. I thought my dreams were another world, a new chance at being special, living with fairies, floating in a magic cloud; best of all was the beautiful arched door in the tree at the crotch of deep roots – how far was death then?

Cancer is hanging around my neck…

Delilah's Diary

I was born too late for all the flower-power free love and shenanigans - though I eventually had a lot of sex.

During the summer of ’69 my mother arrived home in a taxi; she hustled herself up the path, calling for my father, ‘I’ve won the bingo, come and help the driver.’ The cab was piled high with lamps, clocks, dishes and dolls and what-have-you. ‘Oh and I think I’m in labour!’ She ordered my father around for the next hour before he had the courage to stand up to her and call an ambulance.

I joined the world two weeks early…and if that isn’t an oxymoron I’m a super model. And now the big four-o is waving at me from that mountain that I assumed would be a long way away…how did it get here so fast? I’m not ready; not slim enough; not fabulous yet; not where I thought I’d be – so how did it find me?

WOMAN ON THE BRINK

I am not real and pretty much invisible - on the edge of change, standing with my toes in the water, almost ready to jump! So, who am I? RainyBrown is the new me; she can do anything, even repair her broken home - she got a book from the library.

You might think I'm strange, that there are tears straining to burst my banks but you'd be wrong; there is a calm lagoon/loch settling just underneath my heart and I have never felt so still. The palest green is a sage herb and I will heal myself in time.