I'm writing this in May 2026, my umpteenth attempt to post since last October. On re-reading my last piece I'm struck at how ill-at-ease I seemed. This feeling, of being 'unlike me' is real. How I react to it is, I admit, a struggle about who I am and what I do these days. As I read on X recently, “I never had a career. Only work.” Lately I've come to doubt even that.

On a good day I resist this kind of lazy solipsism in a world where deeds, not words, should matter most. The wars currently being waged in the Middle East and elsewhere need no comment from me: the genocides, the broken ceasefires, the startling cruelties are heartbreaking. As for the culture wars closer to home, I hold my thoughts and prejudices to myself, not out of fear of being cancelled for some perceived apostasy, but rather, in the knowledge I was cancelled a long time ago for the crimes of being working class, female and independent-minded. ~ continue...

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It’s mid-March and I’m in a cold shed, (re)writing the screenplay for Tilo in Real Life, a story I’ve carried in my head for seven years or so. I'm reflecting too on why I write the kind of stories I write. I can’t say whether I had a uniquely cruel or deprived upbringing, but I do admit a tendency towards the dark side, thanks to my late mother, whose death twenty years ago resonated with me as Mother's Day came and left, uncelebrated.

Perhaps in another life I was a Victorian author of horror tales, given my talent for creating films with strange, disquieting auras, judging by the effect they have on others. When a plasterer came to do some work in the house recently, on seeing the posters for my films hanging in the hall he remarked on how they looked ‘ominous’; he’s not the first.

~ continue...

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