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It’s a sad fact that modern houses have become too small and well lit to accommodate a rip-roaring gothic narrative: no room to stash a hysterical relative who’s succumbed to the family curse or to venturing onto the moors without a bonnet; no opportunity of an evening to pace bare attic floorboards or to…

I’m Christine, and I’m from Leith, although I lived in North Ronaldsay (in the Orkney Islands) as a wife, mother, crofter, carer, B and B, tutor,  community clerk, luckily not all at once!  The B and B meant the house was busy, lighthouse artificers, students, ecologists, and many nationalities, our children still remember camping…

There is something rather strange, yet wonderful, about this year’s garden. The grass that turned brown and crunchy is again greener than ever. We are taught that in summer we need to water the vegetables, flowers and fruit trees. When the weather is hot, we worry about everything drying out. And yet, despite the…

The very first piece I wrote for this blog concerned saunt*, which refers to a cultural imprint that persists long after something or someone has physically disappeared. While on holiday this summer in Germany, we discovered a prime example of what saunt is all about. There’s a 40-metre-long medieval church buried beneath the mud…

On Saturday mornings I read the newsletter. But with the attention span of a goldfish, reading is fractured by multiple diversions. I gaze out the window quite a lot, up at the sky, but also, more usefully, at the BBC news. Sometimes, there’s a thread running throughout such seemingly disparate activities.  Today I read an article about Indian mountaineer Dorje Morup, whose body lies in the…

In this piece, I wanted to explore the idea that the damage we’re doing to nature through climate change might have unforeseen impacts on the inhabitants of the garden – disrupting their instinctive behaviour in ways that mirror human behaviour and that find parallels in the language of scripture. Apologies for the occasional vulgarity, intended to convey the harsher side…

When I grew up in a small town in the North of Germany, our local Catholic church was an integral part of my family’s life. Both of my parents (not originally from that part of Germany) were Catholic – in fact, they had met at regular, mockingly called ‘mixed marriage prevention balls’ which were afternoon dances…

Monsters have greatest visual impact when placed in the context of the familiar: Cybermen on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral; Martians looming over Big Ben; King Kong atop the Empire State Building. The everyday imparts heightened bearing to the strange, especially if all is eerily quiet in the normally bustling metropolis, the alien…

I am sitting in a café on Madison Avenue in New York. It is 36°C outside (or 97°F, as the locals prefer), and I can honestly say it is a little warmer than I like. Thank the Lord for air conditioning. Literally.  With such extreme heat, and skies occasionally tinged orange by smoke from…

While browsing an 1881 edition of The Boys’ Newspaper (I happen to own two years’ worth of these Victorian “penny press” publications), I came across page after page describing the gruesome instruments of torture once displayed in the Tower of London. What struck me wasn’t simply the cruelty they represented, but how matter-of-factly they…