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New Mountains (or, Woman with a Blue Rinse)
Where a scramble of wet paw prints describes a recent canine hootenanny a shrunken stooped lady in purple dressing gown and slippers turns her patchy blue rinse to squint at me while creaking uphill...
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In Joyful Memory of Daniel ‘Abdal-Hayy Moore
Yesterday my dear friend, mentor and publisher passed away after several years of living with cancer, and a lifetime of prolific writing. Coming of age in Beatnik California, among contemporaries such...
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Snowstorm
There’s a snowstorm that appears in the pauses when an orderly screen of jewelley squares, mind-temptations falls blank as though thinking a shower of sparks that tumbles the way this screen tumbled...
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A Sip of Sainthood (Women Can be in Two Places at Once)
Women can be in two places at once hurrying down a high street with a ten kilo sack of potatoes in each hand and sitting on the porch of a bamboo hut standing on stilts over the Indian Ocean We can...
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Jobs for the Boys
From ‘The Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes’, collected by Iona and Peter Opie, Puffin, 1963 Today is the eighth birthday of my eldest child. This time eight years ago, I was giddy with tiredness and...
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Before the Removal Men
Beloved friends leave us keepsakes to remember them by a curl of their hair in a locket a scarf that still smells of their sandalwood but You don’t have hair or need for neckerchiefs What You have is...
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Ramadan: How to Connect Even When You Can’t Fast
Dates and bread from the zawiya of Sheikh Muhammad Ibn al-Habib, may Allah sanctify his secret. It’s that time again, the month where Muslims empty their bodies during the day and try to clear their...
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Chromatography
The lowest arms of the almond tree hang scrawny, leafless, dark: a reminder of winter. I take off my paper sun hat sweating (why did I wear black?) sun bleached by a thin cloud veil pushing the...
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The Knowledge You Know Without Knowing You Know It
There is knowledge that is shy, dodges knowledge vampires with their ravenous jawed eyes and colander stomachs. This knowledge didn’t listen at school, doodled through every text book and watched the...
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Burkinis, Bling, and Criminally Bad Hairdos: Why Everyone Needs to Shut Up
Yesterday at a beach on the Granada coast, we plopped our towels and parasol down on the white pebbles next to a family from North Africa. It was one of those slightly awkward scenes, where I wanted...
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Hate Is No Substitute
Don’t touch me with that barge pole. The disease you fear in me might travel down your arm through the fibres of that deceased sliver of tree and burn a dot on my arm. Don’t squint at me through that...
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A Tiny Window in the Palace of Rahma
“A mercy to all the worlds”: Can you comprehend that? The world of rocks, of mushrooms, winds, seas, whales, mosquitos, jinn, trees, underground rivers bacteria, bears and ozone the dizzying...
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On Healing the Wrongs of White Ancestors and Why You Probably Don’t Want to...
Call me a lily-@$$ed bimbo, or a political correctness fascist, but I can’t use the term ‘non-white’ any more, and I can’t quite believe myself how long it’s taken to understand why. First of all,...
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Danger of Surfing While Muslim
No, I’m not talking about burkinis again…I’m talking about The real risk to heart and mental health posed by scrolling for hours through social media posts that, through the wonders of logarithms...
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Cartoon Squirrels: Why Kids’ TV is Where Feminism Goes to Die
We’ve got into a pretty bad habit with the TV this year. It’s a slippery slope: first only weekends, then a little at midday to let me make lunch in peace, then before we know it were having to hide...
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