The Prosecutor Rises
Part two. On blame, the courtroom in the chest, and a Saturday morning phone call from a driveway I used to call mine Two weeks ago, on a Saturday morning, my phone rang. My younger daughter, nineteen, distraught, calling from the driveway of our family home. She had been edging
The book I keep buying for other people
I've lost count of how many copies of The Four Agreements I've given away. I keep a stack at home. My own copy is covered in the kind of underlining you do when you're not really reading, you're enthusiastically recognising. I first
Sticks and Stones
Part one of two. On judgment, and the strange arithmetic of being told you're better than the boy who just broke you I was bullied at school. Often. I was the sensitive, musical boy in a school full of rugby players, in a country that had very fixed
Off the Books
On a business that was really an appeal, a family ledger with one column, and the exhaustion I never once felt Three days before the phone call, we had breakfast. He was my non-executive director, and a close friend, and by that point the only other person carrying the
The One-Way Door
On dating profiles, one honest sentence, and whether holding each other's emotions is something we offer or only something we seek The exchange took four messages to die. I've changed her name and blurred the details, because she isn't the villain of this piece
My Flowers Have No Scent
On La Bohème, two dating profiles sung by candlelight, and the man who could tell the truth in the dark but couldn't say it in daylight I had a theatre weekend of accidental symmetry. Saturday night was Sondheim's Company, which I wrote about in the last
Sorry-Grateful
Wanting closeness and being able to do closeness are different skills. That's the thought I carried out of the theatre after seeing Company, and it's been sitting with me since. The invitation came from a friend whose daughter was playing Joanne in the Royal Central School
The Ideas I Sat On for Years
I have always been an ideas person. For most of my life that has been a mixed blessing. The ideas arrived freely, and then they stayed put, because the gap between having an idea and putting it into the world was filled with people I had to pay, trust, and
Care or Fear? (part 2 of 2)
Part two. On the difference between consideration and codependence — and why you have to learn it on purpose For part one - please read here, a better start. I ended the last piece with a question I couldn't answer for most of my adult life. When you stay quiet
The Cape Didn't Fit
On the truth I couldn't tell my wife, where I learned to stay silent, and the pattern that runs more marriages than anyone admits We never actually decided who would look after the children. Or rather — we did, and we didn't. We made the decision the
