Benefit Street, Brighton.

I have a somewhat proprietary view of Early Modern women. This stems from the turn of the century -  when there were only four other people in Australia who had discovered Margaret Cavendish; everyone still got marks for citing Ben Johnson as the writer of the first 'Country House'  poem; Jonathan Swift was credited with having introduced the fiction & satire genres; and reference books assured us that it was the dawn of the 20thC before any woman was invited to the Royal Society. So while I'm pleased that we've challenged history and found so much more truth in it than other generations have been able to; it still saddens me that so little of this information has seeped through as mainstream knowledge. Take, for an example, the mysterious, much speculated-about Amelia Lanyer - who was named before spelling became uniform; so I'm sticking with the first spelling of it I came across back in 2004. There are many academics whose only real interest in Amelia (am on

  At this time of year, I like to make my vol au vents. For, the fire never be allowed to damp down completely in my oven (which be the time for to make meringues in summer); in winter 'tis a thrifty way to let it burn a little higher for to cook pie & pastry cases - and to let us gather cosily before it to do our mending, or crafting, or story-telling. 'Tis also the time the Ladies Maids spend hours cleaning & pressing the endless mud & manure from hems of cloaks & and gowns & stocking soles. While the Bootboy, with a dull knife, hacks clods of chalk, and mud & excrement from boots and patterns alike, before ever he can polish them. It hath oft caused me to grin that what the Gentry eat and when is predicated by their Cooks & not by 'Tradition' - inasmuch as 'twere Cooks who forged the tradition! Now I know scores of receipts - not solely for meat and fowl and fish; but for possets and medicinals and ungents; and to clear fleas from a be

I subtitled a post "Don't quote me" a while back because I wanted to make it clear that what I was expressing was my own - vehement - opinion/idea which was not representative of any group or affiliation. Feel the need to to add this to the same category.     One afternoon, in 2016, I saw on my Youtube page that there was a televised debate between two American contenders for the presidency. Needing a break from the piece I was writing, and with the realisation that my outlook was becoming rather insular as I struggled to understand the Homeland I'd recently settled in, I poised my mouse and clicked. I can still remember the shock of that introduction to contemporary America; in fact I was in a state of shock for the rest of the afternoon. The spectacle of two grown - in fact elderly - people shouting, yelling, talking over each other, using personal abuse (and, dear gods, one actually stalking the other around the podium!) horrified me.  I was involved in a form of

I was a miracle baby. Not that such a phrase would ever have come from the lips of either of my parents. "Oh for gods' sake stop being histrionic." my mother Phyl would have laughed dismissively. While my father, George, would have drily say something  that would  make me the butt of the joke. Both of them had been married before and in each case it had been disastrous. Phyl had been consistently sexually abused by her first husband and, as a result, had been told before she married George that she wouldn't be able to get pregnant. As she was over 40 any cessation of her menses would be down to menopause; not pregnancy, she was informed.   So it was rather a surprise all round when George was called in to visit the RAF doctor. "Ah, yes, George, old man. Marvellous to see you looking so well." "You could have seen how well I was looking at the Mess to-night." George raised an eyebrow. "Yes, yes, jolly good idea. But I thought I'd better tel

  It's only since I got here 7 years ago that I have begun to understand, exactly, how very unique both my parents had been from the general species. So this is probably a good time to introduce the fact that I usually called them Phyl & George. I shall go on referring to them now in that way - both because that's who they are, and because another thing I've learned since coming here is that we were  English Middle Class. So there are verbal minefields to pick my way through even in referring to my parents.  If I call them "Mummy & Daddy" people will make the sign of the evil-eye against me and accuse me of being Middle Class. (Which I find  a bit unfair, as they are the people who put me in that box. I had gone happily through my whole life until 2014 without knowing I belonged in any 'Class' at all.) On the other hand, if I referred to my parents as "Mum & Dad" I'd have to keep pinching myself to remind myself who I was talkin

 Anyone who knows me at all will know two things about me: I resist labelling ; and I detest jargon . Which is rather unfortunate. Because, at the moment I feel like I'm trapped inside the box of my flat drowning in a sea of both; and will be discovered one day strangled by the strings of all those labels, with a note saying "I have ceased to conform within the paradigms which constitute proof of life." It's fortunate that, after those dark years of thinking I would never again be normal, I at last came out of the fog. It was miraculous and freeing, and opened the world up for the first time in 6 years. And then we went into Lockdown. And I realised I would never be normal. Now it might surprise anyone who knows me that I have always dreamt about being able to pass unnoticed through a crowd. To walk into a gathering and to be able to join in with what everyone else was talking about. To have shared the same experiences. The same cultural background. And to know automa

              The day I stood before the door leading to the first classroom I ever entered in China, I paused with my hand on the door handle for quite some time before my brain stopped sending down the "Panic! Run away! Disappear through a hole in the floor!" messages and switched to "Open door". I was already floored to find out that lectures here took place in large school classrooms, were furnished with old-fashioned desks with hinged lids, green chalk-boards and adults sitting scrunched into them so thickly there wasn't a spare seat in the house. Like so much in China, the architecturally modern, streamlined exterior wasn't necessarily any indication of what pertained behind that public presentation. I was unprepared also for lugging armfulls of forms and books and notes and schedules up six flights of stairs, in a stone building whose cold cement treads struck through thin sandals on a hot late-summer day. But most of all I was unprepared for the s

  The last blog I put out was treated with icy British disdain by the general public; who stayed away from it in droves (Well, ok: in larger droves than usual). They didn't even click on to it. They simply read the title and strap-line, thought "Eeeuww!" and kept on scrolling down for something more wholesome. What had I done? Had I f-bombed them in unceasing assaults? Had I perhaps given altogether TMI about my uterus - currently prolapsing away even as we speak? Did I tell the story of my twat-tatt? Had I, in my abysmal ignorance (ye gods, not again. Please!) made bold and airy use of some word which is anathema in every corner of the British Isles? Unfortunately, it turned out to be the latter. And the word - which by now, doubtless, you'll be agog to know?  I have no way of whispering it gently into your shell-like to reduce its loathsomeness slightly. I must throw it down like a gauntlet. Yet I'll present it prettily as I can. The word that must not be named,