It was 1969 when I made my way in the Berkeley hills to the house of Herbert Kohl. He had already written 36 Children, that heart-wrenching account of teaching sixth graders in Harlem, and the pamphlet Teaching the Unteachable, which the New York Review of Books distributed, and The Open Classroom: A Practical Guide to a New Way of Teaching. Kohl was even credited with coining the term “open classroom.”

Standing in line for security at the airport, I can’t stop thinking about how much this flight will help my soul. Run away, don’t face those issues that reside in that place anymore. It’s not uncommon to flee… is it? A revelation of some sort, an epiphany, or some type of awakening perhaps. But this stems from nothing but desire. A brief extinguishing of a painful craving that hardly lasts. This type of freedom never occurs on the ground or being in a place after having travelled through the air and landed again….

I think of the way my house speaks to me, the old building with years of renovation in its age rings, and of the elderly couple that lived there before us who had chairlifts on every set of stairs. It was their space before it was mine and they still remain under our new shiny wallpapers and the screws left in where we took the chairlifts off. The house drips and leaks and grumbles to me in a language of time past, and I confide in it, I whisper back with hopes of future to come.

I have rarely thought about why some productions worked well and why others didn't…. With no academic training, my approach is more intuitive. I work with a crew: cameraman, sound recordist and researcher. I parachute into different spaces, forming a connection with my subjects; I hoover up material and then return to a cutting room to make sense of this material….

… In 1917, 1941 and 1977 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder had not been identified or described; shell shock, trauma, lots of words to describe something that comes from the outside in. In the early days of PTSD it was seen as a psychiatric disorder. In my head was the question, what happens so deep inside it is indiscernible to the external observer?

In the novel Meatless Days, Sara Suleri Goodyear compares bilingualism to maintaining two homes when your body can only inhabit one at a time. To this day, it is the most fitting analogy I’ve found to describe my experience. After three autumns Scotland, English has become a mansion. Flemish still offers shelter, its brick walls are too strong to fall, even though the occasional cold breeze slips through invisible cracks….

What if memory is a problem of texture? Experienced as it is in shards, a collage of sensation kept fresh with a crunch of bone, a chill in your spine. Sound, smell, taste, evoke memories and memories evoke---what? A shudder. A heat which rises from the chest to the cheeks to the ears. A thick lump in the back of your throat. Sometimes I frustrate myself, unable to form images or words or scenes inside my head.…

Jacques Lacan theorised about the mirror stage, a stage in human development whereby an infant recognises their reflection in the mirror, triggering a sense of self-othering and a confusing of subject and object. I stare at the mirror, and through it to the clean white page or blank screen beyond. I was the story in the mirror, then on the screen and on the page….

Consider how insular we are as a species. All our thinking goes on inside; it’s what’s inside that counts; we are taking things in. Pretty selfish of us, don’t you think, to see something and have to consume it, internalise it? It’s all very intricate. Intrepid. The human condition.

That processing ability is informed by our senses—our ability to interact with the world informs our understanding of it.

I find it pleasingly ironic that a word used to urge discipline on writers should act as a distraction. It makes me lose concentration, as though I’m bumping into – and noisily knocking over – a sign saying ‘Silence’ in a library. The very thing it seeks to prohibit is summoned by the collision. Different people will, naturally, trip up and stop at different words….

A place can change you. A place get under your skin, make a home of your body. A place can challenge your sense of what it feels like to be a sensing, sense-making being.

I’m still trying to understand how Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia changed me. It’s a strange place, inconceivably remote and unrelentingly hot and I lived there for three years in my early 30s.

I make lists. To-do lists, playlists, favourites lists, recipes, wordlists, lists of details on my phone. The veneers of control. This writing began from list-making. The phone logging emerged shortly after my granny was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s – two years after my paternal gran was diagnosed with dementia…. nothing is wasted, it’s all thrown in and trailed around each and every day. Yet the practice of list-making is also the practice of attachment.

Manas Ray is a liberal studies scholar and writer. In ‘Limbo Times: Pages from the COVID days,’ Ray explores how precarity transforms the reality of our daily lives. Confined by the lockdown to his room in Kolkata, he writes that he has “indeed become addicted to the smallness of things

Bright Blue Malta… That day we managed to drag out the poolside hermits, and sun-phobics from the villa and go on a proper day trip. We rode the bus into Victoria, picked up some hot pastizzi —found in dazzling supply on every corner of Victoria—and waited for the second bus to arrive.

...the women gaze at each other through the glass and, perhaps, if they were to re-focus this gaze, their gazes, each would see themselves reflected back in them, like a mirror. Two generations of women – grandmother and granddaughter– separated and yet connected. Their worlds re-aligned in a new way.

In my hands I hold many fragments of time. Not all of them are mine⁠—some are my parents; others belong to my brother. The cover of this photo album is thick⁠—appearing to be padded if you glance quickly at it. A white square sits in the middle. If you were to run your hand over it you would stir up a layer of dust, some lifting to dance in the air while the rest sticks to the oil on your fingers.

The Cherry Orchard was Chekhov’s last play, dating from 1904, the year of his death. This lends the play a special poignancy; in any case, it concerns leave-takings, farewells to the scenes of the characters’ youth, Chekhov’s perennial evocations of the transience of human life.

There are five empty bottles next to the sofa. More stashed away in the bin, filling the small space completely. Wine. White. Red. Some Bucks Fizz. Champagne. Seeing them always made embers of blue fire come alive in my stomach. This fire isn’t one that keeps me warm at night.

'An inaugural lecture, how grand.' But of course he didn't mean it in that way. What he meant to say was grand, fantastic, smashing, cor blimey, what a lark! The lady professor is much too sensitive. And to be honest, she's been getting a little above herself since her elevation. Women do that.

What you are doing with your hands these days? Could one ever imagine that those parts of us that that earned our species definition, Homo faber, would one day become our main vulnerability? To be accurate though, it’s not the hands actually that is the problem, rather it’s touch.