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Thank you for listening but it’s time for me to recalibrate and reset
Hilary Fannin’s Year: For Halloween I dress up as a 60-year-old with peroxide blonde hair, a chain-store jumper and too much eye make-up, and lie on the couch with the cat, eating fun-size Mars bars. It’s wonderful
Hilary Fannin: We expected our lives to become richer as we got older. But it’s easy to feel increasingly alone. This Christmas I’ll raise a glass to absent friends
Hilary Fannin: I overhear their contretemps when our trolleys briefly kiss in the domestic war zone otherwise known as Ikea
Only 380-ish hours left until Christmas and not a child in the house washed, as Great-Aunt Delphinia would say
I had an online chat with a robot. Suffice it to say that the bot and I had a discordant communication, neither of us quite understanding the other
Tangled memories, good intentions and a dead bird on a weirdly warm November beach walk
As I was already on the top floor of the store, with no pressing inducement to ride the escalator down again, so I’d wandered into its Christmas zone
Maybe it’s the time of year, or a relentless low-level sense of helplessness in the face of world events
Hilary Fannin: The last time I saw her she was in the hospital on the outskirts of the town we were revisiting, her faculties being smoked out by disease
My mother, sensing she was not alone in the kitchen, saw a young woman drift through the hall
Here, gangs of teenage boys in tight denim jackets and polished boots met to fight similarly attired gangs
How opportune that a pal should send me the Homekeeper’s Diary 2023, by Francis Brennan
Gywneth of Goopdom, my queen of all that life throws up, bends my mind this time with an article about ‘living funerals’
My sister has been ill. I’ve come to see her after three years of phone calls and unsatisfactory Zoom connections