She just wants to be normal I know, but that’s difficult verging on impossible when you have a feminist, socialist mother mouthing off about the Royal Family, organised religion and David Cameron while you’re trying to read the latest Jacqueline Wilson in the back of the car. Today in Brownies they celebrated the Queen being the …
‘I just want to be NORMAL!’ Alula yells at me as I’m driving her to school. ‘What’s so good about normal?’ I ask. ‘And anyway, what do you mean by ‘normal’? What is normal?’ ‘I don’t want to be the kid who has lived in London and then Bali and then here and then somewhere …
I feel as if I’m paralytically drunk and standing on the deck of a storm-tossed boat while someone stabs an acid-tipped skewer into my ear. I have a sinus infection which has spread to my inner ear and I want to place my head in the freezer, curl in a ball and try not to …
The UK reached a high of 16 degrees today, which necessitated half the population stripping down to shorts and T-shirts in the gloriously mistaken belief that summer had arrived. I sighed at the way the British* so wholeheartedly leap into action the moment the thermostat edges into double figures but conceded that it was perhaps …
Alula started school last week in the UK. For the last four years she’s gone to school in the jungle at a school made entirely of bamboo with no walls, a farm, a giant crystal, a mud pit and where the school song is basically a prayer to mother earth. She has also been barefoot most …
‘It’s time to leave Bali mummy,’ Alula declares as we walk out of Green School gates for the last time ever. She doesn’t mean literally. We’re not going for another three days but in her infinite wisdom Alula’s hit the nail on the head. It is time to leave. Though the feeling is vague and …
Alula and I decided that to mark the end of days (ahem) we would spend an entire day in Ubud doing everything we loved most. As it turned out that mainly involved eating. Before we left the house we wrote a bucket list of the best things to do in Ubud. And yes, that does …
Dear Alula, Yesterday you cried. You were inconsolable. You want to leave now, you sobbed. You don’t want to make friends in England, you said, because you’ll just end up leaving them, so what’s the point? You’re really bad at math, you cried. And you call braids braids, not plaits. Who calls them plaits anyway? …
“I’m planning on being a nicer person when I’m back in England.” ‘You are a nice person already,’ I tell Alula. ‘I think I could be nicer. I’m already practicing,” Alula informs me. I feel humbled into silence by my eight-year old daughter’s level of emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Feeling I need to up my …
The balcony is covered in hair. Alula’s blond curls lying there like tumbleweed. We both just had several inches lopped off by Karin the lovely Swiss hairdresser (Alula has not stopped crying for about 3 hours since claiming she now looks like a boy, but that’s a whole other story.) I stare at the sweepings …
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