Chanctonbury Ring

  Chanctonbury Ring    They built this place long ago,  Carved it from the chalk-lands  With antler pick and leather bucket And waited with anxious eyes For the enemy to come  By dawn or dusk’s dim light, Crawling up the bare hills. They fled this place so long ago  I cannot feel them here at [...]

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Boudica and St Helen ~ two women who hoped to change the world.

Boudica and St Helen ~ two women who hoped to change the world. Separated by about three hundred years, there is little that connects these two women beyond the town of Colchester, or the fact that they were both women fighting to achieve something in what was mostly a man’s world. Boudica (or Boudicca or [...]

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That Mona Lisa Smile and Stendhal Syndrome

That Mona Lisa Smile and Stendhal Syndrome   A few weeks ago I got to finally visit the Louvre in Paris. A word of warning: this is the second biggest museum in the world. Even knowing this didn’t not prepare me for the sheer scale of the place. It is ENORMOUS. Unbelievably big. I’ve walked [...]

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Tales of the Wellspring part 2 ~ the origins

Tales of the Wellspring part 2 ~ the origins I’ve always struggled with community, with being among people constantly. It’s always made me feel as if there is something horribly wrong with me that after a couple of days I start to feel irritable, angry and then finally desperate. The first time I began to [...]

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Bringing Dead Men To Life ~ a guest post by Richard Pierce

Bringing Dead Men To Life ( I  met Richard via Twitter and we got talking about all sorts of things, and when I heard about his new book Dead Men I was totally hooked. I’m a bit of a Boys’ Own sort of girl and any tale of heroism gets me interested. But the tragic tale [...]

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Heart and Hearth – how a sense of belonging can heal the soul

Heart and Hearth – how a sense of belonging can heal the soul  Despite the fact that I go away for work often enough to keep a separate bag of toiletry essentials, I really struggle to leave my home for holidays. Even for work, I over-pack and take things that might baffle a Customs official [...]

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Lost #7

Lost #7   Every sense becomes heightened and my nerves begin to twang with adrenaline. Very slowly, I make myself sit up, legs coiled under me to spring forward if I need to. I open my eyes as wide as I can but there’s little but uniform velvety darkness, and no more than the occasional [...]

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Lost #4

Lost #4 There are no paths. All around me, endless shades of green, with some brown and red and orange as counterpoint, and no opening, no indication that anyone has ever come this way before. I sag against the trunk of the tree I have just climbed, the memory of those distant mountains burned into [...]

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Is Life a Labyrinth or a Maze? ~ a philosophical question

The two words are used synonymously but they actually mean something different. A labyrinth is a maze where all you have to do is walk and keep walking and you will reach the centre: As long as you simply follow the path, you will reach the centre. A maze on the other hand has false [...]

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“If you’re going through Hell, keep going!” or Why Winston Churchill was Right.

  “If you’re going through Hell, keep going” ~ or why Winston Churchill was right       If life is a journey that begins with our birth, then the ultimate destination is death. This is simple logic talking, picking apart a somewhat overused metaphor and deconstructing it. I often wonder at the way the [...]

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