Essays, observations and ideas to explore.
Christmas is an understandable deadline for getting people off the streets. The thought of someone sleeping outside becomes especially uncomfortable when the rest of us are making arrangements to be indoors together. Yet there…
Read article →It is possible to live somewhere for years and still know it mainly as the stretch between home, work and the shops. There may be people nearby whom we would enjoy knowing, places we…
Read article →A family should be able to make plans without having to understand what a government or an armed authority might do next. There is something terribly modest about that expectation. Arrange a visit. Think…
Read article →When food and electricity become scarce, the space for ordinary decisions shrinks. What to cook, whether to visit someone, what can wait until tomorrow: familiar questions become calculations about what is still possible. Any…
Read article →A person should be able to live among people who do not particularly like them and still be safe. That is a modest expectation, until we consider how often arguments about belonging quietly make…
Read article →For someone whose future depends on an immigration decision, the workings of government can enter the most ordinary parts of life: whether to make plans, where to live, what to tell the children. A…
Read article →Someone can be managing perfectly well on their own until the conditions around them change. The home is the same, the routines are familiar, and there may be no obvious reason for anyone to…
Read article →Someone describing racism may already have had to make an uncomfortable calculation: whether speaking will help, whether they will be believed, whether the conversation will leave them having to defend their own account. If…
Read article →Being noticed is not the same as being known. A visible difference can become the thing people respond to first, and sometimes the thing they never manage to look beyond. The person themselves has…
Read article →Leaving home can be an act of freedom. It can also be something a person does because every tolerable alternative has disappeared. The movement may look much the same from a distance. For the…
Read article →A person who cannot afford enough food already has a problem to solve. Having to make that problem moving, memorable and persuasive for somebody else adds another task to the day. That is one…
Read article →A family’s plans do not have to be grand to deserve protection. Staying near relatives, keeping children at the same school, knowing which neighbour will have a spare key: much of a life is…
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