Broken strings and other things

So this is a kind-of poem I wrote after watching the film Howl. I have to be honest, I haven’t read the poem, but after we watched the film I sat down to write and this poured out. It’s a total copy of his style and language and was supposed to be a kind-of joke,…

“Mama?” He looks at me with those big, earnest brown-pool eyes, lodged in his soft, baby face, just under a mess of curls. His eyebrows do that puppy-dog sideways parting thing they do, like a bridge opening to let a boat through. “Yes Charlie?” “I love paintin’.” He says this without an ‘ng’, like he…

I just found this in my ‘my music’ folder on my laptop. It was supposed to be a song but doesn’t read like one now looking at it. I barely remember writing it, but I do remember writing some words down after going for a run at night around Oderberger Strasse and Kastanienallee. It happens…

At 6.30am I’m woken up with a headbutt in the face. I then receive an octopus sucker kiss on the mouth, which threatens to end up as a teeth clamp of the lips. I gently remove my 21-month-old assailant, and in doing so, wake up the 3.5-year-old. They’re both awake now. Miko is done with…

I’ve now done several laternenfests with my kids. I started out with great excitement, thinking how lucky I was to experience this magical children’s occasion. St Martin’s Day, I’d never heard of it before moving to Germany. When we first moved here, without kids, I saw a couple of groups of kids and parents weaving…

A rare night out last Friday night. It takes a long time to turn off the mum brain. Instead of, yeah, woo, rock on, here were some of the things that went through my head as I watched Stahlzeit (Rammstein cover band) at Columbia Halle the other night: The bass player looks cool, standing there…

Charlie is sitting watching The Jungle Book. He’s drinking milk that I warmed and frothed for him from his Miffy cup. A half-eaten chocolate bar from his Halloween stash sits beside him. Miko is asleep in the other room. They jumped in muddy puddles this morning. They went on a swing. They ran around in…

This is a difficult one. Since baby number two arrived, the noise hasn’t doubled, it’s quadrupled. We’ve lost any spare minute of time together. Bedtimes are a disaster. When the boys are asleep, too late, we’re done. We want each other to stay up and talk, but the bed calls us like a temptress. We…

So what will you say When after it all they ask So what did you bring Here’s one of my old online flames I remembered today that makes me smile: Haikus of Hopelessness. I was working in London, and was finding agency life a little strange and soul destroying. So I wrote about it in…

When we were getting ready for baby number one, we were clueless. I didn’t know that babies cried, without giving any hint of why. I didn’t known their poo would be various colours and need monitoring like the changing weather. I didn’t know that some babies would never sleep in a cot, or a bed,…