Whose Life Is It Anyway?

Whose Life Is It Anyway?

Recently, we convened a team meeting to launch my next book. “I would like to publish my collected analects (blog posts). Each would be headed by a coloured photo.” Ida immediately piped up with “You can’t do that. It’s too expensive to use colour. It runs contrary to...
Regions Beyond

Regions Beyond

My first assignment in London, as an accountant, was the audit of Regions Beyond Missionary Union. The Methodist Centre comprised a large, marbled mausoleum of a building. There, I was introduced to Janice, the head accountant. She seemed to have stepped out of an...
Hope

Hope

As we roll into 2025, those extrapolating the past year—Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, a new US president, countless deaths through forced migrations—may wonder if Hope exists. A 99-year-old war veteran, painfully pushing his walker round and round his garden every day to...
Saturday Chores in Larnaka

Saturday Chores in Larnaka

Saturday was laundry day in Larnaka. By nine in the morning, the sun shone benignly upon me as I carried a hold-all filled with my week’s dirty clothes. Anna, a five-foot-nothing scrawny blond from Poland, in her thirties, oversaw the laundry room at the Petrou...
Christmas With The Asletts

Christmas With The Asletts

Weeks before Christmas, the Aslett women would gather at Flo’s—my foster mother, the grand matriarch of the clan—to make pasties, fruit cakes and mince pies. Coins from the past—copper farthings , ha’pennies, silver shillings, sixpences, and half-crowns—were stirred...