Bio

As a child, I painted, made up songs, dressed up as a ‘princess disguised as a peasant’, inhabited extended imaginary worlds with my brothers, wrote poems, such as

The Caterpillar

‘Wriggling along the leaf I wonder if he is the chief Biting it as he goes Has he got any toes?’

made miniature books of them with tiny illustrations, made mud pots in the musty boiler room beside the kitchen ‘oh thank you darling, I love it’, played the recorder, the guitar, the piano, percussion, led worship, danced, made bobbin lace, embroidered, sewed a (still unfinished) patchwork, made dolls’ clothes, knitted squares, made rose perfume, decorated cakes, made my own jewellery, wrote stories, acted in and directed plays, curated school assemblies (theme: fire), read and read and read.

And one day, I got ill.

And that was it.  It was over.

The new era began – surviving, catching up, doing my GCSE lessons at home in bed with a tray on my knee, desperately hoping to complete my exams on time.

Those years passed.  I returned to school.  If I had known how to talk about my feelings about it, I would have said it was very hard and I was trying with all my might to behave as if nothing at all unusual or different to anyone else had happened to me.  I was good at maths.  I was put in the fast track.  I worked with all my might.

I got into university.  I was studying Maths and French.  Here and there I went dancing, and I borrowed the key to the music practice rooms and played and flirted with the boys who asked me to ‘teach them’.

And one day, I got ill, again.  With something totally different, but worse. 

Unlucky.

So another era began – surviving, catching up, barely making it to lectures, doing my work at home in bed, desperately trying to learn by rote 40 mathematical proofs that my brain no longer had the capacity to understand, so that I could complete my exams on time.

Those years passed.  I graduated.  If I had known how to talk about my feelings about it, I would have said it was very hard and I was trying with all my might to behave as if nothing at all unusual or different to anyone else had happened to me.  I wanted to get a first, to reach my intellectual potential.  I worked with all my might.

I had an idyllic year in Paris, teaching as lectrice at Paris X-Nanterre, a dream come true.

And as the year drew to an end, I considered a job.  I needed to earn money.  I wanted to understand how the world worked.  I applied to become an accountant with a global professional services firm.  I asked my friend’s Dad if I could have a chat about what an auditor was so that I could answer the questions of the interview.

I was still a little bit fragile from my illness.  No-one really knew if I could hold down a full-time high-performance job.  I devoted myself to the Graduate Training. If I had known how to talk about my feelings about it, I would have said it was very hard and I was trying with all my might to behave as if nothing at all unusual or different to anyone else had happened to me.  I wanted to get rated ‘Outstanding’, to reach my leadership potential.  I worked with all my might.

And then something surprising happened.

There was something alive on the desk where I did my studying, an essay I had written, about poetry and language and being human.  In one place the university exam marker had written ‘shows great promise’.  The idea of a return to literature lingered.  A former tutor started to send me work to read:  maybe this?  Or this?

No one in my family had a higher degree, I had no idea what it might be to do a PhD.  I had a vague idea of sitting around in cafes and reading and writing (this was somewhat accurate, but somewhat incomplete as a measure of the experience). 

And then I read Pierrette Fleutiaux’s fairytales of womanhood, Métamophoses de la reine and I knew ‘this is it’.  I left my job and home and community and city and I moved to Exeter to study this woman’s work.

And this is what I did and it was extraordinary. And terribly terribly difficult.

And I thrived on the difficulty of it.  Because I was exploring questions right at the very heart of everything I felt was most important about what it means to live.

Who am I? How do I become more fully myself? What is the truest vision of reality? What is the highest vision of humanity? How can I navigate difficulty, lostness, struggle and disintegration without embracing rigidity, detachment and cynicism? How do I protect hope? How do I live with courage? How can I become more free? What does it mean to lead?

Of course I did not know this at first, but after 12 years, it was becoming clearer. And as I did this other things were happening… I was growing as an entrepreneur and business consultant.  I was in a Russian bank, I was in a church staff team, I was in a corporate university, I was on a hospital ship, I was in Paris, Athens, Stockholm, Madagascar, Polzeath.

And I was growing in my faith, I was growing in the lived experience of a life with God, of taking risks, of growing in love.  And as I lived in ‘a community of prayerful love’, as Dallas Willard calls the church, I was healed of the pains of my periods of illness and heartbreak, I was loved into wholeness.  And my church was full of artists, and it was so very alive. And in hidden moments I wrote tiny poems, and I posted them to no-one-who-knows-me blogs, and I made cards with tiny drawings for my family, and I sang to God alone in the attic of my home, and I bought a piano and found the perfect teacher but I was too terrified to play in front of anyone.

And then something surprising happened.

There was something alive in the book I was researching, a plant, somehow in itself a motif and symbol of the whole book, ‘L’Expédition’.  I looked up that plant.  Sophora toromiro.  Its story was captivating.  Hmmm it was in Gothenburg.

And so I booked a visit to see it, in its Botanical Garden home in the city.  And as I walked about the March-grey city streets, with their drizzly rain and cloudy skies, I knew ‘this is it’.

The day of the visit to the Botanist, I encountered an artist by the plant, and she handed me the details of Konstepidemin, a cultural centre in the city.  You should apply here, she suggested, they have artist residencies. I ignored her, since I was not an artist, and promptly forgot all about it. But I did not forget the city and that summer I found my way there, here, and as I wrote my novel about the toromiro, and as I started to meet artists, I was touched by the wonder of their existence, and the longings of my own heart, for depth, for lightness, for space.

And I started to understand that this little artist child had been buried under the rubble of illness and heartbreak and the struggle for survival, and if I gave her space, if I trusted to Love and was brave and would face the pains of it and the layers and layers of doubt and dread and fear, intimidation, darkness and terror, we would be reunited.

And now we are.