I’m feeling vaguely ashamed again, and as usual I don’t quite know why. I think I must have overstepped a subtle social barrier, plunged myself into the usual minority of one.

Here’s what happened: I went to someone’s house. In with half a dozen or so other women, all of whom I know and like as individuals, but I can’t say I always fit in with the group. On a table beside where I sat, I noticed a large antique chess set. The pieces were little replicas of early 19th-century soldiers, and the kings had to be Napoleon and Wellington by the way they were dressed.

“Oh wow, that’s an amazing chess set,” I said, staring.
“I could never play chess,” someone remarked. “It’s hard. All the pieces do different things.” 

“Oh yes, chess is hard,” the others all agreed. Unanimously. I’m middle-aged and I’m still trying to figure out why a group of women always has to be unanimous about everything. I am never unanimous. Even when I talk to myself, I don’t often reach agreement. 

Sagittarius, for whoever may be asking. Gen X, Middle Child, Cisgender, Year of the Monkey and AB+. 161, or 145, depending on who’s testing. 24BMI, 34D, Brunette, Autumn, Pear, Introvert. Pommie, or Sassenach, if that’s how you put people into your boxes.

There are two kinds of people in the world: People who need everyone pigeonholed, people who don’t care, people who deliberately break out of every stereotype assigned to them, and people who ponderously overhaul the existing frameworks, building in more boxes to try and contain all possible misfits.

What do you do when your children ask too many questions? Maybe it’s natural curiosity; maybe it’s for a school project; maybe they’re concerned about something they’ve heard, and they’re looking for guidance, reassurance, or just verbal contact with you.
​
Well, these days you don’t have to do anything, it seems, because you can get a chatbot to do the job for you. Speech recognition software means that as soon as a child is able to speak fluently, the robot can answer all their questions, play their choice of music, tell random jokes and carry on an exchange of words that sounds very similar to a conversation. The Parents of the Future will hardly need to speak with their offspring any more, except to tell them when their chicken nuggets are ready. Pretty soon, the microwave will probably take over that role too, and parents will be able to go whole weeks without interacting with the small humans they brought into this world.

I’m looking back to when I had babies, thinking of the things I wasn’t prepared for.

The sheer weight of responsibility, knowing that what you do and don’t do makes a real and lifelong difference to your children. The fear of things that might go wrong; the guilt when anything does. The small unforgettable joys, the first-time discoveries, the newness of smiles and babbles and squashed-up dribbled-on daisies handed to you with pride. The learning to be someone you haven’t been before; the finding out how to inhabit an altered body.
​
The plastic tide, and how not to drown in it. How many thousands of toys will invade your house; how much work it will take to fend off the chaos of superabundance. The efforts to cut the volume of plastic products down to a useful and not overwhelming level. 

We need to talk about moss.

We need to talk about all things green, everything that terraforms the planet, tames the rage of wind and water, gathers carbon out of air and feeds the biosphere. We have not heard enough about trees and grasslands yet, nor river-reeds and seaweeds. Let’s not stop talking forest and food-chain, farming, foraging, flora and fauna. But let’s include the small and creeping things as well. Mosses.
​
I want to know why there are chemical sprays to remove the moss from garden lawns, when everyone who has ever walked barefoot through their garden on a summer morning knows that a lawn needs moss to make it perfect. I want to understand why you would water-blast the greenness off your boundary-walls and driveway, when it’s not doing any harm and it looks so much prettier than naked brick and stone. I want to find out if there’s a cost-effective way to build a roof that won’t get damaged by slow-shifting clumps of moss—a roof that mosses could thicken and insulate like old mediaeval thatch, keeping your house cooler in summer and warmer the rest of the year. 

Name a dinosaur. Any dinosaur.

Why does nearly everyone say Tyrannosaurus Rex? Why does he get all the attention? What’s he ever done for us apart from stomping around very, very heavily and roaring at jeeps in movies?

“What’s your favourite dinosaur?” I ask my husband.
​
Well, he does mention T Rex, but follows up with quite a discourse on different dinosaur species (he is, after all, a preacher). In the end he decides he prefers Stegosaurus.
Stegosaurus is nice. You don’t know what the stegs were for, but mystery leaves room for speculation, and there’s always the remote delectable chance that your guesses will turn out as good as the palaeontologists’ best theories, and that one day when they finally discover the answer to the question of steggishness, you’ll be able to shrug and point to the date when you shared just that opinion on social media three years previously… I’m saying they were defensive, an imitation of an enormous poisonous plant, securing Stegosaurus his solitude and tranquillity. 

Five years ago, when Covid hit, we did some extraordinary things. We avoided one another, met only online, covered our faces. Closing offices and schools, we stayed in our houses, counting statistics of Disease and Death, wondering if it would hit us, and hit us how hard, hoping to save lives by suspending animation. We got angry, variously, at the statistics, the scientists, the politicians or one another.

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the arguments on what we should have done differently. Whether “following the science” was the safest path; where the true balance lay between epidemiology and sociology; which repercussions we should have been able to foresee. It was an ugly equation to solve: pitting hard-to-quantify danger of death against even-harder-to-quantify disrupted lives and societal damage. 

Remember, there was something peculiarly terrifying about Covid-19, in the early days, before real infection rates could be measured, while death rates were still emerging, and before we had any effective treatments, let alone any prospect of a vaccine. It was a Mystery Virus with strange symptoms and unknown long-term effects. 

I’m not saying I hate being a teacher, but there are some things I really, really hate teaching. And one of them is The Writing Lesson. Yes, that’s right: I’m a literary writer, and I dread teaching children to do writing.

When I’m teaching, I like to know I’m encouraging learners, not disheartening them. And the way we administer The Writing Task in key stage 2 (ages 7-12) in Scotland is, in my experience, disheartening to many of them.

We give children a “stimulus” to begin with—a question of personal significance, a fascinating object, an interesting scenario to get them interested. So far, so good. I’m all in favour of writing in response to a sensory or emotional experience. It’s great seeing children catching the inspiration, eager or at least willing to begin.
​
Then we require that before they start the writing, they must produce a Story Plan. Using the template provided. Maybe it’s a series of six drawings or an Introduction/Development/Conclusion format. 

Every now and then this comes up again on social media. Someone posts a complaint that schools are WASTING CHILDREN’S TIME teaching UNNECESSARY KNOWLEDGE!

In one version, the meme claims that we only need to know how to grow food, filter water, etc. to survive. And teachers (how dare they!) are teaching children about the beauty of literature, the lessons of history and the wonders of science. Because, of course, if you’re growing food, you’ll never need a working knowledge of genetics, or if you’re filtering water, you’ll never want to know what pathogens are and how they spread…

Another, similar, meme claims that teachers (oh, how dare they!) are introducing the next generation to algebra or geometry instead of teaching them to fill in tax forms. How terrible to think of children visualising the mathematical properties of the universe when they could be staring at a tax form! 

This is my crazy-lady thing.

Yes, some of us do crazy-lady things, once we hit That Age when for some reason society turns round and allows us to put away the selfie-stick and be ourselves. We become crazy cat ladies, or marvellous jam-makers, or readers of heavy books, or formidable knitters and crocheters.

I am the crazy blackberry lady.
​
This is what I do in my free time from summer into autumn. I take long walks through trodden paths and fishing-grounds, looking for bramble-bushes, surveying which berries will likely ripen first.