A poem by Bee Asha that explores how our awareness of physical touch has changed in lockdown, our inner anxieties left untold and the dramatic reactions that can come from such an unprecedented situation.
Category: Blog
On Having a Portfolio Career
3+ On Having a Portfolio Career by Krishan Coupland So. What do you do? It’s a question so common that […]
Old fears, new loss: Anxiety and PTSD during the pandemic
I go to the bathroom to splash my face, prolonging the inevitable. Instead, I curl up on the bathroom mat and let out short gasping sobs. An old acquaintance comes again. Some other distant part of me wishes someone had informed Anxiety about social distancing.
I became an Auntie on Gorgie Road
My excuse for forgetting birthdays has always been that I’m busy. In the world before, I travel for work. I live between several countries, am part of several extended families on three continents. I remember the A5 format menu plan sellotaped to the wall in my mother’s kitchen. She ran her busy constituency office from the cane chairs arranged on the front verandah of our house, but the menu plan was the core structure by which she organised our lives. I came to believe when I’d learned every dish on that list my mother’s work on earth would be done. So naturally I refused to learn how to cook.
Highland Midges 1 – 0 Me
It’s funny, how my parents usually know that it’s raining in Edinburgh before I do. They are avid weather app users and will provide daily weather reports during our WhatsApp calls. My mum will exclaim “it was so warm today in Datca; we couldn’t leave the house to even go to the beach!” She’ll then follow the exclamation with a timid and consolatory tone, telling me that they’ve already checked the weather for me…
The History of Rummikub: Vignettes from my local shop
Rummikub is a 4-person game played with 106 tiles, somewhere between the card game rummy and mah-jong. It’s a loud game, as the tiles are usually made of hard plastic and make a satisfying sound when they’re mixed. The game was invented by a Jewish man from Romania called Ephraim Hertzano as a work around a gambling ban, since playing card games were forbidden in Romania during the 1940s. Rummikub is one of my favourite games.
Geographies of cooking (or how I learned how to cook adobo in Scotland)
Before moving away from home, my cooking skills were limited to frying everything, and of course, cooking rice. I lived on takeaways, meals out with friends, and free food at my parents’. Food was functional, cooking was a chore.
Writing Words to Calm the Mind
One thing I do in my practice and in my daily life is meditation or visualisations to keep calm. It helps me to stay on track if I am undertaking any tasks…
Sigh-lingual: being a multilingual writer in the UK
‘Tapping the play button on this video was just another attempt on my part to learn more about the squiggles that are capable of creating universes in my mind, especially since – as much as I’d enjoyed reading the alternate paper in my undergrad English lit degree – a part of me regretted not studying literary theory.’
My Edinburgh: A Tale of Two Cities
‘Edinburgh wasn’t one of those impersonal cities where you felt like a stranger … the town centre offered a gateway to possibilities – so much of what happened tapped into a wider world, leapfrogging Britishness, straight into Europe and beyond.’
