What a Romantic River – canoeing in the ice at winter time with my husband-to-be. [Peebles and Neidpath] In the 1980s I paddled down the Tweed from Peebles to the sea. It took me two days. The Tweed Canoe Club, based in Galashiels, meets in a pond at Tweedbank to teach young people to canoe. […]

I first started creative writing about a year before COVID, enticed by a free Gateshead Council project called Art Diamonds that ran sessions in libraries throughout the borough for those over the age of 50. During COVID our tutor used to send us prompts and we met on Zoom. That particular day, I think I […]

Jessica was tired. She’d been attacked from all sides, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. All she wanted to do was get back to a sense of normality. She dressed in warm clothes and wearily went down stairs. The sun was beginning to rise. She turned, her small dog looked at her, his head […]

In the early 1990s we had friends – he was a GP – and I used to make clothes for their children. One day they said they had some fabric for me. They gave me a wonderful stack of fabric, most of it Harris Tweed. That was thirty years ago, and I still have some […]

I have spent most of my life by the River Tweed. Explored much of it, sailed on it, swum in it, canoed it and nearly drowned in it as a child. Though I have never fished. I have spent much time looking at the river from a casual glance to prolonged study. It demands your […]

At the meeting of the waters, you’ll still hear folks reminiscing about the time when different bridges crossed the river here. And how the hostelry on its bank had gone through many lives. As a local’s pub, basically a licensed room in somebody’s house, then extended to become a fancy gastro pub. Then private house […]