Just as the cockroach is adapted to survive nuclear apocalypse, so my blog limps on through this third lockdown. Yes, it’s been a few months of silence for my fans* on our isolated patch of the web. In agricultural terms a fallow period has passed. But now we can rejoice and plant turnips once more, …
Author Archives: floracbowen
Instagram nostalgia
Just a place where I’m keeping my old Instagram photos … I like taking pictures, but I do not like flogging myself on the internet, so these are from an old account. Fine, it probably aren’t in the Correct Chronological Order of My Life, but then again, it’s not as if memory retells a particular …
Pictures of a quiet city. (York in lockdown)
Online exams, offline zest.
I’ve been cooking with citrus and lemon a lot recently. A quick squeeze added green vegetables, oven-cooked fish, yoghurt dips: will it do add anything good? we don’t know, but let’s do it anyway, as it makes me feel like a freewheeling tv chef. The squeezing and sauté-ing and chopping has made up large, salted …
Unproductive worrying about privilege. (‘Privilege disclaimer’)
Yes, I’ve opened and closed and reopened this draft most days – without managing to write anything. All the usual anxieties of blog-writing (will people think I’m a narcissist? illiterate? boring? will future employers condemn me on the basis of total foolishness?) have combined with the self-consciousness of pleasing others. A good deal of lockdown …
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It’s fine, fun is overrated anyway
Greetings from the Year Abroad I am now conducting from my bedroom: a year abroad insofar that it is no longer a Year, but a strange, shapeless vortex of timey wimey stuff, and abroad in the sense that it’s not abroad, but is in fact a suburb in North Yorkshire. What have I been doing, …
Questions of travel, by Elizabeth Bishop
Since we’ve all been temporarily prevented from travelling further than ‘another government-mandated walk around the block? Well, it’s not as if I’ve got much else on…’ , I thought this would be quite a useful poem to think about. It plays with the excitement of travelling, at the same time as it questions its necessity, …
We escape lockdown corona crisis in France
And so we enter the event I am calling ‘The Second Fucking Time I’ve Had To Flee A Country On The Year Abroad.’ (TSFTIHTFACOTYA for short?). It’s all happened pretty quickly. On Friday I sent an e-mail to the company I was supposed to work for in Beaune, in which I (oh, innocence) wondered whether …
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Corona-vacances : she may be small, but she’s shut down France
You’ve probably noticed by now how it’s all gone a bit Exodus, that the newspapers have become great harbingers of doom, and that the world’s generally on an off-day. Coronavirus (for it is she) has spread to France, which is now the 2nd most infected country in Europe, and the ENS has closed. Plus no …
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The Offing, a review.
(The following was commissioned and accepted by the Literary Review for the August 2019 issue, however was not published.) Robert Appleyard is an unusual protagonist for a contemporary novel. The sixteen-year-old son of a miner, he treks across the Yorkshire moors to Robin Hood’s Bay one sunny summer not long after the Second World War. …
