Name dropping

Name dropping

Names hold power. Our personal names are vectors, co-ordinates by which we locate ourselves in time and space, relationships, culture and more. I’m still bearing the names I was given at birth: Alice Mary Bulmer. It’s not a very harmonious collection of names. For...
1966: A year in my life

1966: A year in my life

This is my story about the strange and eventful year that was 1966. It took me all the way from a bungalow on the volcanic lava slopes of Auckland/Tamaki Makarau, to a haunted Elizabethan cottage in East Anglia and back again. In 1966 I learned that the world...
My third grandmother

My third grandmother

I consider myself lucky to have had three grandmothers. At the age of 24 I was gifted a new grandmother, Dr Mary O’Meara Pepper. I received things from my bonus grandmother that I’m only now making sense of, more than three decades later. Like,...
Jamie Fraser, my maths teacher

Jamie Fraser, my maths teacher

Like a zillion other people, I love Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. Her novels are packed with romance, feisty heroines, brave heroes, swashbuckling adventure, hot sex, and characters you’re happy to spend 700-odd pages with. Plus a bit of time-travelling to...