by Alice | Dec 9, 2016 | Becoming Alice, Ecology, Family skeletons, Life and death
This is a post about my father, Ralph Bulmer, a man literally larger than life. Ralph died more than a quarter of a century ago, at the age of 60. My half-brother Richard, who was only four, has no memories of our father. So, Rich, this is for you. And for the...
by Alice | Oct 23, 2016 | Becoming Alice, Ecology, Family skeletons, Life and death, New Zealand culture
Susan Evelyn Bulmer (nee Hirsh); February 17, 1933 – October 6, 2016; Archaeologist I’ve written about my mother, Sue, elsewhere on this website: Songs to Remember and The Family Bat. Last week my beautiful, brave, creative, energetic, passionate, wonderful, crazy,...
by Alice | Aug 14, 2016 | Becoming Alice, Ecology, Family skeletons, textiles
It took me a few weeks to get around to finally saying farewell to the Mormor rug. (See my earlier post: Coming to the end of a rug.) It felt really hard to let it go. But in the end, taking it apart was much easier than I had expected. I started unpicking from the...
by Alice | May 23, 2016 | Becoming Alice, Ecology, Family skeletons, Life and death, textiles
In my living room there is a beautiful handmade rug. It’s a traditional Scandinavian braided rug, made by plaiting long strips of recycled cloth and then coiling the plaits together and hand sewing them into a flat oval rug. This labour of love was created by my...
by Alice | Jan 29, 2016 | Becoming Alice, Ecology, Family skeletons
My mother, Susan Bulmer, has a bat named after her. Bulmer’s Fruit Bat, Aproteles bulmerae. It’s a giant fruit bat from the remote highlands of New Guinea. And it used to be extinct, but probably isn’t. As a young woman, before she was tied down with children,...
by Alice | Jan 21, 2016 | Becoming Alice, Family skeletons, Music, Tools of resilience
How can music improve the lives of people with dementia? Every couple of weeks I drive to Auckland to make music with my mother, Sue. It’s fun and joyful for both of us. My mother has dementia. It has been gradually progressing over the last five years – maybe longer...
