(first published in Roads and Kingdoms, Feb.2019)   The tower blocks by Hamid Olimjon  Photo credit: Alice Allan Two thousand years ago, Indian spice merchants and Chinese silk-sellers passed through Tashkent’s famous bazaars—at the meeting point of the Silk Roads—on their way to Europe. Uzbekistan, a predominantly Muslim nation, has a diverse cultural heritage, and Tashkent […]Read Post ›

Any writer will tell you that the main components of fiction are experience, observation and imagination. But sometimes, particularly when the impetus to write comes from powerful personal experience, experience that, it seems, must be honoured, imagination can have a hard time freeing itself from the shackles of ‘what was’. For me, the question that […]Read Post ›

Heran Tadesse has the graceful confidence of someone who is used to being a muse. I first met her at a breastfeeding group I was running in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. She was hard to place; she has the strong nose and fine features of an Ethiopian, but back then she wore her hair in […]Read Post ›

There’s a dark narrative that runs through women’s mothering stories, and it tells of the wolfish granny. She might sound like a figure from a fairy tale, but women in the mothers’ groups I’ve run in Ethiopia, Central Asia and the UK have told me that she’s alive and well. Among the kind, supportive, wise […]Read Post ›

I am writer…and a mother. Typically, the contents of my handbag include: keys, coins, lollipops, hair bands, plasters, umpteen pens (so that’s where they all end up), a small plastic person with his head missing, a sort of scurf of biscuit crumbs, a pebble and…a receipt with some precious words scribbled on the back. “Thunder […]Read Post ›

Today I miss Addis Ababa. It glitters in my memory, in its haze of smog and dust. It’s been nearly three years now and the cloak of nostalgia grows thicker. I miss our friends, good coffee, the way the eucalyptus shimmers silver and purple in the mountain breeze. I live in Central Asia now, and […]Read Post ›

  There are many ways to give birth. Given our basic anatomical inflexibility, obviously, there are only a couple of actual egresses, but wow, the variations in birth culture. “Just don’t go overdue!” warned a fellow ex-pat mother in Japan, “They stuck seaweed up my you-know-what!” Apparently, there is a chemical in the seaweed that […]Read Post ›

  (www.tripfiction.com) I lived in Ethiopia for four years when my young family and I were posted there with my husband’s job. As a diplomatic family, we’d lived abroad before, but Ethiopia got under my skin like nowhere else. My book, Open My Eyes, That I May See Marvellous Things, is set in Addis Ababa. […]Read Post ›

My  favorite childhood toy, or to coin the great British psychologist D.W Winnicott’s phrase, my transitional object, was (actually he still is) a puffin. He was given to me when I was two and quickly usurped a boss-eyed white bear to which I had previously been attached. I was faithful only to Puffin throughout my […]Read Post ›