It was a year ago this month that I was challenged to share a nature photograph every day for a week on FaceBook. I wandered over to the local duckpond, and discovered a family of swans living there. I took some photos, chose my favourite, shared it, and then returned the next day, and the next day, and the next. A year on, and I am still just as enamoured with this swan family. Last year’s cygnets have grown and flown. And this year’s cygnets are growing larger, stronger, and their feathers are changing from soft beige to snow white. And the mated couple… well, they remain a constant –…

So, I finished the jumper I’ve been knitting, and which I mentioned here at the start of the year. If you’ve been following along, then you might remember that I messed up the sizes on the pattern, and ended up knitting a Large/Extra-Large jumper rather than the Large that I’d intended. All of which meant that I didn’t think it was going to fit my husband – the one for whom it was intended. However, perhaps because I knitted a swatch and properly gauged my work, it’s actually not as huge as I was anticipating. I still don’t think it’s a great fit for him, but, I’ll find out when he…

Sometimes, I’m going to have to be with the fact that the words aren’t going to come. And I need to be ok with that if I’m going to make it all the way to December. Sometimes, I’ll be sharing an image, not words – a photograph that I have taken and which I love. Sometimes, a swan…

So, the moon did that thing she does – catching me by surprise. The sky was turning to twilight, and I realised that I had nothing for the dinner. So I threw on my coat, pulled on my boots and wrapped a scarf around my neck, and headed out to the shops. I had only walked a couple of steps from our front door, when I stopped… awe-struck. As always, the camera in my phone couldn’t capture its magnitude; the milky spectacle of its presence hung low in a rose pink sky. But I snapped the shot anyway, dissatisfied by how small the moon seemed in my photograph, compared with how…

What now feels like a lifetime ago, but was, in truth, only 5 or 6 years past, I worked as a teacher in a university English Literature department. Most of my classes were covering the basics – the first three semesters of the curriculum covering theoretical approaches to authorship, readership, text, context, representation and meaning through novels and poems and plays and short stories that ranged in period and style from Oedipus Rex to Tarantino’s script for Natural Born Killers. Occasionally I would teach a class or two on the Gothic Imagination masters course, but most of my time and energy was invested in these undergraduate classes. And then I was offered an…