Siobhan McDonough, Writer
I twice read Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi this December, and in the last few pages – I won’t spoil it – in the last few pages, I was suddenly in Chicago in winter seeing the trees spangled with lights, and remembering a different life, one in which I wandered around ancient monuments each weekend. It was…
This post was originally published at littlethings07. Every city contains many cities. They run parallel to each other, divided by education, or ethnicity, or religion, or preferences. You can live in a city your whole life without seeing many of its sides. I lived in Lusaka for only a year and a half. I was…
A week (to the hour) before my flight from Lusaka, I came home to a broken back door lock. “Just to let you know, one of our locks needs to be replaced.” I texted my housemates, and then paused. “Oh s***. we might’ve been broken into.” I walked into my room and everything was in…
It was an overcast day, my favourite weather, like Scotland in the early autumn – late afternoon in the season in Zambia where the last flowering trees are coming into bloom and everything is beginning to grow from the rain. Most of the garden was still dust-coloured, but around the arbour was both flower…
This guest post is by my friend Steven Brownstone who recently moved from Zambia after living here for two years. Editor’s note: I hope to bring different viewpoints about Zambia to this blog over the coming months. The views expressed in the following piece are the views of the author, and not necessarily mine. I…
As a mark of my one year anniversary in Zambia, here is a definitive ranking of vegetarian food on every airline I’ve traveled on on the past year (I have to travel on multiple airlines to go home). It heartens back to Spiders I Have Known, which is my 5th most-read blog post, thank you…
I recently read a paean to the character of great cities in the United States. New York is obsessed with wealth and knowing people; Los Angeles with fame, San Francisco with technology, starting the next big thing. Boston/Cambridge is obsessed with ideas, education, and intellect. It is the author’s favourite city, and mine. It reminded…
Life update from a sleepy city… Car After a hiatus of over a month, April the March is back and whole again! It (she? it?) was in bureaucratic limbo for three weeks. When it came back, its homecoming was short-lived. It needed to be jumped twice, stalled while driving, and was having other electrical…
Two weeks ago, I got in a car accident. It’s a weird, frightening, and kind of hilarious story that I’ll tell sometime far in the future. (Why are my best stories always ones that aren’t appropriate for public consumption?) Everyone was completely fine, except the cars. (Everyone was fine because everyone was wearing seatbelts! Please…
It’s been a while. As I’m sure I’ve said before, when I started this blog I didn’t have a very heavy workload. And now I have work. But for the next week (?) I have less so I’ll be trying to catch up on the last few months. Many things have happened. Let me begin…