I am waiting anxiously at Suvarnabhumi Airport, pacing back and forth. As with most places in South East Asia, it is swarming with people. I’m not able to find an empty seat and my eyesight is blurry – a mixture of the early morning flight and the hustle of the airport. I just flew in…
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I pull cobbler’s pegs out of my hair and let them drop to the cabin floor. I wonder, briefly, if this is somehow illegal. Then I realise I know nothing about British flora anyway. Again I rummage in my pocket and pull out the printed map of my route, already dog-eared from being so often…
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I hate to say it, but I only started wearing lipstick last year. I was, up until that point a staunch lip-gloss person. And before that, I had what I’d call my wilderness years, where the occasional slick of Vaseline would suffice. Moving from using lip-gloss to embracing lipstick felt like a jump: an initiation…
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The most common introduction people receive in the world of contra dance is no introduction at all. You arrive at the dance hall, realise, if you are a girl, that your skirt is too short (or too long) and that you forgot to bring another set of shoes. Your carefully chosen boots, which you wore…
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This piece is an excerpt from Ambivalent at Best, a longer memoir work. Every summer my family and I spent time in the Alaskan wilderness, living in a cabin my father had built in the 1970s, which we improved and amended over the course of about six summers. The first summer there I was nine…
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My first thought is, ‘I really did not think this one through.’ That is my first thought when I sit down on a bench, clutching my backpack in the middle of Tokyo. My second thought is of a display I passed as I disembarked from my plane at Narita a couple of hours earlier. It…
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I have always been painfully shy. Well, actually, that is not the entire truth. When I was a very little thing I used to love talking to strangers. I had been taught by my parents to believe that I was special and interesting, and as a result I thought that everyone would be delighted by…
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There’s a buzz around internet-based long distance relationships these days. Everybody has a different opinion: some people can’t for the life of them understand the appeal, and some people sing their praises from the rooftops. When I told people I was in a long distance relationship I received varied reactions. Some people thought it was cool,…
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I have never called myself a feminist. Being raised by a single mother in the 1980s with my sisters, equality for women wasn’t a concept that I questioned. You could say I took it for granted that women had equal rights. At this early age I didn’t question gender equality because I was only influenced…
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**Trigger warning: Discussion of eating disorders** (middle school) The tiles were cold against my skin. In the pitch-black of the night, in our tiny box of a bathroom, I sprawled out. The scratchy blue rug – the old one my father had been begging my mother to throw away for years – acted as my…
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My abortion Pippa and I are really close. Really, we are. She’s not homesick in the slightest. For an ethereal aberration who communicates via text message and telepathy, I must admit, she surprised me with her fast-talking, deadpan, assertive personality and wild history. Neither of us expected to share my womb for nine months. I…
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This piece first appeared in issue three of Lip. Age five was the first time I stepped out onto the parquetry of the ballet studio. Excitement, wonderment and joy filled me. I was dressed in a pretty white leotard and skirt, pink ballet shoes and my hair in piggy tails with colourful ribbons. All this…
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