Because I couldn’t be separated from my daughter — We step out of the train and I notice her back pack is not on her back. ‘Where’s you bag?’ I ask her. She turns around. It’s not in her hands either. Realisation hits us both. ‘Quick, we need to go back!’ I say. Without hesitation, she dashes into the…

Short and sweet at a glance, then the full course at your leisure — Short and Sweet She, her. Writer. Ex-doctor. Ex-Catholic. Ex-Muslim. So what? Writing personal essays, social and political commentary, novels, book reviews and god-knows-what-else. What life experience though? Born in England, grew up in the Caribbean. Medicine, sales, multi-level marketing, migration, depression, dyslexia, marriage, faith, faithlessness.

‘Caribbean Man’ and ‘Black Man Feeling to Party’ will play as long as there’s a Caribbean man or woman alive — So, the Black Stalin died last week, three days after Christmas. And if in the 1980s, Roger Bonair-Agard hadn’t written a poem as a response to Stalin’s ‘Dorothy’ — a spoken word poem that he read and recorded for his Facebook friends in the wake of the great man’s passing…

I was teaching him not to feel, perhaps because I hadn’t learned how to feel myself — My nineteen year old is in the back seat. We’re sailing down the motorway to the seaside city where he’ll be moving into University accomodation for the first time. And in place of the serious round-the-table family conversations we never got around to, I’m delivering little lectures to him from…

In conversation with the author of Mr Big — When I get there, Ty Batson’s already had a drink. He orders another from the Spanish speaking waitress and I join him at the open air table. ‘I hear you’re writing a sequel to Mr Big,’ I say. He admits it. …

Ideas for working backwards from follow the money, to Unfollow The Money — I hadn’t heard of Jackdaw, the project Barclays is financing, till I saw these four women in the photo, protesting outside of Barclays in Croydon. And I’ve been thinking about their protest ever since. Many people wouldn’t want to show up to a protest of four. It’s not big enough…

The Wrong Way To Wright explores what it means ‘to settle’ — Aya Daniels is a loner with a comfort-eating problem, a woman in debt, whose married expat boss wants to get under her dress. Her meddling aunt and mother think the solution to her problems is a man. …

To write memoir is to journey to a vulnerable place, to dare to excavate the self — On the bus I’m reading reviews of Ira Mathur’s Love The Dark Days. Her book is coming alive in my imagination, long before I’ve set eyes on my own copy. I accidentally leave my water bottle on the train, then flustered by one severely delayed bus, take another bus heading…

Seek, and you shall find — a moral question with no answer. — Warning: references to the act of abortion in this article may be disturbing to some readers. At my all-girls Catholic school in Trinidad, I don’t remember any of us thinking abortions were a good thing. If an older sister, cousin, or aunt had one, it would have been kept from…