ASHES

The small postcard below is from a memoir I published in March 2025.It is titled Postcards From a Little Life, and is as the words suggest a non-linear collection of small fragments from the highways and byways of being me.

My book was blessed by the the editorial hand of my friend (& friend to my scribbled life) Rose Rouse She created the structure and form that my postcards live inside - six sections each containing a flavour or orientation, while breaching anything chronological.

The book is available on Amazon, all other online bookseller’s, and any real-world bookstore will order it for you. If you’d like a signed copy or a message for a friend, you can buy it directly from me, where it is on permanent buy one/get another free - my little whimsy of wishing a life for my book, gently finding its way to new readers as if it were an alpine stream.

I keep an orderly house. Not in the tight, breathless way that used to be true. Now it is a soft-edged sort of order, but order nonetheless.

Recently in my orderly house, I found a white cat’s whisker. It made me weep, this enduring cat’s whisker.

It was Mr Myrtle Moo’s whisker. Moo for short.

He died in my arms last summer. It was a season of goodbyes, and left a distinct taste of love and loss on my tongue. I lost a cat and a sister and a cat, all in a roll over several short months. I was there each time, each moment for each last breath, each fall into the mystery.

For a while, it felt like all I loved had turned to ash.

Literally. I had boxes of ashes in my bedroom, and kept them there on the shelf until I didn’t need to anymore. This wet summer, I sprinkled beloved cat ash into the garden where they had been cats all their lives. I folded the whisker into my hand, and then I let it fall.

A little later, very early on a pink dawn day, a small group of humans that had loved Jan dearly gathered on the edge of Hampstead Heath. We walked together across the ground that Jan had loved and walked, and talked, where her footsteps will always be: a small, disparate, threaded together little group, wandering and winding, coming back to the bag of ash that was once a human called Jan. Hands scooped out ashes and they fell and flew and slipped through fingers, each of us having our own intimate experience, separated, in the good company of simple love.

No one had much to say.

Jan being Jan.