Category: misadventures
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Misadventure: 4am in a tree with a flute
When I was at uni I thought I did ridiculous deeds because I was drunk, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realise that I did ridiculous deeds anyway, and sometimes I was also partially inebriated. During an archaeological dig at a place called Star Carr in the summer holidays between first and second…
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Misadventure: Trapped in the Car Park
This happened back when there was still our favourite soft play. It was a Thursday. Afterwards, we went to the library and had a happy two hours looking at books. Both babies chose some nice books (okay, the two-month-old didn’t really choose her own books but she smiled at a couple so I borrowed them…
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Misadventure: Fairies
This is a misadventure about magic, and the watershed between knowing magic is real, as children do, and knowing it isn’t. Both parties KNOW this, and yet… doesn’t that suggest that knowledge depends on your point of view? When I was 8, I moved schools from St Giles RC to The Valley County Primary in…
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Misadventure: A Very Louis Theroux Dinner in America
While I was in America, I had a bit of downtime between a couple of book conferences so I decided to head to a lovely beach town in Virginia. I booked ten days at a beachfront hotel which was delightful but left me with a lot of free time. I was working hard on marketing,…
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Misadventure: Brook jumping
When I was six, seven and eight, Saturdays were always housework. Usually, that meant spending all morning cleaning and tidying. There was dusting my stepdad’s collection of beer taps (what? Your house wasn’t full of these?) and my mum’s… random collection of shite like an owl dressed to play cricket draped with random offcuts of…
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Misadventure: The Sofa Shop
When I was 8 months pregnant, I had just moved from China to Northern Ireland. I was by myself and after five fraught weeks had finally signed a lease and got some keys to a house. Unfurnished. Quite a lot of things for sale online have secret smallprint that you don’t spot until you try…
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Misadventure: I fell off a cliff
If you’re from Cheadle, you’ll probably know about Hawksmoor. If you’re not from Cheadle, you won’t. If you take the Oakamoor road, just after the turn-off signposted to Rocester, Hawksmoor begins with the funny parking area in front of a big cliff with a wood around and above it. It’s where the fields end and…
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Misadventure: A cut below
There’s a certain type of person in the world who thinks that, if they ask you something, and the answer is “no”, that they should just keep annoying you about it and going on and on until the answer changes. My sister is one of them. This isn’t about her. It is about two someones…
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Misadventure: Catching a dog in a spy base
When I was eleven we got a dog. His breed was brown, white and waggly. He looked like a Jack Russell but he was the size of a labrador. And he needed a lot of walking. We lived on a bizarrely-designed council estate which had its front doors at the back and the back doors…
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Misadventure: Shipwrecked
Where I grew up, there was a brook, which is something a bit bigger than a stream but smaller than a river. The brook was probably the most interesting thing about Cheadle. Its path spanned the town. It meandered through the fields between my concrete council estate and the next estate over (a decidedly upmarket,…
Mama Adventure 