Group chats, while at times helpful, rarely spark pleasure. Instead, they’ve become another layer of digital noise in an already overwhelmed world brimming with emails, notifications, and the existential dread of blue ticks left unanswered.

Every year as December approaches, I’m struck by the magic of the season - the streets lighting up, festive music filling the air, and the sense of anticipation building around the holidays. But alongside the charm, I can’t shake a sense of discomfort with what Christmas has become for so many of us: a whirlwind of consumerism, waste, and, often, unmet expectations. I find myself wondering how we got here - how a holiday meant to bring joy and connection has morphed into something that can feel so forced, stressful, and detached from its original purpose. 

Sure, I knew he had kids. We met on Tinder and it was on his profile that he had two daughters aged eight and eleven. We talked about them on our first date; how they both played football and how he’d tried his best to be the best dad he could to them after the breakdown of his marriage. I’d dated men with kids before, but never got to the stage of meeting said kids. I’d never been against it, but honestly, when you first start dating, they’re kind of a concept rather than a reality.

I’ve been seeking connections with people my entire life and throwing myself into different iterations of community. 

My need for connection hasn’t decreased as I’ve grown into an adult, nor has my love of dance, which is why I began taking Lindy Hop classes seven years ago. Lindy Hop is a Black American swing dance that originated in Harlem in the 1920s before gaining huge popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s a partnered dance with lead and follow roles, designed to encourage improvisation on a social dance floor.

When did our internal monologue suddenly adopt a no-nonsense, authoritarian approach rivalling the Wormwoods? Why do we become self-flagellating adults who berate themselves for every little misstep?

When I got in the room I was told to sit down and then a couple of nurses came and got me. They pulled back the curtain that wrapped around the bed she lay in. I saw the redness of my partner’s face, the wet around her eyes. I asked ‘What’s happened. Did it hurt?’

And she said ‘no, but they think I have cancer.’

When I became disabled, one of the things that I struggled the most with was just how much my life changed, practically overnight. 

It wasn't just that I was adapting to no longer being a healthy, able-bodied person, but I was also suddenly transitioning from being able to do so much, so easily, to having a mountain of access needs that had to be fulfilled in order for me to do anything. 

You’ve been with your partner for a long time, but your sex life has been dwindling. Weeks turn into months of no sex and you’re starting to wonder what you’ve done wrong. I’m here to tell you that you’re not alone.

The game slowly defrosted my hibernation and resuscitated my ‘spark’. It provided me a safe space to practise my speech, to train my ability to concentrate, remember details, and untangle the messy earphone cables of thought that made up my mind; to not think about what I couldn’t do but to test the limits of my imagination, which, as it turns out, now feels pretty limitless. 

Those first few weeks, even months, are so special. You and your partner are just in your own little bubble with this gorgeous little baby that you have spent months waiting for. Nothing can compete with those first moments; watching their hair grow, those first sparks of a personality. But what most aren't prepared for, like myself, is when ‘the bubble’ pops.

Fast forward over all the trials and tribulations, failed efforts and false starts to me in my mid 50’s and I’m actually doing it. I’ve just completed two years at college studying HNC and HND photography and now I’m finally off to Bower Ashton to do a BA! 

Picture this: you’re finally pregnant and expecting your first child after years of people extolling the virtues of having children. Suddenly, the narrative is flipped, it’s no longer the best thing to ever happen to you. Unfortunately, you are now doomed to live a joyless life of servitude to said child. It almost feels as though you have been duped, scammed into some sort of parenthood pyramid scheme from which there is no escape.

His stubbled cheek brushed lightly against mine as he moved his lips so close to my ear that they sent a shiver down my spine. With his deep, gravely voice, he whispered these endlessly romantic words: you’re pretty fuckable for a fat chick. 

Too old to work, too old to attract a mate, too old to bear children. Without realising it, I was getting ready to die. I was finished.

Except I wasn’t.

Commenting on other people's bodies, or rather, refraining from doing so, is a topic increasingly circulating not only on image-heavy platforms like Instagram, but also in the collective consciousness. The more people I meet, the more I realise that attitudes are changing, or at least, some thought is being invested into what is and is not acceptable or appropriate to say to someone about how they look.

There’s a quote from Jeremy Bentham – “Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet”. I think that this is true of many of us.

It’s been about 14 years since we’ve been in touch. Why did we lose touch? I honestly don’t know. We were in our early 20s and had both graduated from separate universities, and were taking tentative steps into whatever came next. Neither of us knew what lay ahead but somehow, on the walk to get there, we moved at different speeds and drifted in different directions. I sent you texts every now and again, on birthdays and when you just popped into my head. But you didn’t respond.

There were 5 people involved in the efforts to save my Dad, one of whom grabbed a snorkel and fins from his barge and went under the boats to try to rescue him putting his own life at risk. Incredible. Truly. It must have been so scary for them to have been witness to the shocking and fast moving drama that unfolded that day

Straight Through Processing (STP) is used in almost all industries in the world and is used just as much as the internet. When a person pays for anything using a Credit or Debit card, they are using STP.

Before, I was not a divided person. I took pride in my decisiveness, and my ability to dissect, understand and articulate my own feelings. That was until chronic illness split me down the middle, like a kitchen knife through an overripe avocado.

A weird thing started happening to me a few years ago, I started to become invisible. It wasn’t everywhere or all of the time - in the private sphere of my life I was still very much solid, visible and three dimensional, but I started to notice it happening occasionally on the public stage, like some sort of glitch. Groups of teens and twenty-somethings would start looking through me as I walked along the street towards them. Or I’d stand waving a tenner at the front of a busy bar for what felt like hours whilst the staff served everyone to either side of me.

At 15 months old I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. It gave my parents quite a fright to put it mildly. I almost died. So now I need to manually regulate my blood glucose levels. You can’t calculate the right dose of medicine if you don’t know where you’re starting from. That is where blood glucose monitors come in and they have come on such a long way in the 20 years I have been using them!

Think about how much literal time is being spent unwell, to the point where you’re struggling with basic things such as work, the washing up, cooking, getting dressed and showered. Try to picture back to a time you were particularly unwell. Was it the flu, Covid, a broken bone? Consider how much longer all these basic actions took, or how much time passed before you could even do them? Unfortunately for chronically ill people, this is an everyday reality.

My name’s Harriet and I'm an alcoholic. We’ve all heard this before, but I first said this in my early twenties when I tried a 12 step programme for the first time. A few years prior to this I asked my best friend if she thought I was an alcoholic, and after being told in no uncertain terms that I don't drink in the morning so I can't be, I pushed it to the back of my mind.

School…awful place for most of us. Are you one of those rare people I hardly ever meet who enjoyed it? It wasn’t all bad; school plays, drama and art were my hiding places. But mostly it was like being on Salisbury Plain with landmines, target practice and a lot of being shouted at.

All of them had: my parents, my teachers, my friends, my pastor. They had lied to me at school, at church, at home. They had kept that information from me, and used that ignorance against me. They had forced me to pretend for years to be someone I was not. They had made me feel pathetic, trapped, suicidal.

But telling me I was a woman wasn’t the last lie they would tell me, and far from the last one I would believe.

Disabled LGBTQ+ folk should not be, and should never have had to consider, giving up something that should ordinarily be a wholesome and enlightening experience. Disabled LGBTQ+ people should not have to forgo the feeling of being special, included, and seen due to inaccessibility. Many people have no experience of their health, wellbeing, and safety being disregarded and therefore put at risk due to a lack of accessibility. Yet disabled people are often made to compromise our health in the name of inclusion or opt out of attending. Why?

Since my early teens, I have carried a sense of shame for being interested in and enjoying sex. I come from a family (and culture) where sex is not openly discussed, and it has taken some considerable effort, discomfort, and re-learning to understand what sexual power means to me and how I can harness it for my overall empowerment.

I broke myself, I closed off, dissociating, derealizing, depersonalizing, putting every feeling in a neat little box and slamming closed the lids. I could not just not feel toward a single person, or several, I had to form disjunction after disjunction in my capacity to feel such ways at all. It is no surprise to me now that in my worst depressive states I admitted to my partner that I did not love them. How could I? I loved no one, by necessity. To play the role of monogamist I had to abandon the pretense of monogamy as growth of purest love.

This year, the BBC celebrates 100 years of broadcasting, and those who regularly watch its TV channels will notice the recent ‘This is our BBC’ idents, where clips of programmes have been edited to create a narrative around the importance of the BBC, featuring greats such as David Attenborough, Lenny Henry and Judi Dench. On the surface, it may look like a way to tug on the heartstrings and appeal to nostalgia, but there is a subtle change of tone with the line ‘But the BBC doesn’t have to be here, it only exists if we really believe it matters’. We’ll come back to that.