In 2009, I thought I was told to go to Uganda by God. Luckily, I really wanted to go.
Love Letters: Tess and Nick
Love Letters: Hanya Yanagihara
With Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, I needed some space between takes. I picked it up by chance in the library in 2017, and I only read half of the blurb before I knew I wanted to give it a go.
Love Letters: Alain de Botton
I had always thought that philosophy was a subject confined to the back blocks of creaky universities and dusty bookshops, without much relevance in modern day life.
Love Letters: to the quiet heroes
I was walking back to the House after getting my lunch recently and followed an older man down Montreal Street. He was wearing a fluoro jacket, beanie and tough, worn leather boots. The back of his jacket said, ‘Parking Warden’.
Love Letters: The Teachers
I sometimes wonder about my time at school. The older I get, the more shrouded in a strange mist it appears in my mind, with me wondering, ‘Did I really spend twelve years of my life doing that?' PE lessons, projects about the planets, scales, stationary orders, clip tickets, hunting for change for tuckshop lunches, painful “talent” competitions at lunchtime, copying notes from the whiteboard, so many assemblies: I know it served a purpose, but looking back, the repetitiveness of school life seems horrendous. As a student, don’t you remember how hard it was to fathom that one day, you will be old enough to break free from the rules and structure of this institution and get to choose how you wanted to spend your day?
Love Letters: Frank Warren
Photo borrowed from here. Ever since I was introduced to PostSecret, sitting on my best friend’s bed at university, I was totally captivated. The founder Frank Warren started a simple, safe blog where people were able to send in a secret on a postcard anonymously to his address, and he would scan twenty each week …
Love Letters: Vu Le
We’re a special type of beast, those of us working in not for profits. When I look around me at people doing what I do, I see exceptionally talented and passionate people who are trying to inch the world forward towards its natural moral arc.
Love Letters: Gungor
As you’ll see throughout this blog, different aspects of my past creep up in different ways and heavily inform what I write about. One of the things that most defined me growing up was my faith. I thought I found God at summer camps and overnight retreats; the hype of hormones and loud music, and …
Jemma Balmer 