Kate's Blog

The Music Shop  by Rachel Joyce (Black Swan) Pp.354 Frank owns a music shop which only sells vinyl, and he has the gift of being able to fin...

The Mercies  by Kiran Millwood Hargrave Picador Pp.  336 With echoes of The Crucible , The Handmaid’s Tale and My Antonia , this is a fasci...

Olive Kitteridge  by Elizabeth Strout Scribner Pp. 270 Writer David Nicholls has described this Pulitzer-prize-winning book (in a quote prin...

One of the things I have enjoyed about lockdown is the walking I have done around the suburbs. With limited time allowed for exercise and a ...

I have written about Floriade before  on more than one occasion. This year, what with one thing and another, it would obviously have been i...

Street art by @hijackart There are posts doing the rounds on social media of how this enforced isolation might be good for some of us. ...

In the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake, many buildings have been damaged. This is nothing compared with lives lost, but it still ha...

A couple of weeks ago I had occasion to go to a newish housing development – Lake Hayes Estate – and it got me thinking about homes and comm...