roullier | WHITE

"So you are just going as a ghost?" I was about nine and standing in the bathroom with my mother as she reached into the depths of the linen cupboard, perched high on a stepladder. I had a reputation for doing things very elaborately. Everything was researched, rehearsed and eventually executed with the maximum of attention to detail and the minimum regard for my parent’s belongings. When I wanted to find out how the TV worked; I took it apart. My mother would sigh as she dialled the TV repairman but she seemed largely resolved to her fate. “Yes” I said taking a perfectly ok sheet from my mother ‘but I will need to cut some holes in it”. I was indeed going to the church youth club fancy dress competition as a ghost, but not your common or graveyard ghost! I was going as Jack O’Lantern, the fabled Irish ghoul. The whole outfit pivoted on me being able to create a pumpkin head with exactly the same red glowering eyes as the light cast by sister’s bike’s rear lamp. Having experi

This is my favourite time of the year I love a crisp, sunny autumnal day. The summer is well and truly over, everyone is back at work and the kids are back to school.  ‘Back to School’ even today that phrase fills me with absolute terror; much the same as; “I’m afraid its dry rot’ or ‘do you want chrysanthemums in that bouquet?”   My school career started out wonderfully well and term-time was indistinguishable from the holidays. We went to St Johns & St Clements as it was then in the tiny building on the corner of North Cross Road. Each September my sister and I would run down Archdale Road with the dog, who would take herself home after she had seen us safely through the school gates, hug our teacher, admire her new clogs - it was the 70’s - and picked up where we left off in July.  Then one dark September I was banished to the Dickensian, towering Archbishop Tenison’s Grammar School at the Oval. From loving encouragement to draconian admonishment in less than two