I’d know the split in the road
Gear down the confluence of valleys
Tighter grip to take the bend
His compression brakes and ring the bell twice for last homeward stops of excited moments to an ending.
This fortress, cloaks and shields.
Where we lay ourselves bare.
a collective effort by:
Janet Jones (age 54) Halifax
Nicola 48 Shoreham
Davinia 40 Shoreham
Ride
I’d know the split in the road
Gear down the confluence of valleys
Tighter grip to take the bend
His compression brakes and ring the bell twice for last homeward stops of
excited moments to an ending.
Janet Jones (age 54) Halifax
Home
Home is family,
Home is a friend,
Home is a mystery from end
to end
home is a house for me.
Home is a puzzle as big as the world,
Home is a house for young and old,
Home is a house for me.
Home is my family,
Home is my friend,
My house is the home for me.
Erin Lobb, (age 11), Horsham
I love my home.
I love the place that one day may be home.
At home in the Outer Hebrides maybe, will my first language return?
I love the memory of sleeping outside on the posh lawn of my old home, then later in the 80s sleeping with my clothes in the bed, so they were not so damp on the up.
I love my forgotten Nairobi home and the generous welcome to a daughter of colonisation.
At home in the free (no charge) culture of the London southbank.
At home in a gay bar after a work do, when I am asked “do you know what kind of club this is ?”
At home in my holiday tent, with a stunning Welsh view.
At home in my tent that holds the love of the women who have shared and broken my air bed with passion.
I feel the luck that I can love my home.
At home in a posh hotel on the Brighton sea front, at home with the lovely women who perform sing and give joy there.
At home and privileged as I pass the tents, and the pallets and the tarps and the sleeping bags, and the people that the hotel permits to make a meagre home at its’ front, so the sun can shine on them, this day any way and give a little unhomely warmth.
Harriet, (age 60) Woking
A death, a friend gone too young,
Words left behind – treacle if she were living,
But poignant given her age.
You are sad, and distant, cold to me,
Because of the calamity of our relations,
Before the wake we speak and you say,
I don’t think I love you any more.
I am stunned, but not surprised,
Tempestuous is the word for us,
Blowing up and out and all about.
Your temper, my critique,
And I have fantasised about being alone,
Many times.
But I won’t be alone will I?
I’ll have two teenage sons to raise,
A demanding job,
One son home-ed because of his inherited,
Personality. What’s best?
Two of these types, or one?
Better to focus on my son?
Or shall I keep pushing through my fourteen hour days whilst,
Keeping the peace, hiding my critique,
And fantasising about a home that isn’t shabby,
Flabby, grubby and worn.
A home in which only I take pride,
And you deride – I don’t mind that hole in the wall.
Deferred that shit onto me I see,
Your most rigorous quality, deferral of responsibility.
My new journal states,
‘I am what a feminist looks like’
I cried at this gift,
It felt like a slap, a wake up girl.
You have compromised your world.
Anon, Thanet
Room
Me daughters coming to stay at the weekend
She’s broken up with her husband.
Ah Sorry to hear that..mind you if she’s not happy it can be a good thing!
No it were out of the blue..
Oh was he bothering with another lass?
Well we don’t know he just came home one day and said we need to talk.
Oh dear..
Well that were it so she’s bringing the kids to stop with me
Gawd that’ll be crowded!
Yeah I’ve asked the housing for a transfer for another bedroom, don’t know if I’ll get one though..
Janet Jones (age 54) Halifax
On a winter’s day in February grey,
In England the sun still shines upon
Those of us who blossom and bloom
In heaven, over oceans, and from far away.
Temperature drop, wind unforgiving swirling leaves of red, gold. A highland fling.
Chubby poppy seed pod rattles, shrivels, splits revealing pearly blacks
to a temptress wind who draws and delivers them to warm moist earth.
Wherever the brilliant red paper-thin blooms appear, that is home.
No sooner than the blooms appear, the temptress wind returns
She knows my name
The roots wither and wait
Home is ever present yet nowhere to be found
A joint effort by Lauren Thompson (Christchurch, New Zealand) Fiona Thomson (age 58) Margate, Kent and Ece Ozdemiroglu, London.
On a winter’s day in February grey,
In England the sun still shines upon
Those of us who blossom and bloom
In heaven, over oceans, and from far away.
Temperature drop, wind unforgiving swirling leaves of red, gold. A highland fling.
Chubby poppy seed pod rattles, shrivels, splits revealing pearly blacks
to a temptress wind who draws and delivers them to warm moist earth.
Wherever the brilliant red paper-thin blooms appear, that is home.
A joint effort by Lauren Thompson (Christchurch, New Zealand)
& Fiona Thomson (age 58) Margate, Kent.
On a winter’s day in February grey,
In England the sun still shines upon
Those of us who blossom and bloom
In heaven, over oceans, and from far away.
Lauren Thompson (Christchurch, New Zealand)
Joys
Into the steam of The Golden Lion Café you quietly let out that today, is your secret birthday.
We are dyke cousins, separated by seas but intimately entwined. We compare our young, big city lives. London’s intense staccato, louder, more frantic than your soft spoken, smoky slow, bicycle powered Amsterdam appreciating both extremes.
You are one of five women living in tiny studio rooms called Kemperstraat with a bed high enough to look down into the street big enough to accommodate at least two of your other lovers. Your live-in dogfriend is Tula, like you the friendliest of creatures, her big bed is by the wood burning stovein which we burn bits collected from the streets on Monday evenings.
We don’t have much money but we share coffee and draw, generate poetry or paintings. Like the artists we admire, we make it our mission to look for beauty everywhere in the world and make spaces for women where they can to feel sexy and free, to create and grow dyke-friendly culture.
You tell me, maybe you have a baby. We will travel by boat-train mainly between each other’s homes, to and fro, for the next twenty years. A day long journey with time to breathe-in the sea-salt spray. As we contemplate the way.
By 2017 I’m settled permanently in Wales but there is a tunnel we can drive through. Unsure what to do, you suggest we simply walk together all day around your city. Your boy is full grown and your health returning after a terrible scare. You walk me out further than I have ever been as a tourist before, out to the island once squatted by our freeborn friends now gentrified. To the Dam herself, with the sea beyond. We walk along whole dikes, forgiving betrayals and remembering how to enjoy being together without sex or drugs. Walk talking through grassy wetlands beneath vast motorways, beside flotillas of houseboats until we hit the industrial canal lands where we clamber aboard a free ferry via central station to home. Your generosity is contagious, easy love floats between us in a local Moroccan steam room where tall Dutch housewives debate naked how to improve the world until all of us are scrubbed clean by dark women who laugh as we wince, they know how to help us leave our carapace.
Finally we sip mint tea, contented silently.
by Jane Campbell who is a 54yrs old dyke and is proud to live off grid in a handmade home in rural West Wales UK.
FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph 