The wonderful ghosts of Christmas past
Seances, trikes and the miracle of tinfoil
East Anglia is the place for birds
I first visited Orford in 1970, at peak Cold War when this stretch of the East Anglian coast was one…
We all love a poltergeist story
There are fashions in the paranormal as in everything else. Since the famous Enfield hauntings of the late 1970s, poltergeists…
The dying need real conversation, not false cheeriness
A nurse friend recently finished six weeks in a Covid intensive care unit where she witnessed many deaths and always…
There’s no point in bishops – Covid has shown us so
It is a relief to parents that young children are allowed out a bit now as the length of the…
The genius of Alfred Hitchcock
Nobody earns the right to respect just by having lived into old age, whenever that begins — it has happened…
The lost world of lockdown
It started when, the day after the announcement of some lockdown easing, I drove five miles along the coast road.…
Who can still make a Sunday joint last a week?
Sunday lunch was always roast beef and, in the traditional way, the Yorkshire pudding was served first with gravy, supposedly…
In the Covid era, age isn’t just a number
When I told my seven-year-old granddaughter, over Zoom, how much I missed being with her, I added: ‘Maybe it won’t…
Do we really want to go back to normal?
On the day our A-level exams began some wit wrote on the blackboard: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time…
Pity the poor stepmother — the most reviled character in folk literature
Fairy stories were not originally aimed at children, and we do not know what the first audience responses were; but…
Now is the time for comfort reads
It all started on the day after the Brexit referendum. People who do not get the result they voted for…
The joy of short stories in these taxing times
From time to time, usually when things are quiet, the government brings on the dancing girls. David Cameron made Carol…
The online museums you’ll never want to leave
‘We don’t talk about the war.’ Yet those of my generation and older reference it daily. The coronavirus is an…
My isolation reading list
A psychiatrist once told me that it takes one’s subconscious about three weeks to catch up with a significant life…
Shakespeare knew a thing or two about self-isolation
‘Now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in To saucy doubts and fears.’ Shakespeare got there first, as ever, and…
Susan Hill: The brilliance of the NHS cancer service
Exactly 50 years ago I drove, for the first visit of many, across country to Aldeburgh in Suffolk, following the…
A Halloween short story: by The Woman in Black’s Susan Hill
‘This is a true story…’ Right. Only this time, it really is. There are no wails, whistling winds or taps…
Everything under the sun: The glory of garden centres
Don’t you just love garden centres? You have to be mad to go on a sunny Sunday morning in the…
Everyone hates Maggi Hambling’s ‘Scallop’ – but I love it
Benjamin Britten was adamant that he did not want any memorial sculpture of himself in Aldeburgh, the Suffolk coastal town…
The boy who dreams: A Christmas short story by Susan Hill
‘Wake up, boy! Wake up…’ My father was shaking me and I was confused because it seemed that I had…
Sarah Perry’s Melmoth is a great read, but not a great novel
‘What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split and the upturned bowl…
Susan Hill’s diary: The return of the eels
The swifts had not arrived by June, nary a one, though a Yorkshire Dales friend reported their return, and there…
Diary
I don’t know why party conferences no longer take place in Scarborough. As a child, I saw many an important…
Why I will never read Jane Eyre
Have you ever set your face against a book? This year sees Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary and the novelist Tracy Chevalier…
