This week, I literally revisit the house my great-grandmother Susanna built —a modest home that represented everything she had achieved after a childhood of poverty.

Standing outside it today, surrounded by roads, garages and modern housing, I was struck by how much had changed and by what had endured. The house has survived by adapting, much as people do.

In this episode, I reflect on how homes become symbols of women’s lives: places where identities are built, families are raised, businesses are created and futures imagined. I also explore what happens when age, illness, or circumstance ask us to leave those places behind.

Through an extract from my novel, I consider memory and ageing. While houses change hands, they continue to carry the imprint of the women who first dreamed within their walls.

This week, while writing about my great-grandmother Susanna, I found myself returning to one stark fact in the family record: she gave birth to twelve children over roughly twenty years. Eleven survived.

But what does a fact like that actually tell us about a woman’s life?

In this episode, I look beyond the names and dates of the family tree to consider the physical and emotional reality of motherhood for a working-class woman born in the nineteenth century — and the very different ideas of sex, respectability, reproductive choice and female autonomy that shaped Susanna’s world.

I also follow those twelve children forward through the generations, towards descendants born more than a century later into a world Susanna could scarcely have imagined.

Family trees make lineage look like a collection of neat lines. But behind those lines are women’s bodies: pregnancies and births, losses and obligations, work and extraordinary endurance.

And somewhere at the end of one of those lines is me, looking back at the woman who made my existence possible and saying: I see you.

In this episode, I explore the myth of Medusa through a feminist and symbolic lens.

I reflect on the enduring story of a woman whose sexual assault, punishment and transformation have echoed through Western culture for centuries, beginning with a personal meditation in which Medusa emerged as a powerful guide.

Moving between Greek mythology, astrology, trauma and feminine embodiment, I consider what Medusa is asking us to reclaim: the parts of ourselves that have been silenced, denied or turned to stone in order to survive.

Medusa was never the villain.

Perhaps she has always been asking us to lift our heads and meet the world’s gaze, remembering our own feminine power to petrify.

With the arrival of The Odyssey in cinemas, in this episode, I turn to Eris — the Greek goddess of discord — as a way of thinking about feminine disruption, conflict and the women history has so often cast as dangerous.

Moving between Greek myth, Baba Yaga, Hekate, the demonised ‘witch’ and the women silenced or punished for speaking too loudly, I explore the possibility that these so-called troublemakers are not the source of chaos at all. Instead, they reveal where the real trouble already lies.

This is a reflection on Eris as instigator, witness, and catalyst: a goddess who complicates the path, redirects our gaze and asks what happens when women stop waiting to be invited and begin throwing their own golden apples into the fray.

Tennyson once wrote, “'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

As I prepare to publish my new chapbook this week, I wanted to share one of the companion pieces that appears at the back of the collection.

Photograph of a Swing Boat grew from one of the poems but became something different: a meditation on memory, identity, love and the strange way photographs collapse time. Looking at an anonymous seaside photograph, the narrator recognises echoes of a relationship from her own past and begins to wonder how many lives repeat themselves across generations.

It’s a story about longing, transformation and the people who alter the course of our lives—even when they don’t remain in them.

Photograph of a Swing Boat was originally published under a pen name*

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Caroline explores how the Essex landscape shaped the life of her great-grandmother Susanna. Through reflections on estuaries, dialect, seasonal rhythms, and ancestral connection, she considers the role of place in shaping identity across generations.

In Part 2 of her exploration of the Ghent Altarpiece, Caroline examines alternative interpretations centred on Mary Magdalene and the divine feminine. Through symbolism, sacred geometry, landscape, and feminine imagery, she reflects on women's spiritual authority, forgotten histories, and the enduring presence of the feminine within Christian tradition.

Caroline explores the myth of Sedna and other feminine water myths as a way of understanding authenticity, inherited beliefs, and women’s relationship with identity and selfhood. A reflective episode about feminine power, ancestral patterns, and returning to ourselves.

In this episode, I travel alone to the Belgian city of Ghent to visit one of the world’s greatest artistic treasures: The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

Drawn there by years of reading and reflection around Mary Magdalene, the divine feminine, and women’s place within spiritual history, I approach the Ghent Altarpiece not as an art historian, but as a woman searching for meaning.

Standing before Van Eyck’s extraordinary masterpiece, I explore my emotional and spiritual response to its imagery — Eve’s power, nature’s overwhelming presence, institutional religion, feminine symbolism, and the tension between authority and spirituality.

This is a personal exploration of art, faith, symbolism, and the enduring question of where women belong within sacred stories.

In this episode, I reflect on the idea of “capacity": what it means, who defines it, and why so much of it is still expected of women.

Through the story of my great-grandmother Susanna, who raised twelve children while building a life out of poverty, I explore the hidden labour women have always carried. I also consider how those expectations persist today, shaped by modern work, family life, and the emotional weight we often hold without acknowledgement.

This is a personal reflection on endurance, inheritance, grief, and heartbreak and a question of whether women’s strength has too often been used to justify the unequal systems we still live within.