What I really appreciate about working with homeless people is that when you get to that basic level of survival, all the human pretence is stripped … - Ingrid Andersen

As I grew in my spiritual journey and I came to know what true and unconditional love was, I came to see that what I had was not what marriage should be. I chose life. I staggered/crawled away from the devastation and it took years for me slowly to become the person I was meant to be. And life has been deeply rich and rewarding in every possible way since then.

The first poem in my childhood notebook was written when I was eleven. It was a poem about the conflict I felt when my cat had slaughtered a bird. I don’t remember much about my writing before then, just that I always escaped into words.

Some people find the goldfish bowl difficult to live in – I thrive in it. There is no peak hour traffic. The cathedral bells ring on Sunday and Thursday evenings in the mist. The sunsets are spectacular. You can find a donkey cart (with a set of donkeys) parked neatly in a bay between a BMW and a Golf, and there are often cattle in my street. Cattle have right of way.