Ailsa Piper

After I swim, I watch an osprey hanging in mid-air. If those who came before really do dissolve and dissipate, and if their cells really are all around us, then that bird is held there by Mum and Peter and billions of others of the long-dead. The osprey is kept aloft by absences. Perhaps I am too. When her husband...

Dear Ailsa, Sometimes I wonder whether the friendship that has caught us both—a most unlikely friendship I must confess—might find an echo in a far-off Irish village somewhere in the wild, windy hills of old Donegal. Or am I allowing that uncontrollable imagination of mine too much slack? This is the story of an unlikely friendship. When priest and Sydneysider...