Recent Blogs
Name dropping
Our personal names are vectors, co-ordinates by which we locate ourselves in time and space. I’m still bearing the names I was gifted at birth: Alice Mary Bulmer.
But I know many people who have changed their names, to something they like better.
My journey to life coaching
This is the story of my long and winding road to life coaching.
I hope it inspires you to seek life coaching much earlier than I did.
Looking for my ideal career, I went down a rabbit hole and got lost.
It took me more than 10 years to find my way out, with the help of a coach.
Songcatching
“I’d like to write songs, but I don’t know how to start. How do I choose a good songwriting course?”
It feels like there are so many things you have to know, and that you have to already be good at, before you can write songs.
But it could be somewhat easier than you think.
You don’t have to be a highly skilled musician. You just need three chords, to start with. And a few other elements.
1966: A year in my life
This is my story about the strange and transformative year that was 1966.
It took me all the way from a bungalow on the volcanic lava slopes of Auckland/Tamaki Makarau, to a haunted Elizabethan cottage in East Anglia and back again.
The Cassowary’s Daughter
This is the story of my personal cassowary quest. I’ve been looking for this elusive, magical, mysterious bird all my life. Hunting my cassowary is fascinating, exciting, and much stranger than I could ever have imagined.
“To trap cassowaries, one needs to know a very great deal of magic.” Ian Saem Majnep, Birds of My Kalam Country
Hands in the dirt
I love putting my hands into beautiful, living soil. It’s an amazing, grounding, energetic feeling.
I enjoy other aspects of gardening: caring for plants, building compost heaps, harvesting and eating the bounty.
But getting my hands in the dirt gives me a feeling of wellbeing that goes beyond these other benefits.
Dorothy and her ancestors
This post is about my English grandmother, Dorothy Bulmer, nee Dorothy Hermon Hughes.
Dorothy was born in Bangor in 1897. My father, Ralph Bulmer, was her eldest son.
Dorothy was very proud of her ancestors. Thanks to her, I know a fair amount about my family tree.
My life with green salad
This is the story behind my new book, Meet your greens: Enliven your salads with herbal energetics. It’s about how to make amazing salads, but it’s also about a lot more than that.
Meet Your Greens comes out of my lifelong interest in the different flavours of salad greens.
My kefir Christmas
The year I was 15, my father gave me for Christmas a small jar containing strange white curds.
He said it was a yoghurt bug.
But it wasn’t like any yoghurt bug I’d ever seen.
It wasn’t the kind of present Dad usually gave me.
Better Than Before: My life with Sneaky Feelings
Once in a lifetime a band comes along that you love so much, they become part of your world. For me, it’s Sneaky Feelings.
This is the story of how I discovered my favourite New Zealand band.
It’s quite possible that you haven’t heard of them, even if you live in Aotearoa-New Zealand.