by Alice Bulmer | Oct 4, 2016 | Ecology, Food, Wellbeing
It’s important that those of us who care about food quality get our heads clear about why we need organic certification. Recently I’ve been hearing a lot of people dissing organics. Some say, “Organic certification is just too hard and expensive.” Others say,...
by Alice Bulmer | Aug 14, 2016 | Becoming Alice, Ecology, Family skeletons, textiles
It took me a few weeks to get around to finally saying farewell to the Mormor rug. (See my earlier post: Coming to the end of a rug.) It felt really hard to let it go. But in the end, taking it apart was much easier than I had expected. I started unpicking from the...
by Alice Bulmer | May 23, 2016 | Becoming Alice, Ecology, Family skeletons, Life and death, textiles
In my living room there is a beautiful handmade rug. It’s a traditional Scandinavian braided rug, made by plaiting long strips of recycled cloth and then coiling the plaits together and hand sewing them into a flat oval rug. This labour of love was created by my...
by Alice Bulmer | Jan 29, 2016 | Becoming Alice, Ecology, Family skeletons
My mother, Susan Bulmer, has a bat named after her. Bulmer’s Fruit Bat, Aproteles bulmerae. It’s a giant fruit bat from the remote highlands of New Guinea. And it used to be extinct, but probably isn’t. As a young woman, before she was tied down with children,...
by Alice Bulmer | Jan 21, 2016 | Becoming Alice, Family skeletons, Music, Tools of resilience
How can music improve the lives of people with dementia? Every couple of weeks I drive to Auckland to make music with my mother, Sue. It’s fun and joyful for both of us. My mother has dementia. It has been gradually progressing over the last five years – maybe longer...
by Alice Bulmer | Oct 30, 2015 | Becoming Alice, Ecology, Family skeletons, Music, Storytelling, Tools of resilience
Saturday afternoon is my favourite time of the week. My ukulele group meets at 4pm. We drink a glass of wine, play ukulele and have fun. For two hours, nothing else matters. Our nine members have a wide range of musical experience – some have been playing for six...
