Author Archives: @NicolaP

(A reading of the winning essay for the Kimberly St John Essay Prize by Namaste Care International. December 2021)

(Written in response to the news of the alleged Downing Street Christmas Party of 2020- some readers may find this distressing.) Dear Boris, I have a confession to make. I lied too. At about the same time as your advisers and staff were eating and drinking wine and cheese, I was working. It wasn’t onContinue reading “Dear Boris, I lied too.”

The Christmas Shift 2020 (I wrote this in January 2021 following working the whole of Christmas 2020- this is completely unedited and exactly how I felt once I reflected on the period). Normally we wear tinsel in our hair, we wear sparkling glasses in the shape of Christmas trees. We walk the wards with smilesContinue reading “To Wear Tinsel In Our Hair”

(Opinion piece written in September 2021) The shortage of HGV drivers has interested me greatly. The public out-cry, the governments eagerness to change visa’s, offer short term contracts. Yet according to the Royal Collage of Nursing we currently have an estimated shortage of 50,000 Nurses in England and Wales. Of the nurses we do currentlyContinue reading “I can’t drive a HGV but I have many other skills – Opinion piece”

(#parenting #amwriting #noncovidpost October 2021) How to play = how to write? One of the joys of being a parent is I get to experience the pleasure of pure, unselfconscious, immersive play all over again. I get to witness the unburdened world of total fantasy and make believe.  If I want to, I can joinContinue reading “Half Term Pondering”

(Another extract from my novel (fiction) this is from a few chapters in) A lamb as dry as pork Viv June 019. The sun did come out, unexpected like on a cold November day. High and bright in the sky causing the frost on the ground to glisten. A cloud moved and there it was.Continue reading “A heron watched me fall (2)”

A poem written on the first anniversary of the UK’s start of lockdown. (March 2021) This poem is part of the Royal Society of Literary Write Across London project (https://rsliterature.org/write-across-london) A year of Covid gone by. I remember my first covid patient and how I cleared a path in my full PPE shutting down theContinue reading “A Year Of Covid Gone By (poem)”

Written in late summer 2020 On the 26th March 2020 I completely missed the first clap for carers tribute. I was instead taking a shift handover in the site office. Unbeknown to me were the hordes of people along the river, the police, the ambulance crews, the public and hospital staff. All clapping and cheeringContinue reading “A Clap -an opinion piece”

A short extract from my novel: A Line of Paper dolls May 2019 Imogen As I look up I can see the mirror of terrace houses identical to ours, a line of them seeming as if they go on for ever. Houses connected, garden walls shared, water pipes heard from one house to the next. Continue reading “A Heron Watched Me Fall”

May 2020 (Short listed for the Yeovil Literary Writing Without Restrictions Prize 2021) My colleagues and I hadn’t taken it seriously, we were almost a little cocky, ‘Yeah. Yeah, we’ve seen H1N1, we’ve seen SARS, we’ve nursed in pandemics before’ So we carried on, until very quickly our office became an incident command center, execsContinue reading “Behind Closed Doors: A Nursing Memoir”