This is a first collection of poetry from Julie Anne Gilligan. She was born in south-east London in 1952 and arrived in Essex with her husband and three cats on the back of the hurricane in 1987. She has been there ever since. Brought up on a literary diet of Greek Myths, Shakespeare, The Eagle, Edward Lear, Kentish gravestones, The Goon Show, atlases, telephone directories and cereal packets plus an alliterative spattering of Kipling, Keats and Coleridge, she waited until late 2003 before writing her first poem. After a half century of abstinence, she has been catching up ever since. Much of her writing is inspired, or perhaps driven, by Parkinson's Disease which has had to live with her since 1998.