We’ve had a tragedy rip through our house recently: the unexpected passing of our little caramel-brown Africana hen, Feather.

Chickens, I learnt, are not very resilient and one cold was enough to polish off this sweet hen. It took about an hour from her first beaky sneeze to her journey to the Great Chicken Coop in the Sky, and the ripple effect of this has been huge. My 3 feisty little girls have now asked me about 10 000 times why Feather died, and – when they spotted our cat sneezing – informed me resignedly that he, too, was on his way out.

All of this made me reflect on how brief and transitional life is, and how things that feel ‘forever’ often flash by. To make the link between this and photography is heavy-handed, but it does make me think about liminal spaces and liminal, transitional times in our life. These transitional times can be unsettling and brief as we try to re-anchor ourselves, or remind ourselves of the familiar in the strange.

October is, for me anyway, often a liminal month as we journey into the last quarter of the year; it’s a time to reprioritise, reassess, and – hopefully – to rest before the rollercoaster to Christmas.

As my first solo Christmas minis session comes up on 1 and 2 November 2025 (I booked out in 2 weeks – can’t wait to share these photos), I wanted to share photos from my collaboration with Nurture Nook last year. Here are some images I loved from last year: