A pilot scheme in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire – an area with extremely low breastfeeding numbers – will offer new mothers High Street vouchers to the value of £200 if they breastfeed for six months. Project leader Dr Clare Relton believes such remuneration is a way of ‘acknowledging the value of breastfeeding’, but her views seem […]
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Why badly behaved kids are better off in Aldi
If your children tend to play up in the supermarket, might I suggest you take them to Aldi rather than Waitrose? This is not, as you might suspect, because of the clientele. Now that the middle-classes have descended upon four-letter-supermarkets with the alacrity of locusts, there is no escaping the snooty gaze of the Boden […]
Back-stories, characterisation, and dancing in the kitchen
A novel can have the most powerful story-line in the world, but if the characters are not well-rounded the story will stay on the page. It won’t haunt your day-dreams, or follow you to work, running through your subconscious until the next time you pick up your book again. Characters are everything. As I tackle […]
Today I am grateful
Today my son is seven, and today I am grateful. Today is not a day for what ifs and might-have-beens. It is not a day for grief, for tears, for wishing things had been different. Because before me stands a child who might never have been born, were it not for the brilliance of science. […]
Planking
It would be fair to say that I am not in peak physical condition. (Please, do try to at least look surprised). Clearly I must take some responsibility for this deterioration of a body which, in its prime, was enviably taut and supple: after all, those Bourbons don’t march out of the biscuit tin by […]
When the terrible twos go on and on…
When my twin daughters were two, I gritted my teeth and braved out the terrible twos. The books on tantrums could have been written for my eldest girl, who screamed her way through every meal time, insisted on doing everything for herself, and hurled herself to the floor at the slightest opportunity. It’s okay, I […]