Barely a few days into October, stylist Cristina Colli stood in my sitting room with an armful of Christmas decorations. A hair and make-up technician established herself at the table in the playroom, and the photographer set up under the expert eye of Leanne Bracey, Sainsbury’s Magazine’s Picture Editor. Christmas had come early. The resulting […]
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As good as it gets
I sometimes imagine my grief plotted on a graph, like the London Stock Exchange, or the milestones of a serial dieter. Time marches along the bottom, survival charted first in hours; then weeks and months; now years. Seven years of grief. Along the side, invisible markers of emotional wellbeing: happy; stable; broken. A thick black […]
Ten inspiring ideas to try instead of NaNoWriMo
As we hurtle through October towards November, writers’ thoughts turn to NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The NaNoWriMo challenge is to complete the first draft of a novel (a minimum of 50,000 words) in just thirty days, and fans of the annual event maintain it is perfect for bashing out early drafts, pushing through writer’s […]
The domino effect
It has been a challenging week. As we drove back from a weekend up North, Georgie was sick so violently it hit the windscreen, and so copiously I had to scoop it out of the footwell with my bare hands. Parked on the hard shoulder of the M1, I hosed poor naked Georgie down with […]
Ten thousand steps a day
In order to maintain a healthy level of fitness, one should take around ten thousand steps each day. I bought a pedometer and decided I would track my progress over the course of a few days. The last time I did this I was working full-time, and averaged almost 20,000 steps a day, thanks to […]
I am a terrible driver
I have been driving for twenty years. I have driven around the infamous Arc de Triomphe, across several countries and on Britain’s motorways, dual-carriageways and rural B roads. I have been through police driving school, and am trained in high-speed pursuits. All in all, I am an experienced motorist. I am also a terrible, terrible […]