A few weeks ago I saw a competition on Jane Wenham-Jones’ blog, in celebration of the launch of her extremely funny (and slightly daft) book 100 Ways to Fight the Flab. The book is the perfect antidote for that well-known freelancer’s problem, Writer’s Bottom, and the competition was to write a frivolous diet tip in […]
Blog
Heaven
The boys were five weeks old when Alex died. In my head he has never got any older – how could he? If I think of those thirty-five days – and rarely do I allow myself to do so – it is of a hand curled around my finger; a butterfly heart beneath the translucent […]
Bumping into the past.
I bumped into someone from work the other day. Not my ‘now’ work; my ‘then’ work. The work where I wore a rank on my shoulder, made decisions, briefed teams. The work I slid out of eighteen months ago, on the pretence of a break. The work I finally quit last month, earning in return […]
Sunny days
There’s something about the sunshine, isn’t there? I woke up this morning and there it was: splashing itself across the garden in the most brazen way. I made pancakes, smoothies, fruit yoghurt. The coffee thrust itself upwards in the cafetière as though it couldn’t wait to be brewed. We sat on the deck beneath the […]
Time to donate
Blood, bone-marrow, breast-milk, or good old-fashioned cash. Most people I know donate something on a regular basis, or have done so at least once in the past. I was a regular blood-donor, until a life-saving transfusion meant I could no longer donate. Ah, the irony. When funds were more plentiful I sponsored a child, set […]
Evening time is MY time.
I am almost obsessional about the time between seven in the evening and bedtime. It’s mine. All of it. I revel in the peace which comes when the children are asleep, and the utter selfishness of an evening spent doing what I want to do. When the babies were all under two, and the witching […]