It’s Christmas Eve. All around the world, men are walking blindly around shopping centres, trying to find something to buy for their wives. I shall leave aside, for now, the fact that you should have started your shopping long before now, so let me help you out a little with a few things not to […]
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Today
I spend most of my life with sadness buttoned up inside me, a scarf wound tightly around the lump in my throat. When sorrow seeps out through the gaps I add more buttons, another layer, another piece of armour. But it’s a tenacious beast, grief. It won’t be quietened, it won’t give up. Some days […]
Time for bed
My best friend’s husband had a vasectomy last week. It’s become quite popular within my circle of acquaintances, which makes me realise I must now be middle-aged. It used to be tattoos and piercings – now it’s all tummy tucks and sterilisation. A vasectomy seems to be quite the in thing among responsible men nowadays. […]
Is Voldemort real?
Four-year-old E suffers from a vivid imagination. She seizes upon single issues and pursues them doggedly, often worrying for hours into the night about the hows and the whys and the whens. Unusually, for a mother as uncharitable as I am, I am enormously sympathetic to her. I think I was born worrying about something […]
Fireworks
I can’t recall the day the boys were born. Can’t play a film of it in my head, the way others can. The day is a series of snapshots, taken as though I were quite detached from it all; merely an observer passing through the maternity wards. Jolly midwives; grim-faced doctors; juddering contractions; trailing wires; […]
The Blind Game
Last month I finally got round to sorting out some blinds for the two rooms currently without any form of window dressing. My friend Anna had recommended somewhere, so I called to arrange a visit from one of their sales team. Before they arrived, Anna advised me on how to play The Blind Game. ‘Don’t […]