One of the things I miss most about living in London is easy access to the theatre. When I first moved to the city, I used to go to the theatre incredibly regularly – often a couple of times a week, taking advantage of standby tickets at discounted rates. I lived a 15-minute tube ride … [Read more…]
Halloween is big where we live. Not the sort of big where you lackadaisically put out a half-hearted pumpkin and bung a few sweets in the direction of trick-or-treaters, but the sort of big where people have robot butlers, smoke machines, ten-foot inflatable pumpkins and giant projections onto the sides of their house. Of course, … [Read more…]
I felt invincible. I practically encouraged my children to lick other kids with chicken pox. Ours were vaccinated. We would be fine. YoungestGirl has spitefully gone and developed chicken pox, making a mockery of the £130 we spent on having her immunised against it. Her little face is covered in blisters. Her hands are all … [Read more…]
His name was Mike. He was one of three senior directors in the marketing department where I worked. He was middle-aged and married with children. I was about 25. On my second day there, he said we’d have to go out to lunch. This was back in the early 2000s, where lunches on expenses still … [Read more…]
Faith has been on our minds a lot this month. Firstly, EldestGirl’s (non-faith) school celebrated harvest festival, with lots of wholesome, earthy songs about the food chain, and hard work of non-gender-specific farmers, and then went and spoiled my atheistic enjoyment with a chat from the vicar and a song thanking God (who presumably could … [Read more…]
One of my favourite things about EldestGirl starting school has been her interpretation of new information. Generally her attention to detail and memory is annoyingly infallible, so I have really been enjoying some of her slips-of-the-ear. Last week we had harvest songs. “Onions, peas and carrots, sweetcorn, beans and marrows and white bread to my … [Read more…]
I would like to complain in the strongest possible terms about the service I received at the hands of the NHS this weekend. On Saturday morning I woke in the early hours with what I knew, instantly was a UTI. I haven’t had one – thankfully – for the last ten years, but they’re not … [Read more…]
You know that nightmare you have where you’re back at primary school and you have to dance in front of the class, and everyone else knows the dance moves and you don’t, and the teacher is dancing too and you don’t want to but you still have to dance, dance, dance, and also you’re naked? … [Read more…]
I stopped breastfeeding a long time ago – back in February when YoungestGirl was 15 months old. She is now not far off her second birthday, so a long, long time ago. So you can imagine my surprise when we were in Aldi Waitrose last week, and she was sitting in the trolley, as usual … [Read more…]
So EldestGirl turned five years old today. Right now, this instant actually, as I have set this post to publish at exactly the time of day she was born: 9.30 a.m. Every birthday, every milestone feels like a landmark: the first solids, the first word, the first steps, the first shoes, the first day at … [Read more…]
