Today, at 4.44pm, I became the mum of an adult.
It is such a cliché but I can’t believe how quickly the last eighteen years have passed. It only seems like yesterday since Alice’s tiny six pounds and one ounce emerged and I delivered my Oscars speech to the assembled…
(The Perspective of Later Years)
On Wednesday, my friend came round for a cup of tea and a tour of my garden (I know how to give someone a good day out!). I collected her and dropped her home. She has green fingers. She loved seeing the new landscaping, the…
You Can’t Start a Fire Without a Spark
For me, there are four steps in the writing process - finding the ideas, refining the ideas, doing the crafting and finishing. Let me explain some more…
1. Finding the Ideas
Let’s get this clear first, most writers don’t struggle for ideas…
Lucy doesn’t do hugs. She recoils at affection. Cosy chats on the sofa, definitely not. We’ve never been shopping together. I don’t think she’s ever held my hand. She doesn’t confide in me nor ask for my advice. Our relationship for sixteen years has been purely functional - I put…
In October 2019, I came down with a virus. The coughing and breathlessness left me struggling to speak during the day and panicking at night. I lost my sense of taste and smell for weeks. Walking any distance was exhausting and when I gained enough energy to return to a…
We have been getting extensive landscaping work done to the garden. It has been challenging. There are no afternoon naps on the sofa as someone is always looking in the window. I have resorted to wearing AirPods permanently to drown out the noise of men in the toilet. But the…
Bob Seger’s ‘Roll me Away’ is one of my favourite songs. Those four minutes of rock greatness always power me up the incline home at the end of a run¹.“I was tired of my own voice,” Bob sings, at the start of the song.
In August 2019, before the pandemic…
Recently, I joined a new church. It’s been hard. I have left the church my dad took me to as a young child, the one my Granny faithfully attended in addition to a random collection of mission halls. My earliest memory is sitting in the gallery looking down at her…
On Friday evening, my husband and I fell out .. a lot. After some harsh words, at 8.30pm, my middle-class protest began. I abandoned my aubergine parmigiana, poured a glass of rosé and went to bed to read Hamnet. “Mummy’s gone mad!!!!!!” was posted on the family group chat. It’s…
It was the first proper ‘back to school’ day in our house, today. My eldest daughter drove herself to school (what a milestone), the second eldest left without saying goodbye and number three (after a difficult extraction of two teeth) was teaching me even more about bravery as she psyched…
