Nearly joking One of today’s jobs A woman’s work is never done. Barefoot, pregnant and chained to the kitchen sink. Maybe that’s a joke, a cliche that’s old hat, but not entirely… Survey after survey show that women do the lion’s share of domestic chores regardless of how much paid work they do. They […]
More than you’d expect from a day out in Balloch
This post is all about taking a closer look at the ordinary things. What started off as a perfectly nice but fairly unexciting Sunday outing to Balloch, turned out to be unforgettable. And in a good way. Things I learned from a #kidsgofree day out: Human mothers don’t have it too bad. There’s a kind […]
Middle age in evidence again this week
There was a moment of anxiety last week when someone started talking about Wattpad – an online community for readers and writing. A hot new young adult writer was discovered there, there being somewhere I didn’t even know existed. A bit like finding out all the best holidays happened in Spanbados or Costaland or somewhere. […]
Blethering from the Palace of Bundance
Usual festive nonsense It was shaping up to be a run-of-the-mill roundup from the Palace of Bundance, possibly interspersed with promises to remove the proverbial from the unmentionable for the next 12 months and generally buck up and make the best of it. I might even have found something meaningful to say about wonky Christmas […]
The parenting milestones no one tells you about
It’s possible that before you conceive your first child, milestones are just those old things beside the road or on the set of a panto. Somewhere that Mr Whittington does his turning. You know? But that doesn’t last long. Soon everything is measured out and ticked off – compared to the average, or to her […]