On another day in another place.

The gray sky hangs low, pressing you into the ground, opening out the horizon and forcing everything else to admit its insignificance.
Yet on this unpreposing canvas the reds and yellows of the trees glow. Green grass seems brighter. Buildings are whiter, and every little scrap of litter on the ground shines out in lurid [...]

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On weaning.

In truth you are actually pretty smug about how the Star’s weaning is going.
The boy will eat… well, it’s probably easier to say what he won’t eat:
Papaya.
That’s it.
Unsurprising, though, as in your – and apparently the Star’s – opinion it smells like sick.
On the other hand, he does like broccoli, liver, semolina and the small beads from [...]

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On games to play with babies.

There you are, innocently dandling the Star on your knee as he manipulates his coloured curly rings into his mouth.
Cautiously, you grope for your (lukewarm) tea and make as if to drink.
Instantly, the Star’s eyes light up. His mouth opens wide. He flings his plastic plaything across the room, and shoots his hands out in an attempt to snatch [...]

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On discoveries.

You are not in the least Scottish.
This has always been a source of faint irritation because you are able to conjure up in almost equal amounts a Welsh background, an Irish one, a Northern English past, a Southern English birthplace and a strong connection to the Channel Islands out of France. So to miss out on being [...]

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On being lost in translation.

Having discovered that you had slightly misinterpreted the setting of the book by a Spanish author – with large chunks of it set in Spain simply because Spain is the centre of the universe, as opposed to somewhere suitably Continentally decedent for odd Art to take place – it got you thinking about the other series [...]

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On boiling yourself.

 Last weekend you bought a samovar. There it is, sitting on top of the fridge, looking shiny and brassily cheerful.
Actually, that one’s not yours. Yours isn’t quite that shiny. You found this picture here, along with a lot of other samovars. Nice, aren’t they?
Anyway, the total number of samovars you own is now six, if you include the one [...]

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On women’s work.

Yesterday you indulged your cultural heritage as a middle class British woman from the Home Counties by standing in a drafty village hall surrounded by thatched cottages, 17th Centrury pubs and rolling farmland, serving polystyrene cup after polystyrene cup of stewed tea for seven and a half hours.
Even better was the fact that the tea pot was [...]

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On the creative urge.

You have just finished a marathon cooking session.
So far today you have made a banana and walnut cake with added sultanas so B would eat it. You burnt it, but it’s quite nice now you’ve cut the edges off. Still, it is rather superfluous to need since you have 1001 chocolates in the house if you [...]

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On auld lang syne.

You used to be awful at New Year’s. You’d like to be sniffy and say it was because you aren’t very good at having fun to order, but actually it was probably more because you had a tendancy to be bad at ordering the fun and would rather wait and see if it would turn up of [...]

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On what they hate about us.

Once upon a time you asked a Russian if he’d enjoyed his recent business trip to Great Britain.
“Yes,” he said, “London was great. But,” he added, a look of slightly shocked disgust sliding over his face, “the British really drink far too much.”
This isn’t an isolated opinion either but pretty much the the first comment on the [...]

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