This post is in collaboration with and sponsored by Lenovo, but all thoughts are my own, unchanged and unedited. My previous life in the NHS For most of my time working in speech therapy, I didn’t have a child of my own. I was clued up on child development and had clocked up hundreds of
The mind of a four year old is a wonderfully unpredictable thing. Whereas with adults I can pretty easily predict the direction a conversation will take, with Orla I frequently land in discussions that aren’t even on the map. So it is that her new favourite thing is the ‘I hate game’. What started as a teasing
I was relaying some of the amazing stuff that’s been happening for me to my friend Hannah recently, and she said to me “you’re flying!” And it made me pause, because I feel like I’m doing anything but. I’m chasing my tail and burning the candle so universally that it’s now just a puddle of wax.
What a year! The events of the last week must surely form the icing on a 2016-cake built of bullshit, bitterness and death. I’m increasingly convinced that David Bowie may have been the glue holding our entire world together. It’s been a toughie on a personal level, too – losing two people to irreparable disagreements, after
A dried thistle flower. She hands it to me, sniffling, drying her eyes from some head-bang or dog lick, and tells me in a small voice, ‘it is a hedgehog’. And it is! It has two eyes and a nose, and my heart turns to mush at the prickly little treasure she has brought back from her
Can we talk about small things for a moment? About the impossibly sweet and nostalgic accoutrements of childhood. A little blue cardigan hanging from a big hallway hook. Miniature shoes lined in tidy little rows. Small, pudgy hands clutching smaller, balding Sylvanian rabbits, who in turn hold impossibly tiny jugs and teapots and cakes. Most days I am immune
I was raised on a diet of homemade cake & gingerbeer. Not literally, you understand, but of the literary sort – hours spent gorging on books by Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome. The Famous Five, Swallows & Amazons. A head full of island adventures in rolling British countryside, even as my body lay in quiet,
Europe, I love you. I love Venice in October when the sun is low over the cold lagoon. I love the fantasyof living over Shakespeare Co, earning my keep by selling dusty old books in the morning light of the Marais. I’ve been to the States and loved it, but Europe is something magical, and it’s
Nobody talks about how boring parenting can be. It’s this weird Western system we’ve created, where we all raise our children alone; sealed into our little boxes on quiet, orderly streets. Perhaps meeting at a playground or a toddler group sometimes, where we will start a thousand sentences, and never find out how a single