The inescapable torment I do battle with every time I say goodbye, and today: A hug for my brother, a hug and a kiss for my husband and we said goodbye at the airport. The air around them hummed with their excitement (and nerves, I think—the pressure!) to join friends for a week of golf [...]

Jasmine, from a company called First Energy who said she wanted to book a free 20 minute appointment with me to talk about a government initiative about solar energy (I think) called on around 2 January. I was busy with kids but we are interested in solar energy so I asked that she call back [...]

I have a notebook and pen in the side pocket of my car. I often think of glamorous things like “oh yeah, we need more bin bags!” in the middle of the school run and need to write it down. Sometimes I think of a new twist for a character I’m developing, or a new [...]

It occurred to me this summer that I only have four more years left with my daughter at home. I watched the pages of calendars flip ‘flt-t-t-t-t-t’ past in a cartoon blur of motion as I saw my time with her escape me. In  a subconscious effort to slow that page-flipping calendar I didn’t do [...]

It started with the ticket lottery. All interested people in Britain got to put their name in a hat and see if they were drawn. Immediately people started grumbling. It was highly irregular. What happened to just buying tickets? The system would crash, we were told. Then the system did crash. More grumblings. Oh and [...]

When my daughter was tiny and she and I lived in a tiny house in town she started coming into my bedroom at about 4 am some mornings. I cuddled her in under the duvet with me and snuggled into her warm hair and told her we could go back to sleep for some sweet [...]

In just two months time we’re having a wedding! No, not mine, silly, my (step)daughter. So this means I need an outfit, which means traipsing through shops getting static hair from all that taking off/putting on clothes and becoming more and more despondant. What I am more interested in are the decorations. Regular readers here [...]

(My week of Home on The American Resident shall extend to a week-and-a-bit this time as there are a couple more posts to go before the competition and I have been up to my eyeballs in Busy this week…) If the amount of time one spends on dreaming/planning a new kitchen correlates directly with how [...]