When I showed my girls my latest car number plate photos, they rolled their eyes for about ten minutes and then told me I was very purile. Well, it’s probably true, but as I pointed out, it does keep me occupied on the school run, which is much longer since we moved last year. Anyway, …
Isn’t Ian McEwan just fab? At the Guardian open weekend, he was telling everyone that his son was set his prize-winning novel, Enduring Love, for GCSE. McEwan modestly said that he’d offered his boy a few pointers, but the poor lad had not done brilliantly at all – apparently the teacher was convinced that the …
Unexpected acts of kindness are so lovely, aren’t they? Yesterday, via email, I received a recipe for dairy-free brownies from a friend who had just heard about Child 2’s lactose intolerance. I admit that I used to be one of those harsh souls who believe a lot of diet troubles are fads. ‘We never had all these …
All this tax business (it’s the budget here today and we’re all just waiting to see how much richer the Chancellor, George Osborne, is going to make the rich) is making me have a Political Moment. Now, once upon a time, I was quite a political person and it was more an occasion for capital …
Memory is an odd thing. I was thinking, yesterday, of Mother’s Day last year, which was very difficult for various boring, sad reasons, and a huge contrast with this year, a happy occasion marred only by the odd spat with a teenager-who-shall-remain-nameless. I could remember last year really well, and I remember other years with …
Child Two has the most Lady Bracknellesque expression of outrage on her gorgeous little teenage face. ‘I can’t believe you can get a Sylvanian chimp family now. In my day, the brown rabbit family was exotic!’ she sniffs. I love the fact that she’s peeved that the Sylvanians have moved on, even while she’s been …
There’s a mayoral campaign going on in London, and one of the key issues will be housing. When I left university and moved back to London, I was able to get flats reasonably cheaply, sharing with friends – all right, one place was sublet from the council in a frankly dodgy way, and another was …
Worrying news this morning that 20 per cent of meat is going to kill you. Or that if you eat red meat more than three times a week your legs will explode. Or that hotdogs are the devil’s work (didn’t we know that one already?) I have since got the results back from my own …
I’m so pleased to see Scott and Bailey are back tonight for a second series. For those not in the know, S and B are, sort of, Manchester’s answer to Cagney and Lacey. I don’t remember an awful lot about the original Cagney and Lacey – I just remember being surprised and pleased that they …
My clever friends at Tesco have found a way to help all of us struggling with the price of even basic food these days. I read an article in the Observer over the weekend, for example, saying the price of eggs is going to go up by 70 per cent over the next few weeks. …