I’ve seen quite a few bits and bobs recently sniping about Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering expert. People have been loudly hailing the virtues of keeping their mountains of stuff, and insisting the first item they would get rid of would be Kondo’s book, the Life Changing Magic of Tidying. Well, each to their own, …
Mice have loomed large for us recently. There were bizarre, not to say farcical, scenes on our holiday in Brittany when Child One, Child Two and I ran about screaming for almost half an hour when we spotted a tiny little mouse zipping across their basement bedroom. On my own, I can cope perfectly well …
Bit of a kerfuffle at the weekend. Child 4 had dashed loudly away from the supper table to do one of those 9-year-old boy things that have to be done this very moment. I was mentally ‘tsk-ing’, though not saying anything as I am the stepmother and it is Not My Place. He then immediately came …
I’m still surprised at how sad I was to hear of David Bowie’s death, though I’ll spare you my own memories of discovering his music as a melancholy teenage misfit, as you’ve heard it all a billion times since Monday. I can’t resist pointing out, proudly, that he was from South London (you can still …
Had an unexpectedly lovely day on Saturday doing things that were slightly off the beaten track. We’d thought we’d go to the Royal Academy, but the quite ‘in’ restaurant we were planning to meet at was full. Hungry (and frankly getting crotchety with it) we ended up going to Green’s in Piccadilly. This was an …
Sponsored post I won’t bore you with my New Year’s Resolutions, most of which have bitten the dust already – well, come on, it’s the 7th of January – but I will share a strange little hope with you. No, not that strange. I’d like to learn to knit. I’ve mentioned before my horrible struggles …
Well, I am sitting so far above the moral high ground today that I can barely see it even with the aid of binoculars. I am *literally* the only person in South London who doesn’t have a hangover, for reasons I’m not even going to go into. Of course, trying to sleep on New Year’s …
On my way back from the station yesterday afternoon I saw the children from the local primary school trekking to the big assembly hall in the village for the nativity play. There was Mary, in the now-traditional floor length Frozen gown, Joseph wearing some sort of brown sack, many more than three kings with yellow …
It’s full-on headless chicken mode now as Christmas looms ever larger and my to-do lists are …. still unwritten. For someone who spends so much time writing, I am curiously averse to putting pen to paper when it comes to chores. Part of this stems from my old belief that I can easily store such …
I LOVE the fact that, nowadays, if something is preying on your mind and you can’t quite work out a solution, you can just slap it into Google – even misspelt – and the answers pour forth. I finally got a laptop quite recently after giving up the unequal struggle to keep a toehold on …