Come on in
Welcome to a place that us like minded 40-something birds can hang out to discuss the stuff that interests us and embrace the high (and lows!) of getting on a bit.
Remembrance Day and why it must always matter.
Remembrance Sunday, Armistice Day, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, whatever you choose to call it, is a day that is invariably gloomy of weather, chilly of wind and comes in the dreary winter sized gap between Autumn and Christmas, but it is also a day that has always…
Blending not balancing
“I’ll keep in touch whilst I’m off,” I said. “When they’re in school I’ll be back full time.” I said. And now, as I sit at the kitchen table with the washing machine whirring in the background, I eat my words. 3pm will come quickly today and somehow, I still can’t see how to…
Poster Girl #15 – Matilda Wormwood
“Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. . .” In honour of Roald Dahl Day (13 Sept) our Poster Girl this month is a fictional female but nonetheless as equally as feisty and fabulous as our previous winners. Reader, I give you…
It’s not called God’s Own Country for nowt
In honour of Yorkshire Day, ten of my favourite things about being from God’s Own Country: It doesn’t matter how old I am/will become, when I am on home turf, I will always be considered a ‘lass’. Thanks to a load (or a lerd) of marauding Vikings I am the proud owner (erner) of…
Life in miniature
Ever since I got a doll’s house aged 6 and set about collecting teeny tiny furniture and even teenier cutlery to place upon it for the imaginary tiny folk who would never inhabit it, I have been fascinated by life in miniature. Coming from a family of littlies, at only 5 ft 2,…
Getting by with a little help from my friends
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom” Marcel Proust I am writing this with a glass of wine next to the laptop and acoustic love songs playing on Spotify so I fear I may veer into slurry indulgent ‘I really bloody…
New Motherhood: the lies we tell each other, the world and ourselves
In Autumn of the year 2001 I found myself, to my surprise (but to no one else’s) in the blackened brick office of a community psychiatric nurse sobbing uncontrollably as I recounted details of the brutal labour nine months earlier that had heralded the arrival of my now darling 18 year old daughter. …
40-Something Fear
The last time I felt anxious was just this morning. The catalyst for this concern? A phone call. I had to make a call to a really nice guy (whom I know quite well) about some potential freelance work (at a place I have worked several times before). And yet, because I wasn’t sure how…
Poster Girls #9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14…Six Very Able Seawomen
What is it about women in boats? Ever since Claire Francis captured my imagination as a freckled faced flare wearing 6 year old in the ‘70s, tales of women all at sea have always brought out my inner Titty Walker. Ellen MaCarthur and Tracy Edwards followed Francis in the decades to come, but none…
‘Doing nothing often leads to the very best kind of something’ Winnie the Pooh.
Do you ever think that you never knew a thing was an actual thing, until it becomes a thing to you? That’s how I feel about my torn calf, which in the last 72 hours has become a really big, annoying thing. A trip to my beloved Saturday morning bootcamp came to a fairly…