F is for Fifteen

Married fifteen years on 1 October 2009 Tomorrow we celebrate 15 years of marriage and to celebrate, I’m breaking with the memoir theme to give you Fifteen Things I Love About My Husband. He: 1. Makes me laugh, and finds me funny. 2. Buys cleaning products, and uses them. 3. Is co-dependent in the book [...]

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E is for Ellie

My beloved grandmother. Someone with a huge heart in a tiny body. Although she died in 1997, I feel a spiritual connection with her that is so strong, I can barely separate myself from it in order to write about her. We have no distance. I have to pull at the ties that bind us [...]

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I Vote for Hilary

I started to write a post about why Hilary Mantel absolutely has to win the Booker Prize because her novel Wolf Hall is the best thing I’ve read all year, and she deserves it and I once used to live in the same block as her but never met her only her husband in the [...]

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Scenes from a Diary

I came across my diary from July 1999, when I was expecting my first child. Never mind gestating a baby, I think I was a blogger waiting to be born: “Waiting in the Tesco’s car park for Thomas to do the groceries. I went in with him, but after a couple of minutes of retching, [...]

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D is for David Cooper

There are many people whose names begin with “D” whom I know far better than I know David Cooper, but I have decided to leave the living alone. David Cooper is a mystery man. He is unknown. I apparently met him once at the age of three and have no recall of that encounter, apart [...]

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The Single Mother’s Weekend

Saturday, dawn: Husband and father-in-law depart for a weekend of bonding and looking at history in Berlin. Saturday, 9am: Arise, having read book and enjoyed coffee in bed while the children watch some morning TV and get themselves breakfast (I warmly recommend the over-fours). Saturday, 10am: Raining, so we proceed to the usually hideously over-crowded [...]

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C is for Cowries

Cowries were the shells. We collected fans, mussels, spirals, sea-smoothed pebbles, chips of oyster, cuttlefish, lambs, interestingly formed driftwood, but we would exchange a whole day’s booty for just one cowrie. It had to be perfect – a chipped cowrie, or worse, a half, was like the unfulfilled promise of ice-cream; disappointing. We loved their [...]

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