The Gallery — Where I Live

.   S’funny isn’t it when you remember just a single snippet of a conversation from years ago and it really sticks in your head.    It was Simon Calder giving a talk on travel writing at a blog conference when asked how a blogger could get into being a travel blogger.  His reply was so blindingly simple, yet something that nobody had really thought about Write about your own

Read More

Getting joy from the post

Jonnie said something yesterday that stopped me in my tracks I don’t think I have ever had a letter through the post Other than bank statements or his contact lenses or junk mail, it struck me that he was right.   Teenagers probably haven’t even had a letter through the post.  Never had that excitement of a pretty envelope with their name on, the address hand written.   A letter

Read More

My Week — 5th July

. And hasn’t it been a scorcher this week?  Hottest day since records began on Wednesday and it seems the country grinds to a halt and you can’t open a newspaper without a scantily clad woman lying in a park at lunchtime staring back at you.  But what of our week? Well Ellie was away in Spain with her friend Em and looks to have a great time.  The first

Read More

Virgin Atlantic and their £25 seat charge

. Virgin Atlantic, I like you.  I really do.  In fact I even wrote a blog post about you praising your customer service when a flight with you was cancelled a few years ago.  I didn’t “kick off” despite losing a day of our holiday.  Paying for a day of hire car we didn’t need.   Yes, we could have claimed on our insurance but we decided that in the

Read More

#WaffleFriday — Tower

Did I want to be involved with #WaffleFriday they said.   The theme is a tower they said.   Thoughts went to Pisa and the fact that any tower of waffles I build has a definite lean to it.   I have done a tower before of course, with the beauty above. So I thought I might stick to the theme and do something Wimbledon related.   I got all

Read More

Top things to do on the beach

Sorry for all the posts about holidays this week, but I am in full blown holiday mode now that Ellie has finished school, and is indeed already in Spain for a week.  On a cheeky girls week with one of her best friends at school.  Seriously who knew that girls weeks in Spain would start at 16?! She is back just long enough for bikinis to dry out and then

Read More

How to cheat at smoothies and get away with it

. Okay it might not quite be cheating but smoothies to me have always been a faff.   You have to buy all the fruit and prepare it and then measure it all out, blitz it in your smoothie maker, and generally flap around for ages, to get one glass of fruit.      Or you get organised and buy the fruit and then forget to use it, or something

Read More

My Week — 28th June

. It dawned on me this week that there often lots of things that happen during the week, or that I read, or think about, that I would like to document.  Though they are not big enough for their own post.   I also wanted to document for my own sake my weeks in a sort of diary format because I am slowly losing the ability to remember things that

Read More

Rawfest 2015

There is a new kid on the festival block that I am hugely excited about.    Well, it is new to me.    It is very different from a lot of the other festivals, and ticks alot of boxes for me.   In fact it ticks every box that I love, and that I hate about most other festivals (with the exception of Camp Bestival of course). RAW FEST is

Read More

The best things in life are free

. I found myself humming that lyric yesterday as Money came on the radio.   The sentiment of the song is the exact opposite: that whilst that maybe true it doesn’t pay the bills.   But this morning as I ironed my son’s T-shirt it got me thinking that actually the best things in life are free, and it isn’t all about money (which is a good job as I

Read More

Coconut Oil My new BFF

. I am a late starter when it comes to coconut oil.  People seem to have been talking about for years.  Me, I never really believed the hype.  Until I ran out of butter and remembered something about being able to use coconut oil, which bizarrely I did have.   I think I had read something about it and then bought some but never got around to using it.  

Read More

Wandering around Rome

. I was invited to join a bunch of journalists (I know, me, posing as a journalist) recently on a trip to Rome to learn about tyres and tyre safety with Bridgestone (see other post for the tyre stuff – you can thank me later). After the two days of serious stuff was over, we headed into Rome for a lovely dinner in the area “across the Tiber” Trastevere (Tevere

Read More