Today I decided to do something I’ve been meaning to do for some time but never had the courage. I’ve signed up to run a charity race. I wanted to raise funds like so many millions of others, to help find a cure for “the Big C” – that’s cancer in case you’re wondering. The…
Sing for Pleasure
Are choirs the new “rock and roll?” Apparently so, due largely to the popularity of Gareth Malone’s reality-TV programmes and his hugely successful hits with the Military Wives’ Choir. Suddenly, choral conductors are the sexy, new darlings of the media, on the covers of magazines and newspapers, lauded by the great and the good. Four-part…
The hand that rocks the cradle also rocks the world
This was the best quote of the day from Miriam González Durántez, a truly impressive, keynote speaker at the MumsnetBlogFest I attended recently in London. It might seem a bit of a presumptuous cliche but if you follow the thought through and realise that humans are shaped from infancy and that those infants might become the decision-makers of the…
Play time or no time?
A Mum at the school gate asked me when my five-year-old son would be free for a “play date.” Neither of us had a free slot until Christmas Eve. I headed off thinking “how and when did play time become so complicated?” When did a run-around in the fresh air after school or playing Lego with a…
Lady Sybil
Watching an episode of “Downton Abbey” in which Lady Sybil dies from complications following childbirth, made me think how far we have come in all matters relating to women having babies. I was appalled at how the life and death decisions in Lady Sybil’s case were made by men (her father and her father’s chosen…