The husband working in the industry he does means that Christmas Eve is one of the busiest days/evenings of the year for him and so he always works a super-long day – starting in the morning, spending most of the day on his feet and not getting home until the early hours of Christmas Day. It means it’s…
I’m not a fan of Winter – I much prefer the promise of Spring, the warmth of Summer and the colours of Autumn. If I had my way I’d move us all to the Southern Hemisphere for three months and then return once the greyness has lifted. However, this not really being practical (though I’m sure…
Earlier on this week, Ella, my eldest daughter, turned ten years old. TEN! I can’t believe I’ve been a Mum for a decade. As clichéd as it probably sounds, it really does feel like only yesterday that I gazed down in awe at the tiny ET look-a-like blinking up at me just moments after making…
There is absolutely no reason for this post other than because I absolutely love all of these photos I captured of the girls and I want to document them somewhere. I took these images last Sunday on a lovely, chilly, brisk morning walk up to the rope swings we discovered a couple of months ago…
“I can feel it all starting to speed up. The workload. School stuff. Thoughts and feelings. Birthdays and Christmas. The approach to the end of the year always feels incredibly frantic, no matter how much I try and plan and organise and control. I wish I could freeze time, like this frozen leaf, just for…
Towards the end of my epic year spent travelling in Australia in 2013, the guy I had been travelling with and I went our separate ways. A couple moved into the shared dorm-room in Sydney that we’d been living in at the time. Their names were Tamarin and Pete, and they were just at the beginning of their travelling adventure. We did…
The closer we get to November, the colder and darker the mornings are becoming. I’m not sure why that surprises me – after all, it happens every year. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been enjoying the unexpected late October sunshine so much that a part of me simply hoped it would continue on right the…
“We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated out of our souls. Churched out. Spanked out. Washed out and…
As a child, I wasn’t really all that adventurous. I preferred reading books, drawing and writing stories to going off into the wilderness exploring. My Mum and Stepdad and I would go out for walks on a Sunday (the deer park on Stanmore Common was my favourite), or head to a garden centre, but that…
A couple of weeks ago my best friend and her husband came to stay with us for the weekend. It had been over a year since we last saw them and we’d been trying to arrange it for months and months and months. They live three hours away in Southampton, she is very close to completing her PhD and her husband…