Woooo!!! – Preparing for my first Glasto aka Glastonbury Festival with my son at 54 – My son has been saying for some years, ‘Get registered Mum, and I’ll put you in our syndicate’. I was quietly vey vey chuffed, my dear beloved son, who was ‘God knows where’ most of his teen years, inviting me to such a sacred place. Course I was. But did not take…
The Principal York Hotel: 4 / 5 stars.
Monica Costa and myself headed North to sample the joys of York and review The Principal York Hotel. The Telegraph gave it 4 stars and we concord with this rating.
For convenience / comfort
Adjoining York station, it really is spitting distance, with an easy-access entrance. For all its proximity, you never hear a train or smell one. It’s a delightful 10…
There’s fart, there’s shit and now there’s a helpful new compound word to clarify the subtleties of bowel incontinence – ‘shart’ – currently called ‘leaking poo’ by the NHS. It’s a lonely, unsettling and little spoken of place you go for 24 hours after eating an indian or some highly processed food, in which you can no…
The Sleeping Beauty ballet is backat the ROH on its 99th performance, and now accessible to all in a cinema near you.
Choreography / Dancing
The ballerinas, for it is a female-heavy ballet, were outstanding in their mastery of the steps. The men had a few fire-cracker moments too, such as the superbly springy blue-bird. I was GOL gasping-out-loud at the difficulty and their…
‘Get off the ****ing road!’ I bellowed across 3 lanes of traffic in my most ferociously loud teacher voice, only ever used for breaking up playground punch-ups. I’m petite so there’s the element of surprise. I’ve stopped footie fisty-cuffs in the tube at Fulham Broadway and a roly-poly drunken brawl on Putney High Street ‘Ya not our mum.’ one brother…
Bell-ringing for beginners: or should I say Bell-swinging.
Did you know there’s a book listing every belfry (‘bell tower’) in the world with 3 or more swinging bells and 95% of them are in England? Swingers have the knobs on stalks (‘clappers’, as in, go like the ) inside that clang as the bell goes horizontal. There’s solo and twin bells, but they aren’t…
Losing weight is always a dilemma. We’d all like to shed a few, no doubt. But we don’t. The crisps, the biscuits, the chips, the icecream get bought, get eaten. You don’t seem to be able to stop yourself. It’s not an education thing, you know the facts, you know your food groups and what you should be eating and in what quantities. You just don’t have the will power…
After my first blog on how to knit, here’s part 2 instructions and a recount of my progress.
Pulling it together
Once I had a few fistfuls of granny squares, the game was to work out how many I really needed to cover my upper body. I found a crusty imperial tape measure that kept crinkling back up, and noted my measurements.
Bloody unsquare. By my reckoning…I had to make 2 pieces of…
Remember there’s no scooters, no balls, no dogs, and no climbing at Kew Gardens, all those things that would normally keep your children amused in a public park. So other that just walk about, (‘bor-ring’) what can kids at Kew Gardens do?
The Children’s Garden by Brentford Gate
The most obvious stop-off, the newly revamped playground, obsured by beech hedges and full of…
Russian Easter Festivities – what to expect!
Russia is getting an awful lot of bad press, but to be fair, Putin isn’t Russia, the army isn’t Russia, Wagner isn’t Russia. I mean, are you Rishi? And as I happened to be thrown into my French exchange’s Easter jollities in Paris, it seemed a golden opportunity to show off the beauty of one of the country’s traditions.
French and…