This week we’ve been thinking about Christmas, and planning a trip to Ireland to see my sister and her family, so it got us thinking back to our Ireland road trip. I asked my fiancé to tell you a bit more about what he thought about our Bailey of Bristol summer motorhome extravaganza.
Holiday destinations really matter to me. I like heat, a swimming pool, the sea, not many people and somewhere quiet. I’d never been in a motorhome before this summer. Come to think of it, I’d never been in a caravan either. When I left school, I went camping in Cornwall with some friends, and we met an American couple who had just retired. They’d shipped a Winnebago from New York to Southampton and were in the process of driving through Europe. Their motorhome was amazing. The owner was busy putting up a picket fence as his wife put away their motorbike in the Winnebago’s garage. Yes. The garage.
From that moment on, I’ve rather fancied the idea of driving a massive home on wheels and the freedom it gives you. I had to wait a further 18 years before I finally got the chance to drive a motorhome, but the excitement hadn’t gone. Despite it being the middle of summer, there was an air of Chris Rea’s ‘Driving Home For Christmas’ as I drove our Bailey of Bristol motorhome down the M4 into Wales at the start of our trip.
We didn’t really let Belle drive the Bailey of Bristol. Not on the motorway at least.
That story came about because of a chat I’d had with my fiancé on our radio show, and one of the other stories we talked about at the same time was about the apparent happiness curve we all experience through our lives. This story goes that happiness peaks in our mid-twenties, when we’re free of too much responsibility, full of the joys of youth etc, and then rapidly declines as the stress of work and family life kicks in.
Makes sense so far, especially, as we learnt yesterday, for those people earning over £37,000.
For anyone who is in their 30s, wondering when the curve is going to bottom out and start picking up again, I have bad news. Apparently life is basically a bit shit until retirement. At around 65 you’ll peak again, once you’ve given up work and the kids have finally left home.
Sorry about that.
It got us chatting though about the importance of appreciating those little moments of happiness. You could look at the chart, see a deep and enduring valley of misery spanning 40 years, and just go to bed for a cry, but the truth is that life isn’t really like that. It’s not a smooth curve for a start. It’s like the stock market – investments may grow over time, but along the way you have ups and downs, moments where you see yourself retiring at 40 to the Caribbean and others where you want to chuck it all in and have to hold your nerve.
Happiness comes and goes too.
True fact.
Sometimes that’s reassuring. No matter how bad you feel right now, it’s not going to last. Other times, when everything is going well, it can feel scarier, but that’s why you have to concentrate on the ‘happy right now’ moments.
“How often though,” asked my fiancé, as we chatted on air, “do we take the time to actually stop and think about how happy we are right now?”
“Ummm,” I said, wondering if it was a trick question, “a few times a days?”
He looked at me like I was a loon.
“Don’t you?” I said.
“No,” he replied, “hardly ever.”
I had a moment then when I felt like lots of jigsaw pieces were falling into place all at once. All of the things I read about positivity, fear, life, death and human nature all suddenly felt worthwhile. All the ridiculously American positive thinking podcasts I’ve ever listened to – I suddenly realised how valuable they had been. Even if at the time I had wondered what the point of it all was, here was my reassurance. Without knowing it, I have taught myself to think about things in a slightly different way.
Because actually I do take time, every day, to be grateful for something. I do stop and take in my surroundings, feel physical sensations, appreciate delicious smells and tastes, feel the sun on my face. I do do these things.
So then I had to take a moment to appreciate the fact that I take moments to appreciate things, and that sent me into a little bit of a spin, but you get the point. We have to stop and be glad. No matter where on the curve we’re told we are, there is always something to be happy about, even if it is only for a minute.
How much money would you like to earn? More importantly, at what point would an increase in salary and responsibility no longer be worth it?
I asked my fiancé this question on the back of a news story we were talking about on our community radio show on Friday. (Yes, it is everything you imagine – a hut in a playground, the noise of coffee cups in the background – it’s wonderful.)
“I’m not sure,” he said, “about £120,000?”
“£120,000??” I said. “You can tell you’ve come from London. Who earns £120,000??”
“Lots of people!” he said.
“Well, no one I know.”
The actual tipping point, according to research randomly conducted by Anchor Cheddar, (cheese? why?!), is just £37,000. 91% of the 2,000 people surveyed believe that there’s a point at which the extra salary simply isn’t worth the extra stress and the impact this has on your life. This point averaged out at £37,396. View Post
I came across an image this week which made me think “Yes! This is Belle! This is my life summed up in a postcard!”
This was it:
Does this sound familiar?
I had thought that by the age of 13, Belle would have grown out of her fussy eating. I imagined a gradual acceptance of onions in cooking, a growing fondness for courgettes, and friendly banter around the dining table where we looked back and laughed at her fussier days.
“How silly of me,” she would say, chomping her way through a kale salad, “to have been so fussy for all those years!”
Alas, that day has yet to come. Still, as a teenager, her list of acceptable vegetables is limited pretty much to:
Sweetcorn
Carrots
Spinach (raw, not cooked)
It’s not cool is it? The tricky bit for me lies in how far to push it. I appreciate that 50 years ago she would have just been made to sit at the table until she had finished, but we don’t live 50 years ago do we? We live in an era where ‘food issues’ are constantly on the horizon, especially with girls, and I worry that forcing her to eat something she doesn’t like will mean I’m responsible, later in life, for her crippling obesity/bulimia/inability to visit a supermarket without having a panic attack. (Delete as appropriate.)
Perhaps I just think about it too much.
I’ve decided though that the time has come to be a little more proactive about things. Being busy is no excuse for not making changes to our diet. I need to man up and remind Belle who’s boss. (I hope she doesn’t read this bit and shout at me.) The Co-op agreed to help me out with some ideas for recipes, snacks and easy switches, and so our 21 day food challenge begins.
If your family diet could do with a kick up the bum, or that daily moan of ‘what’s for dinner?’ sends shivers down your spine, why not join me?
I’ve always been a fan of The Co-op. We’ve often had one just around the corner from us, which is very handy for me at 5pm when I still haven’t thought about what to have for tea, and I like their ethics, food wise. In theory it’s not hard to make changes; a handful of grapes here, a wedge of cucumber there – it shouldn’t take much to make a difference. The Co-op also have lots of recipe ideas, and plenty of Pinspiration.
To kick start proceedings, I suggest keeping a diary of what your family eats for a few days. This was a horrible reality check for me, as I like to think I eat reasonably well. Oh how wrong I was. It’s shocking how easy it is to go a whole day and not eat any fruit…
This is a day from Belle’s diary, so you can see what I mean. (Please don’t report me to anyone):
Breakfast – a bowl of chocolate cereal, toast with butter, pineapple juice.
Packed lunch – cheese and ham sandwich, crisps, Babybel, yoghurt, satsuma, water. (I often find the fruit and three quarters of a bottle of water at the bottom of her school bag.)
After school snack – chocolate chip brioche.
Dinner – pasta (not wholemeal), sweetcorn, tinned tuna and pesto. Three chocolate truffles.
Now overall, it doesn’t feel hideous, fairly typical I would imagine, but let’s break it down…
I use the word chocolate three times. Not cool. Even counting the juice, she’s barely scraping two portions of fruit and vegetables on this day.
*takes a minute to reflect on parenting skills*
I then thought it might be a good idea, rather than just spying on what she ate, to ask Belle how she felt about her diet:
Over the next three weeks then we’ll be making an effort to eat better. This might be something as simple as switching from white to brown bread, or it might mean thinking more broadly about how we can encourage Belle to eat a wider variety of fruit and vegetables.
We’d love for you to join us, and share your tips and troubles as you progress, and to get you in the mood, we’re holding a Twitter chat this Tuesday at 1pm. Please RT the invitation and come along with your questions. Experts from The Co-operative will be on hand and I’ll be bringing 20 years of parenting wisdom/sympathy to the virtual table.
In the meantime, please do leave a comment and tell me about the food issues in your family!
When I was a teenager, I remember waking up every morning and feeling starving. By 7.15am I would be in the kitchen already, with a bowl piled high with cereal, pasta or noodles. It was a proper carb craving – a need to fill my tummy with as much stodge as possible.
I reflect fondly, and attribute it to a growth spurt, but I suspect I was just a greedy guts. (I was a fairly podgy pre-teen.)
Nowadays though, it’s a different story. When I wake up, the idea of food quite turns my stomach. It makes me feel like one of those old people who fusses about, refusing to eat anything other than a couple of ginger biscuits mid-morning but for at least an hour, usually two, I just don’t fancy eating at all. Fine, you might think, don’t eat, but this is actually quite inconvenient.
Think about it – where are you two hours after you get up if you’re a busy, professional working girl type like me? Chances are you’re not handily placed next to your fridge any more. Normally at the point at which I get hungry, I’m at my desk, in the car, in a meeting or on a train, none of which are the optimal locations for making toast.
What normally happens then is that I spend unnecessary money on unsuitable snacks, or, when I’m feeling poor, I eat handfuls of dry cereal from the box I keep under my desk. That doesn’t do much for my self-esteem to be honest. It makes me feel like a bit of a tramp.
But wait! What’s that breakfasty apparition on the horizon? It’s Up & Go, Australia’s number one breakfast, and it’s landed in the UK!
I tried to make my carton of Up & Go a little super hero cape but fear it looks more like a bad nativity costume.
Up & Go is breakfast on the go, designed to save you time in the mornings without compromising on nutrition. Every carton contains as much fibre, protein and calcium as your average bowl of cereal and milk, so it’s basically a bowl of cereal in a box. Brilliant for me, as I once did actually try to take a bowl of cereal with milk on a train, in a tub, and it wasn’t very nice/easy to eat.
It’s ideal for busy parents on school mornings, or for when you need to grab something in a hurry, but for me it’s all about the portability. Being able to pop a carton in my bag, knowing I can drink it later in the morning when I get hungry, is fantastic. Not only does it mean I have a more nutritionally balanced breakfast, but it means I can drink it when I want, where I want, which is exactly what I’ve been doing this week.
The other boon of course is that it’s perfect to give to Belle when I’ve not quite got round to buying things for breakfast (*cough*) or we’re in a little bit of a rush. Which is often.
I don’t know why she pulls a face when I suggest, for the fifth morning in a row, when she complains yet again about the lack of breakfast options, that she whip up a bowl of porridge, but pull a face she does.
Not any more.
There’s something about the idea of it being in a carton that definitely appeals to her too. It’s like I’ve suggested she have a milkshake for breakfast. Little does she know that it actually has nutritional value.
We’ve both really enjoyed our Up & Go breakfasts; I’ve found that a cheeky carton at around 10am is ideal to tide me over until lunchtime and Belle no longer scowls at me like I’m scum of the earth everyday at 8am.
As you can see from their ad, they don’t take themselves too seriously either, and I really like the branding:
Up & Go comes in six delicious flavours; chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, banana & honey, mixed berry and coffee. Predictably the chocolate and the coffee are my favourite, but they are all very tasty. It’s available in nearly all of the major supermarkets – look for it in the cereal aisle.
As I’m sure you all now know, I move house a lot. In fact, even since starting this blog I have probably moved house more times than the average person does in a lifetime. (I’m not actually sure if that’s true or what that figure is. Feel free to look it up and probably correct me.) Moving house as often as I have, I’ve becoming pretty good at the whole procedure.
*looks proud*.
I can even plumb in my own washing machine, which probably sounds more impressive than it actually is.
Don’t think I’m some kind of plumbing genius though. A lot of the time I do mess things up and make really silly mistakes, like accidentally scraping the sealant away from my plug hole thinking it was grime. (Yes, really.) My general haphazardness means I do have to get a real plumber out once in a while. Living in a lot of houses, I’ve discovered that sometimes plumbers can be hit and miss if you don’t do your research properly. Please learn from my mistakes and follow my top tips on how to find a great plumber.
Don’t give them more work than necessary View Post
Written by my charming fiancé, who accompanied me this month to Beach Cove Retreat.
I love September.
It’s a mixture of being thankful for not having to go back to school, the weather tending to be lovely and the fact that Christmas is just around the corner. Devon and Cornwall are particularly nice at this time of the year. The beaches and roads that were clogged with families and holidaymakers a couple of weeks beforehand are now quiet, but the weather is still nice enough for you to be able to dip your toes into the Atlantic and lick an ice cream on the beach without catching hypothermia.
Having done lots of lovely family things over the preceding couple of months, Jo and I had been looking forward to going to Ilfracombe on our own ever since the schools went back. The timing was perfect – work was suitably stressful for us both and our departure on Friday was hastily arranged. We didn’t so much pack, as throw whatever clothes were clean into a bag. In fact, we weren’t going to Ilfracombe but to Beach Cove Coastal Retreat at Hele Bay, which is just up the coast. It sounded perfect for a couple with raised blood pressure and the need to unwind. View Post
Do you have a favourite family recipe? We have a few. ‘Fridge pasta’ is one of them, which consists of pasta, plus whatever we can find in the fridge. ‘Crap from the freezer’ is another favourite. I think you can guess what that involves, suffice to say a lot of things tend to be covered in breadcrumbs. This easy spaghetti bake is another one.
When Bee came home a few months ago for her 20th birthday, she had a request. “Can we have the thing with the noodles?” she asked. I knew what she meant. It’s a dish I made up when she was small and we were poor, that basically involves cooking up some noodles, mixing them with a tin of condensed tomato soup, covering the lot with cheese, and baking in the oven.
It sounds like it might be a bit gross, but it’s actually amazing. The noodles sort of swell up and form this wonderful consistency, and you can pretty much slice the thing that comes out of the oven, like a pie. Once you start eating it, it’s hard to stop. I mean like REALLY hard. It’s one of those dishes that you find yourself making an excuse to go back into the kitchen for, just to get a bit on a fork while no one is looking.
The beauty of the dish though is that you can customise it according to your own tastes and what you have in the house. Sometimes, if I’m feeling adventurous, I’ll add some fried onion, or maybe some sweetcorn. The world is your oyster. Today I thought I’d fancy it up a bit and turn it into an easy spaghetti bake using actual fresh ingredients rather than just a can of old soup.
This review of the Leitz Complete Professional Bluetooth Stereo Speaker has been written by my fiancé, because he knows all about things musical. (And I was really busy and he is very kind.)
A few years ago, I was sat on a train going into London. The train was busy with commuters, but rather peaceful. All of a sudden, the silence was broken but a loud distorted racket coming from behind me, that I think was rap. Over the course of half a song, I listened to the narrative of an angry sounding American who, between expletives, was suggesting he’d like to do some things to a lady of the night, which to my uneducated ear sounded neither pleasurable or physically possible.
Everyone was rather British about the situation. Commuters glanced at each other to show their general disgust, and there was an atmosphere of tutting and shaking heads.
I stood up.
“Excuse me, please could you turn that off?”
Having not seen who the music belonged to, I was shocked to see an immaculately dressed woman in her early thirties, holding a smartphone to her head. Perhaps she was deaf.
“No” she replied, “but I’ll turn it down a bit”.
I was shocked and sat down. Other passengers used body language and facial expressions to confirm that I had just made an idiot of myself. Obliviously the noise was antisocial, but I can’t understand why anyone would listen to music that’s distorting.
The way we consume music is changing, and changing fast. Think back to when you first bought music. It was probably on CD, cassette, or even an LP. When I forked out good money for my first single – The Firm’s classic, “Star Trekkin’” as you ask – I had to put it on a record player, delicately place the stylus on the record, and then put it away again for choosing something else to listen to. And records were delicate too – there was what can almost be described as a ceremony in putting music on. The juxtaposition to listening to music now is marked. You type in the name of a song into Google, listen to it for the 30 seconds you like it, and then move on. Listening to music now is different. It’s a commodity that’s available without paying money or paying respect to it and it doesn’t matter how the sound comes out. We all have smartphones that can do and play anything, but they still don’t sound good enough.
Since we moved our living room around, we’ve been watching far less TV and listening to more music and radio, which made a review of the Leitz Complete Professional Bluetooth Stereo Speaker easy to do. Having a Bluetooth speaker in the lounge has meant that whether Jo is listening to (sorry, having a conversation with) The Archers, Belle is dancing, or I’m listening to music, there is a decent speaker without cables all around the room.
The Leitz Complete Professional Bluetooth Stereo Speaker, a name which trips delicately off the tongue, is stylish and easy to connect. One tap of its aptly named blue button makes the device discoverable to compatible devices. It’s all very simple.
Regardless of what it looks like, the sound quality is good. All too often with smaller speakers, you get a tinny treble end and the bass rattles. Not through this. There’s a discreet rubber lip around the base that means it doesn’t rattle, no matter how high you turn up the volume or how much bass there is.
My memory is notoriously bad. I feel awful when my children ask me about things from their childhoods and I look blank. Or, even worse, they remind me about a conversation we had the week before and I have no recollection of it at all.
This week though I had four whole seconds of complete blankness.
I was dropping a friend off at her house – one of those terraces in Bristol where you have to take your chance on finding somewhere to park on the road. “I bet you don’t have this problem at your house,” she said.
I thought about it, but couldn’t for the life of me picture my street. Did I have to park on the road? Did I have a drive? I thought about it some more, but really wasn’t sure where I lived. The moment lasted a good three or four seconds. Count to four in your mind now – it’s quite a long time to not be able to remember where you live.
So what I want to know is, is this normal??
We all lead very busy lives nowadays, and have a lot of information coming at as from a lot of different angles. When I was younger it was face to face communications, the television, the telephone, (plugged into the wall at home), and print media. Now it’s all of the above, plus the vastness that is the internet. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, news websites, emails – it’s a never ending stream of facts and figures, most of them completely unnecessary.
So is it to be expected that some things will get forgotten? Is it natural that as our brains get fuller and fuller, we will struggle to hold it all inside our heads?
Do you find yourself forgetting simple things, or am I losing the plot?
I was listening to a podcast yesterday about fear. It’s part of an ongoing positive thinking series called Life is a Marathon by a guy called Bruce Van Horn – his name alone puts a smile on my face, so he’s off to a good start. If you fancy listening to it, I will warn you in advance that it’s very American, and there is a strong religious slant, but I find I can tune that out. I just replace the word ‘God’ with ‘You’ and that gives my self-esteem an extra boost.
Anyway, he was talking about fear, and how it holds us back. He gave the example of a woman trapped in a burning building who was afraid of stairwells. The fireman is talking her down.
“I know you’re scared,” he says. “Do it scared.”
It really made me stop and think. So often we let the fact that we are scared of doing something stop us from doing it, but why? Yes you might be scared, but that’s OK, you can be scared, it doesn’t mean you don’t do it. We feel all kinds of emotions about all kinds of things, but a lot of the time we carry on regardless.
He used another quote to reinforce the point. I’ve not been able to find a source for it, but it’s about peeing your pants, so a good one for the people who found the name Bruce Van Horn amusing.
“Fear,” it goes, roughly, “is wetting your pants. Courage is doing what you have to do with wet pants.”
This guy understands:
Sometimes life is scary. Things will scare you. That’s OK. The true test is to what extent you can carry on regardless.
Of course it’s easy to say that, less easy to put into practice, because fear can be paralysing. Stood at the top of the high ropes at River Dart Country Park with Belle over the summer I felt the fear. I desperately wanted just to put one foot out onto the rope bridge, but I couldn’t make myself. How might I have felt at the end though if I’d been able to do it scared?
How do you deal with fear? Also, have you ever wet your pants in public? Tell us all about it in the comments…
It’s not only gorgeous in itself but also makes me feel very grown up. This made it perfect to take to the workshop I ran recently, to make sure everyone knew to take me seriously, even though when they gave me a clicker to change the slides I said ‘Ooh! A clicker! Now I feel like a professional!’
(Stay tuned for your 20% Yoshi discount code, so you can get one and be just like me.) View Post
