I received my first ever proposal when I was ten years old from a boy in my class called Richard Gibson. In our school we had these white plastic 30cm rulers that were ideal for passing messages on; you could write on the back with pencil and rub it out when you were done, then when you wanted to pass a note to someone it jut looked like you were helpfully passing them a ruler.

One day I had a ruler passed to me from Richard Gibson.

“Will you marry me?” it said in pencil on the back.

I wrote back. “Which school?” At ten, your choice of secondary school was a life defining thing.

“Stanchester,” he wrote back.

“Huish Episcopi,” I wrote back, “sorry.”

And that was that.

I then went through a bit of a dry spell proposal wise, a 27 year dry spell in fact, which was broken on my birthday in April this year when I received my second ever marriage proposal.

HOORAH! View Post

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I have been a parent for nearly 20 years now. Sometimes I forget, and then remember that Bee is 20 this year and come over all funny. How has it happened that I’ve had children for more than half of my life? When did Bee stop looking like this?

Baby Bee(Also, when did I stop being that slim?)

The very act of having those thoughts then makes me feel even older. Young people don’t sigh to themselves and lament the passing of time do they? And then I catch a glimpse of my hair in a mirror and it’s downhill from there. View Post

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It’s Sunday morning, about 9am, and I’m lying in what may be the biggest bed in the world. If I sit forward just a tiny bit and look out of the window I can see the sea. I starfish, enjoying the space and the feel of the lovely fresh linen. I’m on my own as my boyfriend has taken Belle out with him to play a round of golf, teeing off from just next door to our apartment. One of the things on Belle’s bucket list, alongside ‘be in a car crash’,* is to drive a golf buggy.

We are staying for the weekend at The Point at Polzeath, down on the north coast of Cornwall. We are in one of their new luxury three bedroom apartments – Fitzroy – and luxury is about the right word for it. Designed as a holiday home, it’s at least twice the size of our non-holiday home and far better equipped – the finish is impeccable and the attention to detail superb, something that always makes a holiday so much more enjoyable.

The Point review View Post

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Travelling up the motorway in the rain this morning I found myself trying not to look at the windscreen wipers, a tricky thing to do when you are the driver. In the back of my mind though was the fear of hypnosis.

I blame my mother.

As a parent, you say a lot of things that aren’t really true, I appreciate this now I have my own children. Most of the time you don’t even mean to lie, it might only be a joke or an exaggeration, but it’s amazing the weird things that stick in a child’s mind.

Here are five things my mum told me that stuck with me but that I suspect may not really be true:

Myth: you can get hypnotised by windscreen wipers

Truth: you cannot. At least it has never happened to me, even though I have tried hard sometimes. I can’t even remember how this one came about, I just remember being in the back of the car on a rainy journey one day and being told it might happen. View Post

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A couple of weeks ago I had an appointment with Cooperative Funeralcare, an appointment to plan my own funeral. It doesn’t exactly sound like a day out at the races does it? Funnily enough though, it turned out to be a pretty fascinating couple of hours.

I went along to Cooperative Funeralcare in Taunton, taking my boyfriend with me, knowing that he would ask lots of good questions. It was part of a project I’m doing at the moment with The Cooperative, exploring the different strands of their work and putting their services to the test, and I was interested to find out exactly what would be involved in planning my own funeral.

I’ve played a part in planning a couple of funerals, but they have been in those classic circumstances where you are all a little bit emotional and overwhelmed and plans are made in a rush. No one is 100% sure of what the person who has died would have actually wanted and you muddle through, doing the best you can, (not to mention trying to find the money to foot the bill).

A pre-paid funeral plan takes a different approach; instead of leaving the stress, cost and decision making process up to your loved ones, you invest a little bit of time and money upfront and make things simple.

It sounds like such an obvious idea doesn’t it? You get to choose exactly what you want and pay for it up front at today’s prices. This means it ends up being a lot cheaper, (the cost of funerals has doubled just in the last ten years!), and it means those days and weeks after your death are that much easier for your family. So why don’t we all do it?

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Today, May 11th, is the first ever Somerset Day. Somerset Day has been established to celebrate everything that is wonderful about Somerset; it’s not just that place you drive through on your way to Cornwall you know.

I have lived in Somerset since I was eight years old, aside from my brief fling with Bristol, in a total of 18 different houses. Even though I loved living in Bristol, and had dreamt about it for years, I still felt nostalgic for what I consider my home county. What’s not to love about a country that includes historic cities like Bath, iconic towns such as Glastonbury, beautiful countryside and coastline?

For me though, the things I love about Somerset are more personal, like the drive over the hills between Taunton and Bridgwater. I must have made the journey hundreds of times and yet it still has something special about it. Every single time I drive it I think of my Gran, driving every Saturday morning from her home in Bridgwater to go to Taunton. She would visit the library, (she loved crime fiction) and Marks & Spencer, (she always had a little stack of their rich tea fingers in the morning), before going for coffee in the County Stores. She’d then drive back across the hills, stopping on the way at Hawkridge reservoir for a while to look at the view. View Post

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I’m not asking, I’ve already done it, I’m just hoping that ‘Who should I vote for?’ will get me a lot of search engine traffic today.

Not really.

(Partly).

I do actually want to be helpful though as I personally believe it’s VERY IMPORTANT INDEED that everyone votes. People died you know. All over the world people are still fighting hard for the right to vote, so please use yours.

Like me.

Who should I vote for?

If you are still asking yourself ‘who should I vote for?’ then why not take the Vote for Policies quiz? It anonymises policies from the main parties, meaning you pick by policy and not personality. At the end it tells you who you should vote for based on the policies you support. The results are interesting and the process is only slightly overshadowed by the fear of discovering you’re a secret UKIP supporter. View Post

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I am all about the money saving this month aren’t I? Last week I was buying and selling unwanted gift vouchers and this week I have become the queen of the discount* thanks to Oony.

Oony’s mission is simple – to save people money. They do this by bringing together offers, sales and discounts from big name retailers all over this here interweb. They operate in 19 different countries and their discounts are used by thousands and thousands of people – the average discount is a third, making it well worth a visit if you’re about to embark on a spot of online retail therapy. View Post

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I’m going to recount a short conversation I had with my boyfriend this weekend. He claims he didn’t say it but I am stating here for the record that he did. I didn’t mind him saying it, he tells me how beautiful I am all the time, it’s fine, but he did say it. Fact.

It went something like this:

Him: “What have you done to your eyebrows?”

Me: “Nothing. What do you mean?”

Him (laughing): “Yes, you have! What have you done? They look weird?”

Me (paranoid): “Nothing!!”

Him (looking more closely): “Oh, maybe you haven’t, I think it’s just that they’re going grey.” View Post

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Can you remember the day your first baby was born? How about your second? Who am I kidding – everyone remembers don’t they? That’s the whole point – even though you’re making good use of the gas and air, and a little distracted by the pain, it’s etched on your mind forever. (That said, it does help that I wrote down exactly what happened when my first daughter was born, as that was nearly 20 years ago.)

Even though 2,000 babies are born every day, each and every baby is special, and as we celebrate one very special birth, (hoorah for a new princess!), Pampers wants to celebrate #everybaby born into a world of love, sleep and play in a new captivating film directed by award winning documentary maker, Elizabeth Stopford.

In this moving piece of real-time content, you can watch the epic journey of everyday parents, mirroring the excitement of the new arrival in London. In the 90 second film, created in the same 24 hours that the eyes of the world were fixed on London, we follow the journey of the parents from nervous anticipation through to those precious first moments with their newborns, bringing to life the emotion, adoration and love felt by every parent on the arrival of a new baby.

Take a look and share the film in celebration of #everybaby. View Post

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This Zeek review was written in May 2015, so some of the screenshots my be out of date, but the code is a current one.

I am writing this post from Starbucks where I am sipping my discount skinny hazelnut macchiato, thanks to a new app called Zeek. I’m not normally one for voucher apps but the concept behind Zeek is so simple it literally feels like you’d be stupid not to use it.

Read on for your £5 Zeek promo code.

How many times have you been given a gift voucher, maybe for a birthday or Christmas, and found yourself either buying something you don’t really want, just to use it, or discovering it the week after it expires in your purse and getting annoyed with yourself? Zeek is the answer to that problem, providing a secure marketplace for people to buy and sell unwanted vouchers. The benefit as a seller is that you get the cash instead and for buyers, there’s a discount of around 5-20% on every voucher.

I didn’t have any vouchers to sell but I was happy to put it to the test from a buyer’s point of view as there were plenty of vouchers on offer for stores that I would normally spend in. It’s ridiculously easy to use, just download the app and start browsing. You can browse the hot vouchers, search by category, or look up individual brands. When you’re ready to buy you just hit the button and you’ll be asked to pay either by card or through a Payapl account. (I was given some credit to test the app, hence only having to pay £1 towards my voucher).     View Post

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