I love books.

I love everything about them – the way they look on the shelves, (so long as the spines are lined up flush with the edge and not pushed back, obviously), the way they smell, stroking the covers, it’s all good. Oh and reading them. I like that bit too. I’ve always tried to encourage a love of books and reading in my children too, but I also appreciate that not all children are lucky enough to have access to a wide range of books and that sometimes it’s difficult to get kids excited about reading.

It’s tough nowadays isn’t it to get children to pick up a book instead of an iPad?

Scottish Friendly Children's Book Tour

I believe that a love reading is hugely valuable – not only is it an important skill in terms of doing well in school generally, but it’s a fantastic form of escapism, a brilliant way to relax and unwind and a great way to stimulate imagination and creative thinking. Just think back to when you were young, reading a Secret Seven book in bed, how evocative the language was and how scared you were – you don’t get that with a game of Flappy Fish on a tablet do you?

That’s why I’m supporting the Scottish Friendly Children’s Book Tour. 

Scottish Friendly has been running a book tour far the last 14 years to support The Scottish Book Trust, an organisation looking to inspire readers and writers of all ages, not just children. They have a massive range of resources available, and browsing their website I was particularly impressed by their book lists – I will definitely be checking out some of the suggestions on the ‘female detectives’ list.

The book tour is very ‘hands on’, taking the very best UK and international authors directly into schools across Scotland and England to inspire a love of reading, writing and illustration, reaching around 6,000 children every year. Anything that gets kids excited about books is a good thing in my eyes.

What were your favourite books as a child? 

Disclosure: this is a sponsored post

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So, here I am.

I have been officially single for roughly 25 days now and it’s starting to feel like it might all be OK after all.

The brain is a funny thing isn’t it? A few weeks ago, lying on my sister’s spare bed, sobbing into a snotty sleeve, I genuinely couldn’t imagine a time when I would ever feel excited or happy or even vaguely content ever again, about anything, ever. I’m generally a very positive person, and so any sort of intense emotion tends to catch me off guard and I panic – I literally did not know what to do with the sadness.

Smile

Me looking positive to prove it

And by panic I do actually mean panic.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I woke up in a hotel in Manchester, (knowingly, not because of some weird anxiety induced adventure), and could barely catch my breath, let alone imagine how I would be able to give a keynote speech at a conference that morning.* I made myself get out of bed and into the shower, but couldn’t seem to stop the tightness in my chest or the tears escaping. It felt so all encompassing that it was almost impossible to be anything other than totally consumed in the moment, unable to imagine any time other than right then, in my head. Now I appreciate that a lot of people live with far more serious anxiety and depression every single day but for me, who really doesn’t, it was terrifying to feel so out of control of my own emotions.

Managing to get dressed, one item carefully at a time, but unable even to eat breakfast, (usually my best bit in a hotel so a clear sign that something was up), I started to panic about the future – if I couldn’t stop crying to eat some toast how would I ever be able to hold down a job? Would I have to just stay in bed forever? Who would look after Belle?

I was in a bit of a sorry state.

I carried on though, slowly, just thinking about one little thing at a time and lo and behold, no letters of resignation were required. For the last few days I have woken up and felt briefly fed up, but only because it is 6.40am and I would rather be asleep. I have stopped scrutinising my feelings every minute of the day, picking at every negative thought just in case it means something.

In some ways I feel guilty, like I should have felt much worse for much longer, but then who’s to say that I won’t feel bad again? Right now though, things feel OK. I’m not about to start shaving my legs or anything crazy – I shan’t be signing up to Match.com any time soon – but things feel OK.

It seems I really am a positive person – apparently I can’t help but bounce back.

*Apologies to anyone at Blog On if I seemed a little distracted or blotchy of face during the day. 

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As you may have seen from the snazzy badge in my sidebar, Belle and I are Butlins ambassadors this year. This essentially means that we get to go to Butlins for a holiday in returning then for writing about how we got on.

Wave hotel Butlins Bognor Regis

Part of the reason I applied to be part of the scheme is that I don’t have particularly fond memories of Butlins. In fact, my enduring memories are of tedious days out, deserted windswept fairgrounds, barbed wire topped high fences… Not exactly the stuff dreams are made of.

Butlins has had a bit of a makeover over recent years though, and I wanted to see if the concentration camp vibe I remember from my youth is now a thing of the past.

We rocked up for four nights in the Easter holidays to the Wave Hotel at Bognor Regis and were pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t 5 star – I don’t think they would claim to be that – but the hotel itself was excellent, the staff very friendly and we enjoyed the break. Of course Butlins is all about the kids, so I thought the best thing to do would be to hear what we thought from the horse’s mouth.

And by horse I mean Belle.

Disclosure: We are Butlins ambassadors. 

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Skogstad outdoor clothes for kids competition

I have been thinking a lot lately about the idea of ‘flow’; that elusive state of mind that it’s possible to get into where time passes without you even noticing it because you are so absorbed in what you are doing.

It doesn’t happen to me a great deal to be honest – I have an amazing ability to guess the time to an astonishing degree of accuracy* – and it’s something I always wish would happen more. I suspect it may be a bit like trying to remember your dreams though, the more you struggle to hang on to them, the harder it is to do

One thing though that can often do it is being outside. I don’t mean just going and standing in the garden for a while instead of sitting watching repeats of Storage Hunters, (although that’s a good start), I mean actually outside, in coats and wellies, getting wet and muddy, breathing in the salty air straight off the sea or collecting bugs from the forest floor.

Skogstad outdoor clothes for kids competition

You know when you’re properly outside as your cheeks start to tingle and you feel warm even though it’s cold. The wind may be blowing your hair into your obligatory Mr Whippy, but you feel alive, like anything is possible. When you finally come back indoors you feel refreshed and tired all at the same time and a cup of tea, feet curled up underneath you on the sofa, muddy wellies left at the door, is suddenly the most wondrous thing in the world.

Today’s competition is all about helping you to achieve that glorious windswept Mr Whippy feeling, by kitting out your kids in jackets and fleeces from Skogstad, ready to explore the beauty of the British countryside, or any sort of countryside you like really.

Skogstad is Norway’s number one outdoor clothing brand for the family. Hitting the UK shores last year they’ve already proved popular with families who like to be out in the fresh air, weekend warriors, walkers and mums on the school run! With over 75 years’ experience in making clothes for all climates and conditions they know a bit about how to keep dry, warm and insulated and at prices that won’t break the bank. Reviewers are loving the quality and durability of Skogstad clothing – ranking them better than most of the other well know outdoor brands.

To be in with a chance to win two kids’ fleeces and two jackets, worth up to £200, simply complete as many of the Rafflecopter actions as you can before June 3rd.

Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

*I’m not just boasting here, it really is an amazing skill. I can normally get to within about five minutes, wherever I am and whatever I am doing, even if I have just woken up. On Sunday we were out shopping, I guessed 1.38pm and it was 1.38pm. It’s a gift.

Disclosure – this is a sponsored post

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I make no secret of the fact that I am not exactly a domestic goddess.

(Apart from the amazing tropical fruit fool I made this week of course.)

My intentions are good – I want to eat lovingly constructed quinoa salads and the like – but the truth is that I just can’t be bothered to construct them. My typical diet relies heavily on toast, normally topped with beans. I like it, but it isn’t exactly a recipe for a bloat-free life.

I was keen then last month to try out the range of gluten-free foods from Ilumi because a) I thought it might help with the whole toast induced bloating and b) I am lazy, and they all come in pouches that can just be stuck in the microwave. Nice.

Ilumi gluten free diet View Post

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I am a big fan of breakfast. You know those annoying people who get to something ridiculous like three o’clock in the afternoon and then say ‘Oh silly me, I totally forgot to have anything to eat yet!’?

Well, I am not one of them. In fact, I love breakfast so much that my favourite bit about staying in hotels isn’t the comfy beds or spa facilities, it’s always the all-you-can-eat pastries and adorably tiny mini jars of jam.

Breakfast is important too – it sets you up for the day, gives your body a kick-start and gives you a reason to get out of bed, which is very important when you work at home and have a tendency to prefer to lie under a duvet reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries rather than sit upright in a chair and do something productive. Are you a breakfast person? What’s your favourite breakfasty treat?

This week’s Weight Watchers challenge then, to eat breakfast every day, wasn’t very much of a challenge for me at all. Hoorah!

Weight Watchers #StepIntoSummer challenge

Sticking to a Weight Watchers diet at the same time wasn’t even terribly difficult as there is so much flexibility. No kidding, you can genuinely eat everything in that picture and it counts as ‘diet food.’ I am a particular fan of the ‘healthy and filling’ food list that you use in the first few weeks of the Weight Watchers plan, as you are allowed to eat as much as you like from the list – no restrictions – which means you can have beans, crumpets, bacon, eggs, and all sorts of other yumminess and still have that smug ‘I’m on a healthy eating plan’ glow about you. Toasted crumpets topped with baked beans is one of my favourites, plus a side of scrambled eggs if I’m feeling extra excitable.

This morning though I shunned the crumpet feast in favour of something altogether more exotic – a tropical fruit fool. The recipe is at the end of this post but as you can see it looks amazing and brings a nice summer holiday vibe to your kitchen. I added the lime garnish to half convince myself it was as much fun as a mojito, which to be honest it almost was, expect without the hangover.

Weight Watchers mango fool

Weight Watchers mango fool recipe

Competition time!

If my deliciously tropical breakfast treat has got you fancying your own breakfast feast, then now is your chance to win this fabulous fancy toaster – perfect for toasting your crumpets.

Weight Watchers #stepintosummer competition

The competition is running across all the Weight Watchers social channels, so entering is easy peasy – all you have to do is take a picture of your breakfast and share it on Twitter with the #StepIntoSummer hashtag. You can also share it on Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest, just don’t forget to tag Weight Watchers and mention #StepIntoSummer.

Feeling fruity? Here’s how to make four very generous servings of tropical fruit fool…

Tropical fruit fool recipe

Peel the mangoes and slice the cheeks off. Cut one cheek into small dice and set aside. Put the remaining mango flesh into a liquidiser, and blend to a puree. Transfer to a bowl and stir through the seeds from 2 of the passion fruit. Add lime juice to taste.

Put the yoghurt into another bowl and and beat gently to soften. Gently fold through the passion fruit and mango mixture plus about half of the diced mango, leaving it rippled.

Divide the mixture between 4 glasses, and top with the remaining diced mango. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

To serve, scoop the seeds from the remaining passion fruit and drizzle over the top of the fools then sprinkle over a little lime zest. Serve immediately.

Disclosure: I am being compensated by Weight Watchers as one of their #stepintosummer challenge bloggers but all words and opinions are my own.

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Bingo

I’m sure we all have the same preconception of the stereotypical bingo player. Not exactly a great advert for what i believe to be one of the best forms of gambling available to us today. You usually think of a trip to a bingo hall and you’re probably thinking about groups of retired ladies, all with the same blue rinse, jostling for the best seats, handbags full of those special bingo markers. (I do think the woman on the right looks like she might have a jab with her pen if you don’t keep an eye on her.) Sure, you’ll still find the older demographic in bingo halls around the country, but think about any advertising you’ve seen recently for bingo – both online and in bingo halls – and you’ll probably recall images of groups of younger women rather than the stereotypes that you’d expect.

The cynical amongst you may be thinking, “Yeah, but are those adverts just trying to attract a new demographic that they don’t have, positioning bingo as a younger person’s game before all of their customers die off?” The answer, actually, is no. Go to any bingo hall and you’ll see groups of younger women and even – shock horror – MEN! Who’d have thought it. View Post

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Unless you’ve been living as a social media hermit, you won’t have missed the new fundraising phenomenon that is crowdfunding; ordinary people with small businesses and projects getting the funding they need from the public, usually via donations on a website. In return, investors might receive equity, a sample of the finished product or something else exciting.

Crowdfunding is beneficial for both the funders and the fundraisers. Fundraisers get a chance to engage with the public and promote their product in a community driven environment and people who wouldn’t  usually be ‘investors’ can put in often as little as £10 and still reap the rewards, while supporting small businesses that may not be able to get funding elsewhere.

This simple method of funding has taken off all over the internet in recent years, with everything from charity runs to films being funded by the people who want to support them. If you fancy pledging to a crowdfunded project, you might be wondering where to start. This is where I come in. I’ve got two favourites at the moment, so take a look at these cool projects and get involved!

Go Wild nature kits

A couple of weeks ago Belle and I went to the launch of this project in Bristol and spent a really lovely evening around a camp fire, toasting marshmallows, drinking hot chocolate, hunting for animal tracks and listening for bats. It was awesome.

Go Wild nature kits View Post

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I’ve always looked young for my age. So young that I still get asked for ID in the Co-op when buying gin from time to time, probably more than my 18 year old daughter. I’ve been very lucky too that I’ve never suffered with any serious skin conditions, like eczema or acne, although acne definitely doesn’t have to be something you just put up with. Products like ClearAwayAcne are well worth exploring – don’t suffer in silence.

This is me. In make-up for a change. (I like this photo as I have deliberately cut off the top of my head so you can’t see my huge forehead or flat hair.)

Slummy single mummyWhen people ask about my children I am deliberately casual as I love to watch people’s reactions. “I have two daughters,” I say, “one is 11,” (pause slightly for people to look surprised that I am old enough to have an 11 year old), “and my eldest is 18.” View Post

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How did you get on with the fruit and vegetable challenge last week? All good? This week’s challenge is to get creative and cook some new recipes, so wooden spoons at the ready. This week you can win a hamper of Weight Watchers Simple Start goodies, so read on to find out how.

Weight Watchers #stepintosummer challenge

Now I’m not a natural cook, so this was a little bit more of a challenge for me than simply chucking a handful of salad onto the side of my plate like last week. My innate kitchen laziness, combined with the recent break-up, does not immediately lend itself to food based experimentation, other than the ‘I think I will give that new biscuit brand a try’ variety.

Never one though to turn down a challenge, I rose to the occasion.  View Post

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Writing letters

Dear Long Lost Boyfriend,

I had a dream about you last night.

We both lived in tiny flats in the same building and one night I broke into your flat to look around. It was exciting. Until I realised you were asleep in the bed, watching me, and I had to make an excuse and run away. When I woke up, the room dark around me, I was back in 1999. Do you remember as vividly as I do the adrenalin fuelled awkwardness of trying to instigate our first date?

It was tough for me at university. Bee was only a toddler and I lived an hour’s drive away. I had to leave after lectures every day to go back to being a mummy, so one of those late night liaisons, a slow kiss after hours spent hanging around at someone’s house, waiting for something to happen, was never on the cards. Instead I came up with the idea of oh so casually inviting you back to my house, 40 miles away, to ‘revise’.

I remember I had come out of an exam early, figuring that the only moment we would have alone would be if you came out early too. Not exactly a foolproof plan. I waited in the bar, my heart in my mouth. I had been planning it for so long and I can feel butterflies in my stomach now even thinking about, 15 years later. When you appeared, about ten minutes before everyone else was due to come out, I knew I had to be quick.

“I’m struggling a bit with revising for tomorrow’s exam,” I said, a blatant lie that you would have seen through in a second as I was the biggest swot on the course.

“Yeah?” You looked at me, a sparkle in your eyes, a nervous laugh.

“I was thinking perhaps you could come back with me tonight and help me revise?”

(You later said it was the most instant erection you had ever had – one of my proudest achievements to date.)

On our way back to pick Bee up from my mum’s you made us stop in McDonald’s so you could buy her a Happy Meal, keen to make a good first impression.

You won’t have realised, but those six months when I was your girlfriend changed my life forever. You had such a passion for life that is was impossible not to be inspired. It felt like you lived in a completely different world to me; the bedroom of your flat in Clifton with views out over the whole city, your mum’s house full of her colourful naked pictures of herself, meals served with freshly ground pepper when I didn’t even own a pepper mill. You would take me round Sainsbury’s when you came to stay and cook me actual foods – amazing things like fresh salmon, a world away from the endless sachets of Pasta ‘n’ Sauce that Bee and I would cook over the camping stove in our tiny house, before we had an oven that worked.

I remember you taking me to your house to make me lunch once, before that awkward exam proposition, and cooking me pasta. I was 20 years old and had never eaten pesto. Even now I can’t open a jar without just for a second being back in your large sunny kitchen in Montpelier, giddy with nerves, listening to you play the guitar.

Our relationship may have had little significance for you, but for me it was a turning point. Your enthusiasm and encouragement made me realise properly for the first time that I could actually be anything I wanted to be. You believed in me – I could feel it – and you made it impossible for me not to believe in myself.

I watched you over that summer barely able to contain your excitement for your grand plan to sell things on the internet (it was 1999 remember) and I marvelled at your self-believe. On your 21st birthday I watched as you picked up a guitar and played for what felt like hours, everyone hypnotised, me bursting with pride and amazement that you had picked me, the girl who didn’t even own a pepper mill and had never eaten pesto, to be your girlfriend.

It may have been a fleeting romance, but it opened my eyes to a world of possibilities and sparked within me the beginnings of a self-confidence and ambition without which I would never be where I am today.

So thank you Long Lost Boyfriend. Thank you for being you and for helping make me who I am today.

xx

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I will warn you in advance that there isn’t exactly a point to this post, it’s more of a musing. A few of you said you liked hearing my more personal stories, so tough luck, now you have one.

I started thinking about this after reading my sister Annabel’s post about how birth order effects achievement. I’m the first born child and display a lot of the typical characteristics – I’m probably regarded as the sensible one in the family, I have a first class economics degree, completed with toddler in tow, and have done alright for myself fashioning a ‘career’ out of playing on the internet. (I life in fear of people one day realising they are paying me to do a made up job, but let’s not dwell on that.) I should add though that Annabel does have a post-graduate qualification and I do not, so she wins on that front, much to my disappointment.

I started thinking then about the other people I knew, and whether they had the sort of personalities you’d expect, given their birth order. I wracked my brain, but found it very hard to come up with more than a handful of good friends who weren’t also the eldest of their siblings. I wondered if this might be a Thing.

Does birth order effect personality?

 

When I took it a step further, I realised something even more surprising – every serious relationship I have ever had has been with a first born child.

I have had three properly serious relationships in my life – all lasting for years rather than months and all where we have lived together. (Nobody in this time has actually ever asked me to marry them, but that’s a whole other post for when I am feeling less emotionally fragile and more inclined to question why no one would want to promise anything in front of witnesses.) All three of these men though have been the eldest of their siblings.

Now I have a economics degree, I know that you can’t conclude anything statistically significant from a sample of three, but I found it interesting as I’m not sure it had ever occurred to me before just how many of the important relationships in my life, both with friends and partners, were with first born children. Do you think that we are simply drawn to people with similar experiences and outlooks on family life? Do we seek out people who will understand us? Or is it purely coincidence?

Where do you sit in your family? Are your friends and partners the same?

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