Unless you’ve been living in some sort of home-made canvas tent, eating nothing but dandelion roots and milk from your own goat, you’ll have probably noticed prices going up. Everyone’s talking about how much a tin of beans now costs, and how you used to be able to get a packet of value brand super noodles for nine pence. Just today in fact, I was chatting to a friend about the price of ham, and she confessed she’d started buying gammon joints, boiling them herself, and slicing them thinly for sandwiches. Oh what glamorous circles I move in!

So, with cheap beans spiralling out of my price range, I thought I’d have a look at Tesco – The New Price Drop.

Supermarkets are always competing to be the cheapest, and claim to be continually lowering prices. This seems a little suspicious, given the aforementioned cost of beans, but still, you have to believe don’t you? Otherwise we’ll realise we’re all doomed to bankruptcy and collapse in a sobbing heap, shovelling not-so-cheap noodles into our mouths out of sheer panic and desperation.

The idea behind this campaign is, if only purely from a marketing perspective, an interesting one. Rather than just rocking up to the store and seeing that the price has been reduced on all kinds of useless things you don’t really want, if you go to The New Price Drop on facebook, you can actually pick the products you want to see reduced. A pretty clever social media strategy if you ask me. (It’s all about the consumer engagement don’t you know.)

Now I got pretty excited when I first read about this, thinking I’d be able to bring down the price of all my favourites – gin, Haribo, Magnum ice-creams, that sort of thing – but unfortunately you do only get to pick your favourite from a predefined list.

I thought I’d have a go anyway though, just to see how it worked. First off you pick your area. I’m Bristol, but they didn’t have this, so I had to opt for Avon. (Note to Tesco – Avon was abolished as a county in 1996 and the area split between the Bath and North East Somerset, City of Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire unitary local authorities.)

The you pick the food you’d like to see reduced. As exciting as it would be to see the price of cauliflower slashed, I went in the end for ‘frozen desserts and pies’. Hopefully Magnums fall into this category. Then you just click VOTE. Job done. You’ll know who you’ve got to thank when you’re next picking up your cheap frozen apple strudel won’t you?

I had a quick look at the Tesco home page too, and it poses some interesting questions, like just where should Tesco staff stick their avocados? Polite answers in the comment box below…

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As a journalist, it’s all too easy to get distracted by research. In my case, this ‘research’ often starts with checking my blog stats and ends with a nice cup of tea, perhaps with a little stop at Amazon along the way.

This can often mean that the actual writing of words takes some time to achieve. Five minutes into a poetry workshop though and we have already launched ourselves into free writing. Free writing is a way to get you started, to simply get the words flowing, whatever they may be, and it’s a useful tool for people who find themselves staring at a blank page, not knowing where to start. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to impress anyone, it doesn’t matter if the words even form proper sentences, you just have to write.

It’s brilliant. In three minutes I have already written these first paragraphs! I feel a bit guilty, as I’m sure I should be writing something a bit more creative, rather than a critique of the class and its techniques, but the horrors of reading aloud to the group don’t apply to this exercise, so I think I can get away with it. View Post

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Picture this…

It’s a Sunday afternoon. The rain is beating gently against the kitchen windows, and I’m humming gently to myself as I lightly dust the work surface with flour and begin to roll out the pastry for the homemade pie I’m baking for dinner. Small babies jabber happily at my feet, and a squirrel swings playfully from the strings of my apron.

No? Not seeing it?

That’s because it would NEVER HAPPEN.

However, I am shoving my slummy exterior to one side just for today, to show my support for CLIC Sargent’s Yummy Mummy campaign, raising money to help children and young people living with cancer. View Post

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Working from home full-time has plenty of perks – not having to go to pointless meetings, eating dry cereal out of the box and watching Cash in the Attic while you work, that sort of thing, but it has its downsides too. As I’ve been inundated by coverage of London Fashion Week, I’ve become increasingly concerned about my dress sense, which has always been a little ‘unpredictable’ at its best.

“Working at home must be great!” people say. “You can stay in your pyjamas!”

Well yes you can, but is that necessarily a good thing? Perhaps it’s not so bad to have to make the effort sometimes to brush your hair and put on something without an elasticated waist.

I realised it had become a problem recently when I started wearing one of my ‘sports’ bra during the day, just because it’s comfortable. I say ‘sports’ – I do wear them for netball, but they are basically the kind of old lady bras you see advertised in the Mail on Sunday magazine, where you can buy a special three pack of beige, and get a free pair of reading glasses. View Post

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A good friend is this season’s must have,
Like a new pair of red footless tights.
You need a good mixture of textures,
Include pastels and some neon brights.

Great mates are a key wardrobe basic,
Friends are this winter’s new black.
Do read the care labels well though,
No receipts so you can’t take them back.

This is the product of my evening at The Steady Table writing group, where I am under pressure to write creatively, and not just reply to emails…

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“I really hope we make pancakes at school today,” said Belle as we walked to school this morning.

“We did already make pancakes though,” I pointed out, “I was up early making the batter remember?”*

“Yes, but I didn’t do any of the making. You did the batter, and you cooked them, and you even put the fillings in.”

“You did the chewing though,” I said, “and that’s one of the most crucial bits.”

“It’s not really making though is it?” argued Belle. “If anything I unmade them.”

Fair point. We walked along for a bit in chummy silence. View Post

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February.

Eurgh.

Not a very inspiring month is it? It’s cold, the evenings are still dark, and you know that at some point you’re going to be forced to make pancakes that no one really wants to eat. Hardly surprising that my mind has been wandering forward to summer, imagining being able to sit outside with my lunch, feeling the warmth of the sun on my shoulders.

I’m having a bit of dilemma though when it comes to planning holidays. For a start, you know when you’re taking children with you that it’s never really a ‘break’, so you’re reluctant to spend too much money or travel too far for what will essentially be like being at home but without your own bed and favourite tea bags for comfort.

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I’m not really here!

I mean I am a real person obviously, but I’m actually writing this on Thursday, and you’re reading it on, well, not Thursday. How cool is that?? I just told the computer, and it remembered to do it all by itself. I feel like a character in a Graham Greene novel, sending a letter out to a spy in some far flung part of South America, with instructions for him to post it on a particular day, at a particular time, from a postbox marked with a black crow.

I love being at that age where although I can use it fairly well, technology still has the power to amaze me. How do voices come out of your phone without it even being connected to anything? Where even IS the internet?

It’s all very impressive.

So here’s my question today – if you weren’t here either, where would you rather be? You can be anywhere in the country, in the world, in the whole universe, doing anything you like.

Of course if you weren’t here, and I wasn’t here either, which I’m not, this conversation would never have happened, and you wouldn’t know what the question was to answer it, but let’s try not to think too deeply about the whole thing.

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Last weekend I had the whole weekend to myself.

I will say that again for emphasis. The Whole Weekend.

It doesn’t happen often, but the forces of nature and orbits of the planets and such like all aligned so that everyone apart from me was somewhere else. The prospect was quite overwhelming, and by Saturday night I had resorted to making origami animal friends for myself, but we’ll brush over that part.

Keen to make the most of it, I set off on Saturday morning for a day of doing all the things that no one else in my family enjoys terribly much, like mooching about in book shops, and spending money in cafes. One thing I particularly like about being on my own is that you can leave places as soon as you like, so after fifteen minutes or so in a modern art gallery, when I realised I didn’t really understand what was going on, I could just leave, nodding sagely to myself, and know that no one would judge me. View Post

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So, this week is half term, joy oh joy. Seriously, what is it with all the school holidays?? Just when you’ve settled back into work – BAM! – there’s another one.

Anyway, this week, to make up for the fact that I’m spending most of my time working, (by which I mean hiding), in my attic office, on Tuesday I took Belle and a friend from school to London. We began our day with a tour of the CBBC studios, where they got to do all kinds of exciting things like pretend to be Newsround presenters, and sit in chairs that Take That had once sat in.

Although Belle spent the whole tour with an autograph book clutched in her sweaty paw, we didn’t see anyone famous. No Chuckle Brother photo opportunities for us. Outside the studios though, while we were deciding which tube to take, we had better luck.

“Look!” Belle’s friend whispered excitedly, nudging me and jiggling about on the spot as a vaguely familiar looking man strode purposefully past us, “it’s HIM!”

“Who, who!!” Belle joined in frantically.

“Well don’t just stand there then,” I instructed, always one to play it cool, “run after him!” View Post

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Who doesn’t like champagne and smoked salmon for breakfast? A fool, that’s who, a fact that Lego appreciated as they plied me with booze and snacks this morning, whilst I played with the new Lego Friends range and got disproportionately excited about the teeny-weeny coffee machine and ketchup dispenser.

(Gosh, that was a long sentence wasn’t it? I really must be excited).

If you haven’t come across it already, Lego Friends is the new range of Lego designed particularly for girls. It’s the same Lego building experience, but is based on years of research and development that has shown that girls prefer more ‘real life’ play, featuring scenarios they encounter in their own lives. As a mother of two girls, I can vouch for this. Most little girls I know aren’t interested in aliens and robots and rockets, they want realism and detail. Hence the tiny ketchup dispensers. View Post

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…that last post was my 300th!

My 300th post, and I marked it with nonsense about guinea pigs wearing clothes.

*ashamed*

To make up for it, here is a link to a very serious news story about the extension of the Bank of England’s quantitative easing programme.

There, that feels better.

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