We lived in Taunton first time around about 12 years ago when Belle was a baby. As she got slightly older and less likely to scream the second I broke physical contact with her, going out and about became easier and eating out less of a nightmare. Taunton wasn’t overrun at the time with nice places to eat, but there was one very lovely little restaurant down on East Reach called Tristans.

Tristans was run, funnily enough, by a friendly chap called Tristan, and Tristan made just about the best eggs Benedict in the entire world. Brunch there on a Sunday was bliss, and not just because I could keep Belle quiet for a good twenty minutes by filling her mouth with hot buttered toast.

Tristans Bistro has changed hands a couple of times since then, so being newly back in Taunton Belle and I were very excited to be invited to visit for dinner and to see how it’s doing now. We decided it would be our date night and Belle made the effort to put on a pretty dress and wear a flower in her hair. It was very sweet.

On arrival we were greeted by very friendly and helpful staff and Belle set about assessing the surroundings. She really liked the cosy atmosphere and the cutlery passed her test – no ‘previous food’ to be seen. She even had a feel under the tables for gum and declared everything up to her high standards. View Post

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How often have you had sex in the last month?

sex

If you coughed a bit and looked sort of embarrassed then fear not; a third of Britons haven’t done it at all. Not once. That’s apparently the reality of modern Britain – we’re doing it less than ever and, when we do, we’re not even sure we’re as good as we once were.

I’ve not been out asking people in the street or anything, this is all coming from a comprehensive study undertaken by The Observer, and to be honest it makes for fairly depressing reading. The survey is a follow up to the one they carried out in 2008 and shows some rather worrying trends. Some people believe the results are a reflection of a depressed economy and people working harder than ever – as parents particularly we all know how much more attractive sleep can seem than sex when you’ve been mentally battling a toddler for 14 hours straight.

I wonder too how much is to do with mobile technology and a tendency to sit in the evenings dual screening rather than retiring to the bedroom for an early night. Come on, admit it – have you ever thought about having sex but instead turned to Twitter or WhatsApp? There is much less effort involved when the person you’re interacting with can’t see that you’re in pudding stained pyjamas and haven’t shaved your legs since Christmas. View Post

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I love a word game and have, sometimes to my own detriment, always been a sucker for a man who knows where to put his scrabble tile.

It will come as no surprise then to hear that I have spent a good hour of work time this morning playing Letterfall – a new word game from Scottish Friendly with cash prizes! Woohoo! You choose which country you’d like to represent and the top scorers from each win £100 and the chance to go to the grand final in Glasgow at the end of November.

The game is being run as part of Scottish Friendly’s 15 year long partnership with the Scottish Book Trust. The Letterfall UK Championship ties into their work of encouraging children’s literacy; the hope being that parents and big kids will find the game enjoyable, rewarding and educational.

It’s a sort of Tetris for word lovers – make as many words as you can before the screen fills up and you have a panic attack.

The first time I played I scored 229, which given the England high score of 10,744 is pretty poor. No Scottish Friendly, I don’t think everyone on Facebook needs to know about that.

Letterfall View Post

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I’m getting a new washing machine from Servis. I am more excited about it than I ever have been about the acquisition of white goods, a fact I quickly put down to age rather than a reflection of the state of my social life.

My new washing machine is part of my involvement with the Servis blogger programme and is an 8kg HydroDrive machine. This washing machine is meant to be perfect for families, so what better way for Servis to put it to the test than to let real parents put it through its paces and offer honest feedback?

The machine has lots of fancy features, but there are a couple of things I am particularly excited about. Firstly, I’m intrigued by the 12 minute cycle for lightly soiled items. I surely can’t be the only parent who suddenly realises at 10pm on a Sunday night that they haven’t washed any school uniform yet?

I am also feeling rather chuffed at the thought of owning a washing machine from a proper grown-up brand like Servis and not just one of those budget ranges with names you’re not sure how to pronounce. Servis has been around since 1929 so you feel like it’s one of those brands you can trust. It’s a treat – like having Heinz beans instead of Tesco basics.

I have one big unanswered question though – do I get it in black or white?? View Post

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Inspired by Belle’s fashion video, I enlisted her help this afternoon to help me show off my brand new boots from Kaleidoscope.

Kaleidoscope asked me to choose something that I thought would be versatile in the transition from summer to autumn and I have to admit that these boots weren’t my first choice. They are totally unlike anything I would normally choose, but I absolutely love them. When I put them on, whatever it’s with, I feel awesome. 

Bee looked vaguely disgusted but then she’s 19, what does she know about style?

I normally find shoes and boots really difficult to shop for but these have been really comfortable from day one – not a single blister in sight, even though my first outing in them was a full on sambuca-fuelled dance fest.

What do you think? Where these boots made for walking?

 

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They say ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’.

My first question though – who exactly is ‘they’? ‘They’ implies some sort of panel of wise old men with beards and women who look a bit like Judi Dench, all nodding earnestly as they decide on the important rules for life. I suspect, not without some sense of disappointment, that that may not actually be the case.

Some people I know do get panicky about all things financial, and while I’m not especially keen on lending money, I’m quite happy to borrow it, so long as it’s done sensibly. This week for example I had to buy a new car. Ex Boyfriend had very kindly let me hang on to his for a few months but now he needs it back – quite rightly – and so I have had to get one of my very own.

It was weird having to choose a car without someone in the background muttering about cam belts and track rod ends, and in the end I opted for that tried and tested approach of buying the very first thing I saw, taking into consideration all the most important aspects of choosing a car:

Seat altea View Post

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How long did it take you to fall in love? How many dates before you were officially boyfriend and girlfriend?

According to recent research, we are falling in love quicker than ever, with it now just taking 224 tweets and 163 text messages for us to woo our partners. Approximately*. Apparently it now takes the average couple just 24 days to refer to each other as girlfriend and boyfriend, compared to 78 days a generation or two ago.

Do you think we are falling in love quicker than ever? Does social media make it easier to get the girl (or boy) or is it an artificial intimacy?

What isn’t made clear in the article is whether you actually have to spend any face to face time together, or whether the 140 characters alone is enough to seduce a future partner. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people on Twitter that I have shared 224 tweets with over the years, but I am under no illusion at all that I actually know anything about them, let alone that I am in love with them.

Sure, it’s nice to have ways to communicate quickly and easily, but those things can’t replace physical closeness, that time spent lying face to face in bed with someone, sharing stories from your past. While phones and social media can compliment that, I simply don’t believe that you can know someone from a tweet.

Or even 224 of them.

What do you think?

*Waits patiently while you go and count how many texts you have exchanged with that potential new partner

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Do you remember that Homebase ad where they build a house out of containers?

Homebase container

I always thought it looked pretty cool. It reminded me of playing Sylvanian Families when I was little* and spending ages organising the furniture in the little box shaped houses. I never imagined that one day I would get to sleep in a real actual container.

Well, you know what’s coming don’t you?

A couple of weeks ago Belle and I did spend the night in a container, and not because we were trying to sneak across any borders, but as part of a visit to Thorpe Park and the new Shark Hotel.

“The hotel is made of containers,” I told everyone.

“Seriously though,” they said, “what was it like?”

“Like sleeping in a container,” I said, and showed them the pictures: View Post

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When we were children we had two favourite car games; the left right game and the follow a car game. I think you can probably guess what was involved. My children are fans too, but my first thought always nowadays when asked to follow a car is ‘How far will it go? How much will that cost me in petrol??’ Playing in the late 80s when you could get a litre of 4* for about 40p was a slightly different prospect.

When we were away in the motorhome I even found myself doing something I have never done before – downloading an app to compare the nearest fuel prices. It was a difficult and slightly scary moment for me; you know you’ve really turned a corner age wise when you start driving past petrol stations and actually noticing and caring about a 2p increase in prices.

However expensive fuel gets though, it’s just not something I’m ever going to be able to go without. Being able to drive to visit friends and family is really important to me, as is taking Belle for days out and holidays. Fuel might be expensive, but to me it’s worth it. Our road trip was wonderful – it gave Belle and I both a much needed break from life at home, it allowed us to visit places we had never seen before, to learn new things, and most importantly, to spend time together.

Mother and daughter View Post

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Someone asked me this week what I was looking for in a man.

I started thinking about it – because I do want someone in my life – and began reeling off a list of the things I thought were important to me. It was the usual stuff, the sort of thing anyone would say; honesty, loyalty, company, compassion. It was kind of a dull list. I tried to think a little broader. I decided it was important to me to have a partner that listened to me, that took a genuine interest in my life and my interests and who wasn’t afraid to challenge me, emotionally and intellectually.

Still it didn’t feel right. When you think about it like I was, it somehow becomes a to-do list. It felt like I was creating a sort of relationship check list, a template against which I would be marking a future partner regularly to see how they were performing.

That isn’t what I want though, obviously.

I tried to distil it down.

‘I want them to be nice,’ I thought to myself. Well, that’s all well and good, but there are plenty of nice people around, it has to be more than that.

‘I want them to love me,’ I thought. Getting there. But still, I have been loved by people in the past and it hasn’t made everything OK.

‘I want them to love me enough,’ I decided.

Better.

All I want in a partner is for them to love me enough that all of the other things come naturally. I want a man who is honest with me because he loves me enough to respect me and not even think of hiding anything from me. I want a man who wants to challenge me and nurture me and take care of me because he loves me and it is instinct, not because of a sense of obligation or a list of requirements.

I want a man who loves me with a passion that means he will do whatever it takes to make sure we stay together, however annoying I might sometimes be or whatever issues I might have, and I want to love him back the same way.

Is that too much to ask?

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Now if that isn’t a cracker of a title, guaranteed to draw you in, then quite frankly I don’t know what more I can do. What do you want from me? Blood?

My LED desk lamp story begins a couple of months ago, when the nice people at TaoTronics asked me if I would like to try out one of their fancy lights.

“Yes please,” I said, “that would be perfect for me. I work at home and it would be great for my desk.”

Well that put the kiss of death on things, as shortly after that I moved house and no longer even have room for a desk. Hmmm. Not to worry, we found another home for it. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘Belle’.

“Cooool!” She said when she saw it, in that way that children can and grown-ups can’t without sounding stupid. “I can use it to read in bed!”

There wasn’t even a discussion, she just sort of assumed that any sort of exciting parcel must be for her, what with her being pubescent and therefore the centre of the universe. Our TaoTronics desk lamp resides therefore in Belle’s bedroom, until I marry into money, have my own office again, and manage to wrestle it from her tiny yet freakishly strong grasp.  View Post

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Last weekend I did something I haven’t done in a very long time. (No sniggering.)

I went to Boots with a disposable camera that Belle took on school camp about a year ago. Two days later and £4.99 poorer we had one of those cardboard wallets containing 24 negatives, 3 half decent pictures and 21 snaps of the sky/blurry thumbs/close up faces that were unrecognisable.

Those were the days weren’t they?

*sighs nostalgically in that ridiculous way that old people do when they are remembering something that was clearly much lower quality than what we have today*

Nowadays of course it’s all phones. How many photos did you take on your phone last month do you reckon? 50? 100 maybe? 200 if you spend a lot of time around cute babies or attractively styled cakes? I had a quick browse and have taken pictures of things I would never have wasted a disposable camera shot on, like jars of biscuit spread and my restuffed teddy in a pair of new dungarees, giving you a glimpse into just how rock and roll my life is right now.* View Post

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