How To Shop, Christmas-Style

Before you read on, I should probably emphasise that the placement of that comma in the title is deliberate, lest you think this is going to be a piece about where to find the most blisteringly ironic Christmas jumpers on the high street or how to, in the words of Home and Garden magazine, “bring…

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How to Carve a Halloween Pumpkin in Four Easy Steps

I know, I KNOW!  I’m back with one of those annoying “how to” posts.  You know, the ones I said I’d never do.  And this time, I’m Halloweening it up big time, and I figured that as today, at the ripe old age of 37 (never get tired of saying that.  I can definitely no…

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Why I Won’t Be Jumping on the Blogging Bandwagon

Blogging is dead, they said.  The long form, the written word, it’s dead and buried.  It’s not coming back.  It’s all about video now, they said.  It’s all about the YouTube channel where you connect directly with your audience.  That’s where the money is, and the fame, and the opportunities. I ignored them. I may…

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Marrying Yourself: Tale of Tragic Spinsterhood, or What We All Deserve?

In a school I once taught at, an enterprising Young Enterprise group (I guess that was the point) started selling “Last Rolos” for Valentine’s Day. I bought one for myself. Mainly, I wanted to support the students in their entrepreneurial ventures, and it wasn’t as though I was going to try wooing someone else in…

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The Token Women

I went to university with a woman-let’s call her Liv-who, some years after our university days had ended, I spotted walking up the street in the dead of winter wearing nothing but a pair of hotpants and a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “I AM NOT A TOKEN WOMAN.” Liv could never have been mistaken…

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What about the dad bloggers?????

It was just a joke, you know.  Just a little joke on Twitter.  You ladies, you just can’t take the bantz.  All I said was “Dads are better than mums and anyone who says they’re not is a man-hating harpy.”  God, anyone would think I’d walked into a W.I. meeting, shouted “Periods don’t hurt AT…

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Why September is the REAL New Year

It goes without saying that New Year is awful. Last year, I returned to work having had one of the best New Year celebrations of my life, holed up in an enormous house in the countryside with twenty friends, only to return home and find that everything was bleak, bleak, bleak.  It was about minus…

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Single Mum Cooks: Baked Eggs in Wonton Wrappers

Once upon a time, long, long ago, I lived in Japan. That was all many years ago now and a story for another day, but one of the longer lasting effects of my tenure in the Land of the Rising Sun (longer at least than my grasp of the Japanese language, which has all but…

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Would You Sell Your Pre-Baby Wardrobe?

The other day, whilst idly perusing my phone in the usual way, I came across an opportunity to work with Ebay as a blogger.  The job involved listing some stuff on Ebay and then writing about it. I thought about it. I met the criteria.  I hadn’t listed anything on Ebay in years (this was…

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Egg Freezing: Putting all your eggs in one basket?

“Do you think we’ll all still be single and friends with each other in our thirties?” The year is 2000.  A new millennium has dawned, and having recently read and become mildly obsessed with Bridget Jones’ Diary, I am sitting in a bar in Oxford with two of my closest friends from university, musing aloud…

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