but remember to heed the warnings from Charlie Brown first – the continual battles with kite-eating tree, the running for miles but it never lifting from the ground, the mountains of knotted string… I was thinking about good ole Charlie Brown yesterday as I sat on a rock on the beach, holding two of the…

what you say, because little ears are listening.  This is something I am often aware of when I’m talking to someone with my children present or within earshot.  I have been rebuked many times when my wee girl says something that I had said (sometimes weeks before), forgetting that just because she is below my…

Well friends, I thought I’d better explain the lack of blog posts lately.  I have been writing, but behind the scenes.  Currently my husband is in the process of preparing my novel, Unmatched Brooches for publishing, and two others are waiting in the sidelines – stories drawn from Glimpses of Sky as I focus on…

time to sing, sing a powerful song.’  So The Saw Doctors reminded me last week.  It has been a month stuffed full of tragedy, horror, bad news and heart-break.  It’s seemed as though not a day can go past without something horrible happening.  You think you’ve heard the worst, and more comes to kick you…

A few weeks ago my dad commented that my writing style was ‘rather gloomy’.  Granted he was reading the grittiest novel I’ve written so far, but it made me stop and think.  Since then, I have been making every effort to inject some humour into my writing, but to be honest, it does not come…

Well, I do sometimes wonder if I’m approaching the madness of Lady Macbeth when it comes to cleaning my house, or in fact, trying to fix everything that is imperfect in my life.  The words came to me as I was trying yet again to clean the carpet, where my daughter had spectacularly vomited last…

Or so I say when I tell someone I have MS.  It’s a kind of turning the attention away from me/filling the awkward silence kind of a thing.  Mostly, they then try to argue that they’ve got it easy compared to me, and I say again, ‘things could be worse.’  I know that to be…

It’s actually often hard to recognise it when it’s right in front of you.  I have always thought of my dad when the word comes up, because he did so many things when I was growing up that were incredibly brave.  Then, at the start of this week I watched a Panorama progamme about a…

Yesterday the kids were singing that Sunday School song, and I remembered it as one of my favourites.  As I listened to the words – creatures thanking God for the thing that made them who they were I realised I had not done that in a long time. The start of the new year has…

All week I have been telling the family that I have a dream of seeing a robin in our new garden.  If I saw a robin, I said, it would make everything better.  Of course, an empty bird-feeder and two warring cats did not help.  I spent two days giving off about the cats, shooing…