One of the things I associate with my mum is the way she spies a broken flower, bends down and puts it in a vase of water. My dad sees a faulty thing, and works to fix it. My granny used to scrape jam jars until they were almost as clean as they had been…

I forgot how it felt for a while. My husband/partner in all things house-related/main dog-walker got a job working from home. The commute was a walk down the garden, the coffee breaks and lunches were mostly shared, times alone few and far between.

You know them too: the days when you do the bare minimum because it’s all you can manage. Maybe you’re stressed about more important things, maybe you’re too busy, maybe you just don’t have the physical strength, motivation or will to do any more. Next week, that’ll be me. Next week, the main dog walker/…

We could just stop there actually. If the photo made you laugh then my work’s done. A few weeks ago I was with my son at the orthodontist. She asked him to smile and then said, ‘we could make that smile even better’. So next month he’ll be sporting braces. I didn’t think there was…

As I was walking up a hill towards our house in Donegal two days ago, I had a memory of my cousin and me deciding to walk in our bare feet the whole way from the beach on that road. Every ten metres we would stop and cry out, ‘look how far we walked!’ That…

Last week I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Quite literally. I’d done the too long walk across the rippled sand and now I didn’t have the strength to get home. My mum phoned dad and he drove his 4×4 over the rough hill road to get me. Problem was, there were…

Last week I was in a slow-moving queue in a sports shop. As I shared an exasperated look with another customer, she turned to her friend and said loudly, ‘if I’d known it would take this long, I’d have brought a picnic.’ We all laughed, forgetting the heat, expense and stress of our surroundings for…

Pushing down on me, pressing down on you.*

Do you ever find that, already at your wit’s end, something new explodes in and knocks you flat? Before that, you were saying to yourself, this is as much as I can take. Now, the next thing is pressing down on top of everything else.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to not have MS. More than anything. I would love to be able to walk beside my family wherever they go, to move with grace, to wear nice shoes, to not have this imprisoning, wretched, sometimes terrifying disease. BUT yet again I’m discovering an amazing capacity for kindness…