Last week I discovered the reason why my eleven year old wouldn’t play his clarinet in front of people. I put it down to lack of practice, but I was wrong.

When you can’t do the things you always did, when circumstances have robbed you of any luxury, when you have to drop everything for someone else, what are you left with?

No thankyou. It feels like this year things are starting even earlier than usual. Some shops have always choked us with cinnamon and hurt our eyes with glitter months before they should,

What’s yours? Last week I noticed that Facebook have a new thing where they show people’s ‘stories’. Maybe it’s compensating for the fact that a single snapshot of a pouting thirty year old does not tell us anything about them, but I doubt it.

When I was growing up there was no TV in the house. I used to hide the fact because it was so out of the ordinary.

My Kingdom for a chair.

For a long time I tried to cover it- only unfolding my walking stick at the last possible minute, surreptitiously leaning against walls, not ticking boxes that would slap a label on me, seeking out quiet streets where there were no eyes watching.