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…

There has never been a year I have looked forward to Christmas as much.  Warmth, light and cheer are all I want.  The past couple of months have brought a lot of stress and strain; the prevailing weather has been storms of pain and darkness.  Worst thing of all was that I lost a wonderful…

So, after much trial and tumult, we finally moved in.  That event was stressful enough, but it didn’t end there.  Last Friday three builders came, put up scaffolding and started on the roof in the lounge.  Wee girl and I arrived home to find the only room we could access was the kitchen, through the…

The vendors of our new house announced suddenly that they were taking the summer house with them.  Now, that lovely egg shell blue shed had been one of the first things that won my heart over to the house, and the kids were very excited about it too.  The photos on the schedule placed it…