Mind The Gap: Resuming a Career After Cancer

Gaps on your CV can be tricky to handle and explain away to employers and mine had a rather long, awkward silence on it thanks to time spent enduring treatment for breast cancer after being diagnosed in 2017. It wasn’t...

The Year of Living Intravenously

A year has passed by.  A whole year.  In fact, it’s a year and a month since the day I was told I had cancer.  In most ways I’m out the other side now although you are never the same....

The Botanical Bedroom Shelf

For the last year or so, I've been trying to transform my bedroom into some sort of botanical/tropical haven (I previously wrote about it here).  Then life got in the way of such trivialities (our four year old was seriously...

The rise of the Blue Lizard empire (tales of endless parcels, invisible zips and overlocked seams)

I’ve been trying to write this blog post for most of this year but events conspire against me.  I actually did knuckle down and write it once, and then the entire thing mysteriously vanished, unrecoverable and unsaved.  Meanwhile, the story...

Wounds

It's the middle of summer and I'm stood on the stairs in the nursery, on my way to collect my one year old.  I run into a mum I know vaguely and the conversation starts off normally. 'That's fantastic that...

The Journey Home…

I'm at the nursery collecting Marigold.  When I walk into the building I often have a lapse of memory and pause as I work out which child to collect first, then I remember there's only one today.  A preschooler walks...

Rising to the surface

'Mummy...' A little voice cries out in the half darkness 'Mummy.  Mummmm-meeeeeeee.  MUUUUUMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEEE' I roll my eyes and curse.  It's 2.15am and I've had precisely 10 minutes' sleep since the last request.  And before that, she was awake for a...

The girl who wanted to be a mermaid

I normally write on here about fabric and the other stuff in my house, but a week ago today our lives changed immeasurably and I thought now would be a good time to write it down. We have two little...

The Hallway Overhaul

One of the downsides of living in a victorian terrace is the long, narrow dark hall.  It was kind of manageable though until children arrived and then it gradually evolved into its recent state of trip hazard theme park with...