While I’m aware that there are much bigger problems on the world stage this week, in our little corner today is a sad day. We lost a beautiful member of our farm and family.
Redford, the bantam chook that the previous owner asked us to adopt when we bought this house, was savaged by a dog this morning.
It seems silly to feel this blue about a chicken, but she was one of our motley crew, and the circumstances surrounding her death play heavy on my heart. Animals suffer in the wild, but I was proud of the happy life our chickens lived, roaming our garden, the true definition of free range, not the supermarket definition of free range, which if you actually look into it is not very free range at all. Continue reading
Hey age, you scurrilous demon, you thief of time and wrinkle-free skin. Could you just stop chipping away at my body, mind and soul?
They say growing old is a privilege afforded to few. And I am very grateful to still be here. But youth is beginning to fade like a setting sun over a cloudy horizon. And I’m sorry to see it go, before I’d really had a chance to befriend it, enjoy it and realise I had it.
Things I hate about drifting into my mid 30s:
I’ve STILL got spots. Weren’t they supposed to be a teenage thing? I’m kind of bored of them now.
Crows feet, or soften the blow and call them laughter lines. For indeed HA HA HA at ageing! It is hilarious. But seriously, wrinkles and spots? Not fair. Continue reading
One problem with being vegan is you’re trying to sail the same boat as some crew who want to head on the same course as you do (that is to say, into the sunset, smugly saving the world) but they want to get there on port tack, while you’re very much a starboard kind of skipper.
When I first wrote about going vegan, I could hardly say the word. Nine months later and I’m as vegan as a rhino. Your children’s children can thank me later – as can all the animals. And my own digestive system. Continue reading
It’s official. I’m statistically funnier than my sibling. Which makes me funnier than three entire people in this world – no mean feat. Or at least, if I read the fine print on a recent YouGov survey, I am like 46% of Youngest Sibling: ‘more likely to think they are funny’.
Which sounds to me like YouGov are trying to passive aggressively infer that we’re not as funny as we think we are. To which I say, knock knock. Who’s there? YouGov. YouGov who? You Gov me cos I’m funny. Continue reading
Fijian? Or just a cavalier attitude to sunscreen?
We build a brand. The minutiae of personality that has our friends say ‘Oh, typical Fred!’ and ‘Classic Sally!’ My brand was built on the story I’d been telling myself since I was a child, based loosely on a story my parents told me, with the necessary exaggerations and fabrications to create the unique human being I liked to think I was. Continue reading
This is what microcephaly looks like. Absolutely beautiful if you ask me.
Driving to the gym after a hard day at the office, Radio 4’s evening news bulletin drifted out of the stereo. I usually half-listen to the news and half-listen to the thoughts in my head while I half-concentrate on driving. But then I heard a familiar word and my ears pricked. ‘Microcephaly.’ A word my family know so well, but not a word I’d expect to hear on prime time news.
‘Oh hello microcephaly,’ I thought, turning up the volume. ‘What are you doing on the radio?’
It was the first of many times I’d hear about microcephaly in the coming weeks. Until then, it wasn’t a word known to many, but it is now. Continue reading
