Home Thoughts Weekly

Blossom has tagged me to share six random things about myself. After a completely cr*p week everything feels pretty random at the moment so, off the top of my head:- 1. I am a tad under 5’4’’ tall. 2. Yesterday my lovely daughters, Lily and Rose, sent me a surprise gift to cheer me up after ‘Fighting the Tide got rejected. A bouquet of roses and lisianthus arrived together with a copy of the latest Louise Rennison’s confessions of Georgia Nicholson, ‘Stop in the Name of Pants’. I may have work to do on the writing front but I am very fortunate to have such wonderful daughters. In the same post a framed photo arrived that Rose and Si had taken during their stay with us. It shows Tom and me looking like Pooh and Piglet walking down the beach hand in hand, our backs to the camera and says a lot about us. My thanks to Si who thought of the idea and chose the frame – what a nice man! 3. In a couple of hours time I am off to sea again and I’m pretty apprehensive after our boat ‘ La Rev...

The Bad 1. Mil has become one of those domestic accidents stats that get trotted out at the end of the year; the ones where slippers rear up to savage their wearers and trousers lay traps for the unwary. The ones that sound funny but end up in a trip to casualty, if not worse. Poor Mil woke up to see a spider on the ceiling, directly above her head and couldn’t go back to sleep knowing it was there. Rather than wake Dil in the next room, she trotted off to fetch a broom to coax it down herself. Now Mil is a fan of the Marshmallow Bed, very high and very squashy, so you know what happened, don’t you? One minute Mil was swatting a spider and the next she was on the floor, slammed up against the wall, wondering if she would ever walk again. Fortunately she doesn’t seem to have sustained any permanent damage, nor even, it seems, any broken bones but she’s terribly shaken and needs a lot of ‘‘phone’ support at the moment. We’ll have to see how she goes and hope her confidence returns...

This is a photo of my lovely daughter, known to you as Lily, in her role as Ambassador for Cancer Research UK, meeting Constituency Assembly Member for Cardiff Central, Jenny Randerson. Lily is one of 40 volunteer campaigners who have been recruited across Wales by the charity to seek improvements in cancer services and policy for Wales. Cancer Research UK’s Cancer 2020 Campaign calls for a Cancer Plan for Wales which would focus on prioritising cancer prevention, improving early presentation, detection and screening and the uniform provision of cancer treatment across the country. Many of the charity’s ambassadors are themselves cancer patients and survivors but Lily volunteered because of what had happened in our family. In her words: ‘When my grandfather developed pancreatic cancer in 2004 one of the few positives was that he was treated at a nearby hospital, the Royal Marsden, the first hospital in the world dedicated purely to treatment and research of cancer. Although there wa...

I never do it outside but love it in the gym. The Libertines do it for me but Dirty Pretty Things don’t. There’s a certain frisson that comes from Dave Gahan roaring ‘You can’t tell me that you don’t want it,’ as I tackle a 6% incline but it’s Razorlight and the lovely Johnny Borrell singing ‘Somewhere Else’ that really sets my pulse racing. I refer, of course, to my running playlist. I’m a recent convert to running to music. Until now I’ve always run outside where I’m keenly aware of potential danger. Back in the days when I lived between a busy town and the Downs there was too much of a risk from commuters reversing out their drives without looking at one end and race horses and weirdos in the bushes at the other to contemplate wearing headphones. These days my route takes me through narrow winding country lanes where lone runners aren’t the first thing on drivers’ minds so it’s essential to keep a sharp ear open for traffic. Besides, the purist in me just likes to stay in tou...