Home Thoughts Weekly

‘You’re the family sandwich filling at the moment,’ says my dear fellow Choc Lit author, Linda Mitchelmore, ‘between the generation either side needing your help.’ To be fair, most of the time, all that’s required is a phone call, we’re not running around all over the place yet. Our surviving parents, by no means in their dotage, have the medical problems that come with age; aches, pains and the occasional referral which gives rise to concern. Our children are shaping their careers, settling down and even having children of their own.  It’s six years in April since I started writing Home Thoughts; pretty much unpublished, largely unread and free to let off a bit of playful steam. Lately, I’d begun to think this blog had run its course; family either side of me deserve a bit of privacy to get on with the nuts and bolts of their lives and months of grey skies, endless rain and constant cold have worn me down. Then a lovely reader left a very appreciative comment about Home Thoug...

Hurray! With a lot of help from the bride-to-be, I’ve managed to find the makings of an outfit for my daughter’s wedding.   Basically the secret seems to be to try everything on, something I’m not very keen to do by myself but which was much more fun with Lily to help.   Along the way we rejected The Intestine Dress (a dusky pink shade which I love but which drains me of all colour, in a tube design which was probably meant for someone seven foot tall) several Frumps R Us numbers (just because you are the mother of the bride doesn’t mean that you’re ready to look as, only Milla  could put it, like a sofa cover) and a couple of Trying Too Hard dresses (just because you can, doesn’t mean you should). In the end I bought a shift dress and jacket in a sea-green colour (which, by amazing coincidence, MiL tells me is just the colour she’s been looking at) that seems to hit the right note between mumsy at one end and mutton-dressed-as-lamb at the other....