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  It’s six years in April since I started writing Home Thoughts; pretty much unpublished, largely unread and free to let off a bit of playful steam.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...

S o much for, ‘Oh, I’m never ill!’ I studied enough Greek Lit at school to know all about hubris, the sin of pride, but lately all that boasting to myself about my robust health has come back to bite me. The latest attempt to evict the bug squatting inside my sinuses has seen me leaving the GP with seven varieties of medication and less five phials of blood. ‘This may leave a slight bruise,’ says the kindly nurse, removing the syringe.   ‘Oh no, I never bruise,’ I assure her, opening my big mouth again. Sure enough, I wake up the next morning with an arm like an old banana; all black, purple and yellow.  Tom and I go for a walk to the beach to blow the cobwebs away. On the way home, we attract lots of evil-looking flies, but it’s all right, because, as Dad and I always used to say to each other, confident that our rhesus negative blood repelled all blood-sucking insects, I never get bitten. Naturally, by the time I get in, my right thigh is sprouting a ...