Mummy's Rant

Looking good is hard work. And expensive. And time consuming. So this busy mummy advocates DIY beauty.  Of course you can’t guarantee that the results will be as professional, as natural or as complete as the professionals manage but as a stop gap between proper treatments it’s okay. I’ve a drawer or two full of beauty products that rarely see the light of day. But now that summer has teased us with its presence over the bank holiday weekend (we won’t mention the torrential rain we’ve endured today, biblical is the word) it’s time to unpack the face pack and invest in some heavy duty moisturiser.  Root touch up colours are regular visitors to the house, otherwise I’d need to book in to see Ian at Eclipse every fortnight. Or else risk micro-RM saying things like “Your hair is so beautiful mummy but why have you got a white line in it?” From the mouth of babes. Then there’s the pedi-products... soaks and exfoliators, pumice and massagers, and every shade of red varnish y...

Suitably emboldened by the response to my last blog , I'm ready to confess everything. Life with my husband can be interesting. By which I mean frustrating. And hilarious. We've been together 15 years this September, and there are many moments which make me laugh when I remember them. Like the time we went to Lake Garda and he unplugged the maid's vacuum cleaner as he dragged his case down the corridor, and then hid when she came out of a room to investigate what happened. When he went to Egypt, he gate crashed a wedding, was chased by men with guns and sent me a picture of himself being photo-bombed by a camel. Then there was the time we were putting together a log shed and our neighbour's borrowed drill was making funny noises. Cue the neighbour's voice reaching through our yew hedge to ask if it was perhaps on a hammer setting. I do most of the cooking in the house, although he poaches the best eggs I've ever had. The first meal he made me is now known ...

I'm not a material girl in this material world. Aside from the fact that I'm past 40 and therefore can only be referred to as a girl by my grandmother's generation, I'm not one for fancy trappings. Yes, I like Ted Baker, but I also wear Primarche . I love M&S food but I also shop at Aldi (pronounced Al-di, not All-di). My point is that I enjoy the finer things in life, but don't need them. On the matter of finer things, karma is up there. I'm desperately resisting the aching urge to say "I told you so" to a number of people. So to maintain some dignity I'm going to blog in generalist terms, in the hope that it's as cathartic as my writing usually is.  I've got a fiendish friend sitting on my shoulder. There used to be a slight nick, not quite big enough to be a chip but definitely some shallow damage, but that's healed and now the devil's taken up residence. Every once in a while, he'll lean across and whisper in my ea...

When was the last time you had a hit of hilarity that left you breathless, soundless, and quite likely to pee yourself? The type of belly laugh that keeps you giggling every time you think of it for some time. I'm lucky - there's lots of laughter in our house, usually because my husband makes me laugh. Not always intentionally either. In the years BC, my husband and I went on a road trip in Canada. We planned to travel the Icefields Parkway from Banff to Jasper and back again. The trip was amazing, with the exception of a trip round the local natural spring on a hangover, but it does go down in history as the first time I really, really laughed at  with my life-partner. My husband has never claimed to be an aficionado of fowl and fauna - he once famously called a peacock a penguin - but on one particular stop near a beautiful glacier-fed lake on our way to Jasper, an exceptionally large bird touched down nearby. Imagine a crow crossed with the giant chicken doing the rou...

It's been ages since I last wrote in you. True, I've been writing for other people and things are going pretty well, so I have been busy. Hopefully this little entry will make up for the days of neglect you've suffered. I wanted to tell you about a conversation I had with my husband. We're not normally in the bathroom at the same time - we follow a complicated routine every evening that accommodates my husband's OCD tendencies so I'm usually in bed already by the time he is ready to begin his evening toilette. Last night however, a series of events led to us both in the en suite at the same time. He was brushing his teeth and I was lamenting how quickly my eyebrows grow. Seriously, since I saw Ian and he eradicated the most obvious signs of my aging, I've not needed to look in a mirror - let's face it, I don't go out - and in the last couple of days my normally beautifully shaped brows have advanced in to no man's land unnoticed. Anyway, I ...