I was a late-comer to Facebook. It was only because almost all of my friends started posting their photos on the site rather than sending them through email that I begrudgingly signed on or in, as the case may be. Of course I’m as happy as a pig in mud now, having re-connected with friends…
Read More...
I have written before about friendship and how lucky I am to still have friends from a hundred years ago when we were pig-tailed girls in school but friendship can be a delicate construct. I started thinking about this after reading a recent post by a friend about how friendships are maintained and our expectations of…
Read More...
Yesterday I went to a funeral. A friend’s mother. She was 88, frail, with dementia. It’s a bitter pill we have to swallow, aging, but, as the cliché goes, it’s better than the alternative – although perhaps less so towards the end. As is the way now, there was a slide show of her life. …
Read More...
Religion is an interesting proposition in our house. I am – using a recently discovered and the most apt description of all time – a “submarine Catholic“, surfacing only at Christmas and Easter. My dad was an “armchair Catholic “, arguing that God could hear him just as clearly from our house as from any Church…
Read More...
I was 13 the first time I travelled internationally. It was 1971, Alitalia still flew out of Sydney and smoking was still allowed on planes. People would dress up to fly and it was still a big deal. We winged our way to Rome via Bombay, as it was called then, in a smoke-filled metal…
Read More...
“Does every woman secretly crave a daughter?” Well top marks for an attention-grabbing title for this recent opinion piece in one of our Sunday magazines. My personal and very articulate response which may or may not have been uttered out loud was – “Ummmm, no, that would be a no”. But as a mother to one…
Read More...
As we hurtle headlong towards St Valentine’s Day – named after the Patron Saint of florists and Hallmark cards – I was struck by a particular radio ad urging men to spend vast amounts of money on something (obviously not a very effective ad) because “flowers are boring and poetry is lame“. Poetry is…
Read More...
Oh—-my—-God. I’m in the process of a MASSIVE clean-out of BIBLICAL proportions and I came across one of my English books from 1972. So…. I’m 14 years old – the same age as my son is now – and have written a poem. It’s a corker. You will understand why when you read it but…
Read More...
My ex-pat friend based in Los Angeles recently wrote a piece describing what she misses about Australian food and even though I’ve been back from Atlanta for 13 years, there are still things I miss about America; the things that always seem to come up in conversation with either my husband or other people and…
Read More...
Dear Mr Zuckerberg I can’t thank you enough for giving us Facebook and its frivolous fluff. From fabulous felines and marvellous memes to pugnacious puppies and talented teens. From all the lost animals and those that are saved to children angelic and badly behaved. Best friends and selfies and women with tatts to worldwide obsession…
Read More...