Dulwich Divorcee

Christmas isn’t an easy time for any woman. You see us, battling around the shops, shoulders hunched, faces grim, as we do our best to grab the stuff that will, like magic pixie dust, transform our grumpy family (and isn’t every family grumpy in this cold, dark, wet, grey December?) into a Norman Rockwell festival [...]

I must say, sometimes my timing is brilliant. Accidentally, of course, but brilliant nonetheless. Take yesterday. There’d been a recipe in the Sunday papers for panettone. Now I have a bit of a panettone addiction. I can easily eat quantities of it that would frankly stun you, in a single sitting. A sensible person would [...]

A while ago I told you about Nat West’s paint-a-piggy-wig competition, more properly known as Pigs by Kids. The idea was to design a rival to the Nat West pig family of yore, those rather delicious ceramic figures which the bank gave away a decade or so ago and which have now become highly collectable, [...]

Now as you know I’m a very temperate soul (stop laughing at the back there) and hardly ever lose my rag, or should I say, my hand-embroidered chiffon square. But yesterday, dear readers, I did see red. I’d had one of those clubcard updates in the post from Tesco. Tesco is one of the few [...]

Ok. Can I just ask you this one question? Which do you think is the most aesthetically pleasing advent calendar? Is it this one, crafted from wood, hand-painted in dove grey with touches of pale teal and terracotta, and complete with its own personal Santa loitering by the door:   Or this one? A tacky, [...]

Hello lovely people, it’s review time again – with any luck you’ll find a bit of present inspiration here. I haven’t found any good tips in the papers this year – I nearly hurled my Guardian weekend section across the room on Saturday when one of their ‘experts’ opined that a scented candle was always [...]

Poor TL and I have been spending an inordinate amount of time at the dentist recently. I’d always thought he had wonderful teeth, as he never seemed to need a check-up and never mentioned any problems. Turns out he was probably ostriching. By the time the dentist saw him, things had turned nasty and, many [...]

I really can’t believe the news that the Church of England will not, after all, be appointing women bishops for at least five years. Ok, ok, I can sense you yawning already, but it is a serious issue and one which does affect all women, wherever in the world they may be. The joy of [...]

What a frustrating morning! Admittedly, I had completely over-reached myself, by scheduling my car’s MOT, a visit to the doctor and a filling at the dentist all one after another, but still. Grrrrrrr. And grrrr. And grrr. The first problem was that I had not been quite as efficient as I thought. I booked the [...]

While the subject of the loathsome Jimmy Saville is still creeping around, has anyone read a book called Wire in the Blood, by Val McDermid? It’s the first I’ve read by this author, and I picked it up largely because I heard her being interviewed on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 and I thought she [...]