You may not be old enough to remember the R Whites advert? The one that had a resounding chorus of “I’m a secret lemonade drinker ….R Whites….R Whites..”. Well I don’t know what made me think of it but it seemed appropriate. You see, I’m on holiday. No – I don’t drink lemonade only on holiday – it wasn’t that. In the original advert – the ‘Dad’ sneaks down to the fridge in the middle of theRead More
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going….” Didn’t Billy Idol sing that? Oh, no; it was Billy Ocean, in flares, I seem to recall from some repeat TOTP videos somewhere. I was in a friends garden over the weekend and it was flying ant time. All a bit yuk if you don’t like flying ants (and I don’t) but actually they are a marvellous creature. Ants are marvellous, full stop. They are pre-programmedRead More
Well, it is that time of year, isn’t it? And as I thinking about packing our cases I thought how different I am from my best friend. You see one of us crams everything possible into the case – just in case, and with no real plan. The other is meticulous in writing a list of everything possible that could be needed. There are pro’s and cons to each of course. OK I admit it – I am theRead More
I had a fabulous day out last weekend. I went with a friend of mine to Lacock, a very gorgeous village in the Cotswolds. It’s a National Trust village and is home to Lacock Abbey as well as the Fox Talbot museum (Fox Talbot being one of the founders of the new science of capturing pictures on paper i.e. photography..!). It is also slightly less, ahem, ‘scientific’ as it was where the Duchess ofRead More
No, it’s not the start of a shaggy dog story……you know – a builder and an architect went into a pub…..it’s an observation. I was at a friends house at the weekend, and her other half is a builder. They have a lovely house, but the last 3 or 4 times I have been – which spans a period of maybe 6 months – there has been an unfinished archway where they have knocked through a wall toRead More
When you were a child, did you play Chinese Whispers? You know that game where you all sit in a line and someone starts at one end with a sentence and tells that sentence to the person next to them, then that person tells the person next to them and so on until the message gets to the end of the line and then the last person says what they heard. Usually what is saidRead More
Actually that’s not true. No-one calls ME the Human Calculator. That is what some of the kids at school call my son. It is because he is so flippin’ good at mental arithmetic. Which is great. And that’s only one of his many talents. (I would say that because I am his Mum – but it is true). And actually – we all have talents which to us seem easy but to other people mightRead More
I was talking to a client the other day who had was complaining of being too busy. I think we can all relate to that one! However, as we spoke in more detail about what was happening she came to a startling revelation. She was the bottleneck in her business. And the reason she was the bottleneck was the same reason as her ‘over busyness’. What causes this is a desire to give the best possible result/service toRead More
There I was. Walking down a London street a few weeks back on a Sunday morning and I was presented with a real-life picture of that old joke about lightbulbs (except, obvs, it wasn’t lightbulbs but men watching someone else dig up the pavement…all 5 of them.). I was bemused as I walked past them; there was no sense from them that ‘Oi, we ought to be getting on with work, lads’. No. Perhaps theyRead More
Do you have sugar in your tea? Or your coffee? Perhaps you have a biscuit addiction, or can’t resist a cake in the afternoon? We know it is bad for us, don’t we, but we just can’t help ourselves. It’s not our fault / we enjoy it too much / life would be boring without it.Why do we do stuff that we know is not good for us?It’s because we are stuck, stuck in ourRead More