Early Morning

October 23, 2012 By in Harpenden, Photography Tags: , , , , , , , , , 24 Comments

For once I remembered to take my camera with me this morning, and after I’d dropped DorkySon at nursery I spent about twenty minutes messing around with it in the park. All the webs look so beautiful when they’re covered in dew, butI really need to get a tripod so that I can do my macro lens justice. There were lots more lovely shots that I wanted to get, but my hands were too shaky.

I ended up having a funny wee chat with a little boy who was on his way to school. He stopped and got off his scooter to see what I was up to – you could almost see him thinking ‘What’s that crazy lady doing crouching over in the bushes?’ – and asked to see some of the pictures on my camera. He liked the ones with spiders in, but thought the leaf ones were boring.

Always nice to get some honest feedback…

macro photography raindrops
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Time as Healer

October 22, 2012 By in Family Tags: , , , , 11 Comments

clock on marble fireplace

I have been reminded this week what an excellent healer time can be, and how much respect we ought to give it as something which can solve our problems.

I wrote up my birth story last week, and I was amazed at what a different perspective I was able to have writing it so long after the event.

I took copious notes shortly after giving birth to ensure that I would always have an accurate record of how things went chronologically, and also have a copy of all my medical notes, so it’s not that the hard facts have changed. It’s that something which traumatised me at the time and contributed massively to a year of postnatal depression is now something that I can genuinely laugh at in parts. I have not forgotten the difficult bits (of which there were many) but they don’t define me anymore. The passage of time means that I am no longer the woman who cries all the time while sitting on a doughnut cushion.

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Friendship

October 20, 2012 By in Family, Nostalgia Tags: , , 13 Comments

heart made of leaf

I’ve been pondering the notion of friendship a lot recently, and admitting to myself how hard it sometimes is to have your friends scattered all over the world as we do.

I had a lovely Skype chat with a friend in Australia the other day. I used to schedule those chats for a time when DorkySon was here, but now I wait and do it while he’s at nursery, otherwise the entire hour is taken up by him showing off all the cars in his toybox. We usually manage to catch up every couple of months, and it’s always great to hear how she is settling into her new life, how work is going and all the rest of it. But it’s not quite the same as when we used to sit and watch a chick flick together with a bottle of wine and a pizza. It’s especially hard when there are big things going on in each other’s lives. Celebrating good news (or commiserating about bad news) several weeks after the fact, via computer screen, doesn’t feel quite as effective as an in-person hug!
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Bloggers and Charities

October 19, 2012 By in Activism Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 21 Comments

Edinburgh poster art

I have seen quite a bit of grumbling recently from bloggers about the volume of charity requests that are dropping into their inboxes. I can only imagine that in the run up to Christmas such requests will become even more frequent.

To be honest, I don’t mind emails from charities too much myself because I have a fairly strict system for dealing with them.

I give the majority of my support to two charities – one big one (Save the Children) and one small one (PiggyBankKids) – and they are the only ones I’ll write about in any detail on the blog.
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