Looking to negotiate an increase in the amount of pocket money she receives, my 9-year old drives a hard bargain.

“It’s not my fault I was born three years after my sister. So why should I get less pocket money than her?”

She’s got a point, but life is unfair, I say, “so get used to it.” Continue reading →

It’s been almost two years since I stopped drinking alcohol. As much as I enjoyed having a glass of wine with my dinner, not to mention champagne, I wasn’t enjoying the headache and bad mood that followed, so I decided to quit. It was a personal decision and in no way a moral one, yet I was taken aback by the number of people who seemed to take my no-booze policy as an affront to their own alcohol consumption. Continue reading →

Socialist or capitalist? Take the test. Those words are from a children’s book on politics, which my 9-year old daughter currently favours, and she delights in testing everyone who enters through our front door. Depending on your answers, you’ll end up either as a pure socialist, pure capitalist, mixed capitalist, or a social democrat.

Given my daughter’s penchant for negotiating pocket money, I worried the test might reveal her as a pure capitalist, but she tested positive as a social democrat, as did I.

That I should turn out to be a social democrat was expected given my Scandinavian roots, but I was pleased to see that my political-minded Scandi genes had passed on to my British born daughter. Especially as aged five, she displayed some worrying tendencies towards English nationalism when she suggested that I, her Swedish mother, should move back to Sweden where I belonged. Continue reading →

November – officially it is still autumn, but with the clocks turned back and the darkness descending on us an hour earlier than I’d like, it feels more like the beginning of winter. Or the beginning of the end of the world.

It’s the time of year when I wish I could do what bears do and go into hibernation until the spring. Imagine going to sleep for months and not having to deal with the stress brought on by general elections, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Brexit. What bliss! Continue reading →