Friends that is. Big and small. We’re just back from visiting our great friends in Italy, and their four wee ones (some not so wee now). As well as restocking the supplies of risotto rice, grana, and a certain small pasta that goes well in sausage casserole. It’s now nearly 8 years since R and …
Category archives: Moments
Scenes from a bus
Public transport. It’s a marvellous thing for writing inspiration, or even just a little entertainment at the end of a working day. Sights from today’s bus ride home: A Goth at a bus stop with black gloves with a skeleton pattern on the backs of the hands. As I tend to sit upstairs, I got …
In the wars
Yesterday I did some half-hearted moaning about life in one’s thirties; today there’s another phenomenon that seems to creep up with age. It’s well known (or well alleged) that women end up becoming like their mothers; I think the process is accelerated if you become a mum yourself.  Facing tiredness or shock, whatever the cause, the brain …
There’s no such thing as a free…
…Post-it note? But of course there is. A free pen. A free cotton bag. A free jute carbon neutral bag. In fact, a free policy booklet that you hadn’t planned on reading in the first place. Despite Scotland’s happy insistence on state schooling for the majority of its pupils, there’s clearly no such thing as …
And now from our reporter in…
Haven’t been able to file a report from abroad before. I’m sure it ought to be very exciting, full of drama and tension. Except I’m in Bonn, the town where it was said, by one of the diplomats in residence at the time, that ‘every day was a little like Sunday’. It’s certainly felt like it …