We all have watershed moments in the course of our lives. Days when, from then on, things become notably different. The day you left home, the day you got married (or moved in together), the day you had your first child – all days signifying…

A lot of people, I find, have a close friend who does not make sense. Someone who just doesn’t ‘fit’ with other aspects of their life, and no one from outside can quite understand why they are friends at all. Such friendships can be especially meaningful…

As your children take that giant step of becoming parents themselves, what do you feel about how they are doing? Some grandmothers are highly impressed with the way their grandchildren are being brought up. Others are disappointed…

As winter slowly turns into spring, most people turn their thoughts to warmer weather, flowers in the park and, probably, the birds and the bees. These are all good things to welcome, in my view. But what I really like in the late spring, right up to the summer solstice…

I heard an expression the other day that stopped me in my tracks. It had the ring of a famous saying, although that turned out not to be the case. But more importantly, it had some real profundity. It said, simply, “Life ends in the middle of a sentence…

By the time you are in your mid-70s and there has been no major health crisis, you know you have been lucky. If you have a spouse (or partner) and ‘you’ means both of you, you know you have been doubly lucky. Now aged 79 and my husband aged 80…

Ask almost any woman about her new grandchild and she will light up all over, like a young woman in love. Grandmothers are invariably thrilled to bits. Perhaps that is all we need to know. We have become grandmothers and we love it…

As we move into our ‘senior years’, a whole lot of new questions begin to emerge in our day-to-day thinking. Some of us may look into the future and begin to worry about coping with long term illness or, indeed, dying. Others, in contrast, may begin…

It is a common practice to see the world in a binary fashion. For instance, no matter the factor of division, there usually seem to be two types of people. Extroverts and introverts. Meat eaters and vegetarians…

We’re all a bit scared right now. Indeed, if we aren’t, we should be. The tentacles of Covid-19 are everywhere and getting worse. And we are warned that health systems are under serious strain. In England, where the new, more contagious…