My husband had been in hospital for three days, having had a partial knee replacement operation on the morning of the first day. Everything had gone as planned, he was very happy with the surgery not to mention the kindliness and competence…

It was the middle of the night, and I had gotten up to pee. I noticed a light coming from downstairs. That’s strange, I thought. No one else here but my sleeping husband. Oh dear, I will need to go down and turn it off. That was the immediate plan…

There are many happy grandmothers about. I know; I am one of them. We play with the kids, we bore our friends by talking about how wonderful they are and we generally feel very pleased with the way grandchildren have enhanced our lives…

We do not usually identify ourselves by what we are not. We do not say I am not blonde or not good at knitting or I do not come from a large family. Nor do other people think about these things when they think of us…

When I was young – pick any age up to 55 or so – I definitely thought that the future was a foreign country. It would be strange to me, and it would be difficult to cope with. And they would definitely “do things differently” there…

Now we are 60 (as A.A. Milne of Christopher Robin fame might have said), we are of an age to think about grandmothers. Perhaps you are a grandmother or hoping to be one. Perhaps your friends are grandmothers…

There are certain things we all know about our country’s ways. You grow up knowing them, like the National Anthem. Or, in the US, how to salute the flag. You can’t even remember where you first learned them…

I got diagnosed with Covid two weeks ago. But it is SO last year! No, worse than that, it is so 2021!! Nobody gets it now. The world has moved on. Hardly anyone wears masks these days. Or worries about the odd cough. We all think it has gone away…

When you were younger but already adult, your parents most likely helped you in every way they could. Not everyone has such help, but a huge number of us do. And perhaps your grandparents did the same. Maybe it was financial help…

Things don’t always turn out as expected. More often than not, I think, the expectations were probably too optimistic in the first place and the surprise is an unwelcome one. This is a lovely story of the reverse…