String Revolution

Hardware! I love hardware. These are the accessories that came with my old Singer sewing machine, which I inherited from my great-aunts. (A Singer No. 201K, incidentally, with “rotating hook, reverse feed, for family use”.) Aren’t they marvellous-looking things?
I should confess straight off that I haven’t used a single one. When I was younger I [...]

It’s always illuminating to look at how we present things to children. We tend (in the West, anyway) to portray the world to them in a kind of sanitised, round-edged, Technicolor version of how we believe it to be – or perhaps how we would like it to be – which says a lot about [...]

Oh, friends, the swine flu thing has laid me low. (But not too low to start my post with an accidental iambic pentameter, I note.) I’m flattened. This is partly – even largely – because the Feaster has yet to shake the last few symptoms: he’s unusually limpetty, coughing and snotty, and sleeping like a [...]

It’s been quiet around here this past week, because the household has been felled by swine flu. The Feaster and I got it on Sunday, the Oyster on Tuesday. Niall either had it two weeks ago or will be getting it some day soon.
It knocked me over, attacked my children and scuppered my birthday, but [...]