Spring house makeover

At long last, spring is in the air! I can't say I feel the urge to spring-clean, but all this lovely sunshine is raising my energy levels on the house front. We moved into a period home last October and are in the throes of figuring out what needs renovating. The to-do list seems to keep on growing...

Exhibitors at the House & Garden Show

We could live here quite happily for another year or so without doing anything, but we're under pressure to get the heavy lifting out the way before my daughter takes her GCSEs next summer. 

We're all in the same boat

There is something about navigating through water in a small vessel that has come to symbolise our struggle as human beings. The concept of a voyage, with people pitched against the elements, has enjoyed mythical status throughout time, from the Aeneid and Moby Dick to J.K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. On Sunday my family went canoeing with our cousins, adding - I felt - our small contribution to the boating canon.

Paddling down Hennerton Backwater
Credit: William Lam

In a flotilla of three canoes - our inflatable and two hired Canadian canoes - we paddled down an idyllic stretch of the River Thames from Henley to Wargrave. We may have been unlikely literary heroes in our shorts and hoodies, but the way in which each crew tackled the challenge of reaching the George & Dragon pub in Wargrave spoke volumes about our attitudes to life.

Foreign fields

Travel diary
WWI sites in Belgium and France

Every evening in the Belgian town of Ypres, people of all nationalities gather at the Menin Gate to remember the young men who died in the Great War. At eight o'clock sharp, a group of buglers sound the last post to commemorate more than 54,000 missing Commonwealth soldiers. Their names are engraved on the honey-coloured walls, interminable lists of men who went missing in action. They died in the fields around Ypres, but their bodies have never been found or identified. 

Crowds gather at the Menin Gate

This ceremony has been performed every evening since 1928, apart from when Ypres was under German occupation during the second-world war. I attended with my family one Sunday in late May at the beginning of a half-term trip to visit the sites of World War I. The aim was to enrich the kids' understanding of the war, although I think we all came away with a deeper sense of what went on during this terrible period of history, viewed by some as a European civil war.

A woman like Sally

People watching: 
Sally Curson, founder of Face Matters skincare

As I grow older I find myself becoming obsessed with little details such as wiping the kitchen surfaces and tidying away stray felt-tip pens. It is not a trait that I am proud of - in fact I actively fight against this instinct to control and order my immediate surroundings. Somehow it feels so unBohemian, so suburban, and worst of all it implies a disregard for the important things in life.

Sally: 'Focus on the important issues'

Nevertheless, most mornings, my son and I have our habitual disagreement over whether he has made his bed, drawn his curtains and hung up his pyjamas. My daughter, cut from the same genetic mould as her neat-freak mother, never waits to be asked. "But Mummy, I really don't care if my bed is not made," wails my son. "I like it all messy." Still I persist in urging him to follow my rules.

A few weeks ago, I met a woman who takes a different view. Lying on a couch, my face wrapped in warm flannels, I found myself in conversation with Sally Curson, a beauty therapist and founder of the Face Matters anti-ageing skincare range. She gives facials at Fenwicks in Bond Street and runs a successful business selling beautiful, silicon-based products (which I have recently reviewed for my lovely friends at CountryWives). 

Teenage fuel

My 11-year old daughter was bemoaning the fact that she was too tall the other day. Having just started secondary school, she was embarrassed that she was towering above many of the older girls. In an attempt to comfort her, I started to tell her that our culture prized superlatively tall women in the form of supermodels... then I stopped. Where was I heading with this? Was I encouraging her to aspire to being bony and underfed? Heaven forbid!

Having fun with food...
© Roman Sluka | Dreamstime.com

As mothers, we are advised not to comment on our own weight or even focus too much on the way our daughters look. Our girls and boys are growing up in a society where the pressure to look attractive/desirable is almost overwhelming. According to a recent government survey, two-thirds of British teenage girls consider themselves too fat. No wonder then that admissions to UK hospitals for teenagers with eating disorders have almost doubled in the past three years. To add to the complexity of the problem, obesity in children is also on the rise.

Food, glorious food!

Food has never been more high profile. What with Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Day, the rise of the Insta-foodies, worries over school dinners and the obesity scare, food has become the latest Holy Grail. To some extent, we are all defined by our diet. Over the years, I have evolved from eating pasta sauce in a jar during my student days, to posh ready meals, Annabel Karmel - when the kids came along - and then onto buckwheat, avocado and brown rice. In the course of that journey, I have become increasingly interested in how diet affects our health... and learnt of course how to pronounce quinoa! 

On a food journey: Alex and Emma

Following my previous post about the dangers of processed sugar, I spent a few hours last week talking to Alex, a working mum who has spent several months overhauling her diet with help from Emma Wildgoose, a nutritional advisor and owner of Eat Real Food. Six months ago, at the start of their collaboration, Alex was feeling overweight, plagued by irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and concerned about various health issues. "I was very aware that my whole diet and eating habits were totally messed up," she says candidly. 

During an interview with both of them, Emma recalls how Alex initially felt quite defensive about trying to lose weight. "She kept saying, 'If it doesn't happen, it doesn't matter.'" Nodding her head, Alex admits that she didn't really believe it would work. Six months later, such scepticism has turned to excitement after she lost nearly two stone (11 kilos). "What I love best about losing weight is that I've got my neck back," Alex says gleefully, running her hands over her throat. "No more double chin!"

Bitter sweet

Last Sunday I spent half an hour rifling through the contents of my larder cupboard and checking the sugar count in our cereals, sauces and tins. For months I have been reading about the damaging effects of processed sugar - sweet poison as one food campaigner calls it - but only recently have I started to take notice. Ransacking the cupboard brought home to me just how much sugar has been added to our food without us realising - if sugar is in the top three on the list of ingredients, there's probably too much of it.

Emma's wants to pack nutrients into baking!

I partly owe my Damascene conversion to a friend who has recently studied to be a nutritional advisor and now runs her own business offering advice and cookery lessons. Emma Wildgoose, owner of Eat Real Food, is on a campaign to bring nutrients back into food, which means that she avoids using processed sugar and white flour in the recipes she designs. "In combination, these two ingredients have a catastrophic effect on blood sugar levels," she says. Her mission is also to "get children unhinged from sugar and pack into baking as many nutrients as possible".

The end of thin fascism?

There's nothing like wearing a bikini for a week to make you feel a little body-conscious. My family spent half term in a hotel in Gran Canaria, surrounded by a palm trees and two glistening swimming-pools. Each day, after we had plundered the buffet breakfast, we lay like beached whales on our sun loungers. By day three, my husband and I were feeling so bloated we volunteered for poolside yoga, followed by some thrashing about in the water (aka aqua aerobics). 

Holiday excess: one too many helpings...

When we got home, after a week of gluttony, I was too afraid to get on the scales. On the plane home, however, I was comforted to read an article ('I was born with curves') in The Sunday Times about an American, plus-size model called Ashley Graham. This young woman, apparently a British size 18, is a ravishing beauty who turns heads in restaurants and brings traffic to a halt outside. She also loves pizza and dips her crusts in Nutella. "My butt rolls, it's really out there," she told the journalist, Eleanor Mills. 

Beauty, truth and the third alien

Hermaphrodite Mum

Three kids and a single mum

Middle Child came back from school a while ago and told me he had some important news. He had won a starring role in his school nativity play! That's great, I said. Joseph? One of the three kings? "Third alien," he said. Right. How many aliens are there? "Five," he said. Well, that's just brilliant! Of course he will always be my little star, even if his big break only amounted to three lines (one of which was said in unison with the other four aliens).

The third alien makes his debut
© Oleksandr Melnyk | Dreamstime.com

It was a fabulous school production nonetheless! Watching all those little people singing their hearts out never fails to make my eyes water. My favourite bit was when MC's best friend Laura (fourth alien) whipped up her costume in a frenzy of excitement and flashed her Peppa Pig pants at the audience.