A writer’s guide to reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

What can a close reading of Never Let Me Go, by Nobel Prize in literature winner Kazuo Ishiguro teach you as a writer?

How to Act like a Traveller at Home

True travel addicts share how they keep the travel vibe alive on home turf.

Easter – remembering and looking forward

For me Easter will always be a special holiday. It is a holiday which smells, not like chocolate, but like boat fuel mixed with salt water. It feels like crisp mornings which will turn into sunny days. For most of my life Easter was spent camping in Mallacoota. A seaside town on the very edge…

The Sleep Series – Part two. The Bermuda Triangle

I am committed to writing positive sleep stories, and I will get there, but first I need to write out the Bermuda triangle of bad bed times we experienced this week – and then I will get to something positive! Just now I am nostalgic for good bedtimes. It has been a bad week for…

The Sleep Series – Part one. I can’t remember where I slept last night

  I walked in the door this afternoon and it flashed across my mind, for no particular reason that I could not remember where I slept last night. I don't have a wild lifestyle. I just have two small children.   Sleeping Woman For the first few weeks after going into his own bed Rafa…

I will teach my children lies

I will teach them that a mothers love and a fathers love can protect them from everything...  

How To Feed Your Soul

Have you already lost that New Year glow? That warm fuzzy feeling that this year things will go OK, things will be accomplished. You will be calm, intelligent and accomplished? I reached a proper low around the middle of January. The bottom out involved words like: stomach bug, medical fasting, colonoscopy*, husband projectile vomiting, two…

Five Tips from a One Time Group Travel Virgin

On 'that' trip. Scotland 2011 In I my pre-mum, pre-writing about travel with babies life I was often to be found curled up with a good book. On occasion I got myself out of the house and had an adventure or two. If you read until the end of my rather long tale of group travel virgin blog you…

Tale of a Group Travel Virgin

I wrote a travel story recently about my first experience of group travel. It saw me looking back to a trip that I took ten years ago. Writing it was quite an interesting journey in itself – funny how when you look back patterns reveal themselves. That's one of the reasons I love writing. The…

Counting down to Christmas

A week or so to go: Christmas is coming, Christmas is coming, Christmas is coming... and I've done very little. Edinburgh is bloated with pre-Christmas activities. I think perhaps the intention is to distract us from the gloomy weather setting in – so the locals feel cold and are indoctrinated to think 'ah Christmas is…