Everydaystranger

It’s Autumn here.
No really. It really is.
The mornings start off like this:

and this:

I know it seems crazy – it’s only the first of September after all. But temperatures have dipped down in the late afternoons and evenings, hitting 6C/42F. We’ve put the winter duvet on the bed and even had [...]

When I walk through the streets of London to get to the office, leaves blow around the pavement, collecting around resting pigeons and the odd end of a badly smoked cigarette. If you stand still long enough, you can see a plastic bag whist by you in a breeze, its blue stripes of the [...]

We watch “Mistresses” in this house, because while I publicly eschew reality and trash TV, I will gleefully and happily embrace trash-like TV if it has “BBC Series” written on the box. I love a good bit of dosh, particularly if said plot involves four women who drink, hang out, and generally may need [...]

I’m a bit of a foodie. This might come across as deeply ironic, seeing as I’ve long had an eating disorder, however some experts hypothesize that anorexics and bulemics are some of the more food-obsessed people out there. Somehow this computes, as while I’ve met a lot of anorexics, I’ve never met one [...]

They say you shouldn’t be blogging on a weekend.
They say you should post first thing in the morning to boost traffic.
Whoever “they” are, I’m ignoring them.
Yesterday I went into London, this time for an entirely different meeting altogether. Courtesy of the wonderful British Mummy Bloggers site, an editor and I stumbled upon each other. [...]

Today I trooped into the office for several meetings and then left to attend my latest in my clutch of consultants (I didn’t know what the aggregate for “consultant” was. I was leaning towards “pack” but that sounded a bit ferocious. “Pride” made me want to hurl. I veered towards “clutch” at [...]

Yesterday I took the twins to see In the Night Garden Live at the O2 in London. Melissa took the train up with us to help transport, and once at the door of the event I went in with the twins on my own.
They were confined (rather unhappily) to their pram, because parading them [...]

Yesterday a white van came and took away the babies’ beds. I included all their bedding and a few of their older cot toys that they no longer play with. The beds and linens and toys are all destined for a new nursery and it’s good and I get that it’s like Toy [...]

Now for something a little lighter.
I’m a complete cut-and-dried bookworm, always have been, always will be. As I once mentioned, I once entered a competition to see how much one could read in one month, and I blew the competition out of the water by reading 11,111 pages in one month. I was [...]

We went camping this weekend with all of Alastair’s extended family. Six adults, eight children, and one very happy doggy all in our family tents in New Forest, a campsite in the very southern tip of England. It was all about barbecues and fishing and admiring some of the many wild ponies that [...]

I had two days away this week at an account meeting. It wasn’t fun but the job got done, I spent the night in a nameless faceless soulless hotel and my expense claim is yet to be entered.
The night I stayed over I met with some of my team for dinner and drinks. [...]

Their cots have been taken down, this time for good.

The twins moved into their big beds last week and although we put up their cots in the spare room “just in case”, the two love their beds and are doing just fine. The cots move on to their new homes shortly. [...]

Last week I had to trek up north (north, in my terms, is typically anything north of London. In this instance I had to take the M1, which means really, really north. I almost had a nosebleed.) I had to help out last minute with an account which isn’t mine but which [...]

I’ve got a bit of an issue, and it’s with myself.
Hear me out here.
So I have a background in anthropology, which has sweet fuck-all to do with my current job. It does, however, mean I’m a Class A geek and like everything from the etymology of words (my current reading [...]

We went camping.
As you know.
We bought a great big fuck-off tent, which we assembled in the back garden prior to going because we didn’t want to look like newbie assholes.

(That’s Jeff in the background. Jeff is fab. Jeff’s face is also not going to be shown here, which you probably also [...]

I’ve been quiet because of being crazy busy with some things I can talk about, and some I can’t. We have something going on that has taken a fair amount of my mental capacity lately, and I can’t write about it, not right now. It’s fine – I’m ok, Alastair’s ok, all are [...]

First, they shared the same bassinette in the Labour and Delivery Unit (while swaddled in many blankets and wearing preemie baby clothes).

Then they shared the same cot.

Then they went into two separate cots four months after they arrived – this photo is the last day they shared a cot.

Almost two years ago we lowered their [...]

In a little over two months, the Lemonheads will turn three.
Staggering, isn’t it? Three. Three. Years. Old. I can’t believe it. I think it was yesterday that they were born. Or, more likely, they’ve been here for eleven hundred years, since the dawn of time [...]

Sometimes it’s intriguing, this idea that you can lift the lid on the past and breathe in.
It’s easy to do when you’ve been blogging for over 7 years. You can lift the lid off the archives and see who you were at any given point in time, because at no point in [...]

The last of the great “wedding and honeymoon” posts from me, then I’ll leave you alone with all the romantic shit, ok?
We left last Monday, the 5th of July, on a flight to Antigua – we had been booked to go to Croatia, which remains high on the list for us both, but we had [...]