Good old Amazon have recommended Balancing Senses: The Six Senses Spa Book by Kate O'Brien, presumably on the basis that last year I ordered As Music and Splendour from them. The fact that the Kate O'Brien who writes about luxury spas is not the Irish novelist who died in 1974 has clearly escaped their notice, although the idea of a spa is a very ( Read more... )

Sometimes, 'ffs' is the only appropriate reaction. If we're talking about 'matters of conscience', then how about placing traumatised children with the families who will be best able to cope with their needs? And why hasn't the BBC bothered to get a representative from the British Association for Adoption and Fostering to say that for some children ( Read more... )

Am really quite angry about this. Three things:

1) adoption is not a matter of providing 'goods, facilities and services' to adoptive parents, it's about finding families for children who need them;
2) for some of those children, same-sex couples (or single adopters) may well be the best families ( Read more... )

... not just people in unnecessary four-wheel drives, but people in great hulking silver unnecessary four-wheel drives who loom aggressively close in your rear-view mirror when you're already going at 60, and then cut you up when you're about to pull off a sliproad onto a dual carriageway. I hope you all catch something itchy.

... thus the Small Hare, at five o'clock this morning, lining up the toys in his cot.

Dear Mr Green and Blacks,

I hope you don't think I'm being pushy or anything, but do you think you could make some of your nice chocolate with dried apricots and flaked almonds in it? It really would be rather good.

Noteworthy point from my last batch of marking: one of my Year Sevens has a giant African land snail called, of all things, Passion. I suspect this could only happen on the edge of the Fens.

Yesterday was lovely: I went to Oxford, met up with Claire for lunch and CAKE! and catching up, and then met bopeepsheep and elleblue for a quick drink in Heroes before setting off to Borders for the Adam Ant booksigning. We queued for about an hour in a long snaky line that took us through the travel section (a bad place to be, at this stage in the academic year) ( Read more... )

It’s that time of year again, when it’s all golden and crunchy underfoot and the smell of woodsmoke is in the air, and I want to be in Bruges, dammit. I want to get the first Eurostar out of Waterloo and doze my way under the Channel and wake up at Brussel-Zuid, which always arrives a lot more quickly than I think it will, and then catch the Ostend ( Read more... )

Is this the scariest stuffed toy you've ever seen?