And after hand me down?  

When I began to break out of that me-as-mini-version-of-my-mother?

Hooped petticoats, fed with faux-whalebone strips to stand out like a lampshade, space between hem and thigh filled with flounced and ruffled netting.…

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At least they’d had the summer.

It wouldn’t be true to say that it had been entirely blissful – she hadn’t enjoyed feeling so…

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Alex Comfort’s ‘Joy of Sex’ was pretty mysterious if you didn’t actually know what was meant by ‘sex’.    Starting from a position of ignorance, the hardback book hidden in the bottom of my parents’ wardrobe didn’t enlighten me very much at all.

Reading it, I wondered why people needed to worry about 'contraception', when it was obvious to me, at about eight years old, that if you didn’t want children you simply didn’t do whatever was causing the problem.   The most memorable line was…

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One day she told me he’d hit her.
He’d been a boxer, and he’d hit her.
He was six feet three, she five foot four, and he’d hit her

Even then I could see how she’d incite it.
Even then I knew her telling me was wrong.
And one evening soon after I lay awake in terror, hearing thumping, over and over, unable to account for it, assuming he was hitting her again – but it was the thumping of the iron on the ironing board.

We just wanted to be married, so we could live together, sleep together.



My mother wanted to be the Mother of the Bride and endlessly discuss weddings with her work colleagues, so would have preferred us to wait another six months at least.



His parents wanted us to get married in church, despite the fact that neither of us were believers. The hoops they made us jump through, in their attempts to persuade us included a deeply funny tea party to which his mother’d invited the… Continue

As parents we generally do our best to bring our children up as well-balanced individuals, but since we too are only human it is impossible to predict which of our mistakes, perceived or otherwise, will be forever remembered, forever cited as the reason for that child’s lack of ...success? love? employment? happiness? ... or which aspects of their upbringing they will, in hindsight, thank us for.… Continue

‘First borns, as a general rule, do not tend to marry first borns’ was the gist of one of those ragbag statistics which occasionally rise to consciousness; my initial response had been along the lines of “Ha – proved you wrong there!”…

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It has always seemed to me that journals self-consciously kept for future generations to read are likely to be less than honest because the writer will, intentionally or not, temper their words so as not to cause distress or destroy memories by expressing what was at the time an honestly held opinion. (And in writing this I am reminded that my elder son couldn’t wait for the future to inform me of his…

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Had my self-esteem been low at the time, the heartfelt spontaneity of his remark could well have shattered it completely.



When I periodically review, as one does, the state and progress of our marriage, it does occasionally occur to me to wonder whether, as an over-tall, shy and socially inept teenager - NHS glasses and the nickname of ‘Drip’ – I’d not grabbed the first interested male and hung on for dear life. At the time it certainly didn’t feel like that – right from the start,… Continue

Apprehensive, because the summons had had undertones she could not fathom, she sat facing her mother and the next door neighbour, side by side in well-rehearsed collusion: “We were worried you’d thought your father wasn’t your father.”



Her mind see-sawed and swung ... what on EARTH were they on about ... or about to tell her?



“We thought that because he was always strict, you’d thought he didn’t love you and you weren’t really his daughter”



At eight years old… Continue