Flower arranging - such a lovely sounding activity.  Peaceful, colourful, relaxing unless you grew up with my flame-haired volcano of a mother.  Spring is here and the daffodils are nodding, the snowdrops are peeping, blossoms are warming up for their big entrance. ...

“The Hurling” is my and Mum’s code for a situation where you get so frustrated, angry and irrational, the only thing to do is hurl things.  “I had a hurling last week, Sonia darling” Mum told me once with a mischievous giggle in her voice.  She’d hurled two cups of coffee over the care home fence as it had got too cold – no doubt losing essential temperature while she was throwing biscuits into the laps of her fellow residents.   She referred to another hurling recently, but couldn’t quite remember why she’d done it; something to do with clothes.    Knowing not to directly question or contradict her I told her that I felt like having one myself last Friday.  She went quiet for a while, breathing hard into the telephone, took a sharp breath and asked “But you didn’t though, did you? Promise me you didn’t”.

I once told Les Dawson a Mum anecdote and he said, “I’ll probably use that in my act.” He was amused by the growing number of landlords and landladies in the UK and told this wonderful story on-air when I was working for BBC Radio 2. When he complained about the...

There’s nothing quite like a funeral for raising the blood pressure. I’ve taken Mum to a few and each one has been a disaster on the day, a hilarious story the day after. When Mum’s best friend at the care home died a few years ago, Mum banged on the coffin with her...