Mum is enthralled with watching a repeat of the the royal wedding, but thinks the venue is rather odd. "It's a bit of a knockdown place don't you think?" sniffs my Mum.  A knockdown place Mum?  I'm not sure what you mean.  "Knockdown, you know!"  She's sounding...

A little pile of plain digestive biscuits, a cheeky smile and my mum's soft hand encasing mine - these are the presents I love.  In the old days she used to buy the most extraordinary array of gifts from extravagant to plain loopy.   Everything had a reason somewhere...

When did your mum tell you the REAL story about the birds and the bees?  in front of the school?  In the middle of a film screening?  No?  You do surprise me.  Forget trying to watch a film or a TV show with Mum around.  Anything on screen only serves as a trigger for...

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”.