Our Summer Season Blogs
Find all of our Summer Season Blogs here.
The Emergency Chicken – the Summer Sequel!
The secret of the chicken that I keep in my freezer – just in case – is now out there. Up until now, it is something that I have done for as long as I can remember. Since ‘as long as I can remember’ happens to be just before my son was born, that means I have been doing this for at least the last fifteen years. You know what they say, time flies when you are having fun!I’ve also realised that not only do I have an emergency chicken in the freezer, I have an emergency packet of puff pastry in there too. Want to know why? It’s there because you just never know when you might need to throw together an urgent cheese and tomato tart.
How (not) to cope in a crisis
At some time in your life, you will find yourself dealing with an emergency. Now, we all deal with emergencies every day. However, these tend to be more of the ‘Emergency Chicken’ variety. The type that is known as a ‘Crisis Management’ issue. You know the ones; it’s the catastrophes that happen which require quick thinking and improvisation. It’s this kind of thing: “Today, minutes before the most important job interview I have ever had, the jacket I was wearing split from top to bottom at the back, just as I was getting out of the lift.”
Or
“I was delivering the cake to the wedding reception and I fell down the steps of the hotel and the cake was in bits all over the floor.”
The Best Things About Summer
When the sun shines and the weather is clear (and not too hot), the Summer is the best time of the year. Having lovely long days, where the sun comes up early and goes to bed late is just wonderful.
The Lizard that Talks to Me (Part 1)
This week the Lizard has been chatting away. It comes when I am worried or when I am under pressure. The more pressure or stress that I am under, the louder it gets. It will wake me up at 2.30am, leaving me turning over and over in bed, almost begging it to shut up and leave me alone so that I can go back to sleep. It’s the voice that is with me when I give up trying and sit drinking tea and eating chocolate biscuits at 3am.
The Lizard that Talks to Me (Part 2)
And now you know about the Lizard that talks to me. I think I should explain a little bit more.
Sabre-Toothed Tigers lived on earth between 23 million and 2.6 million years ago. We also know that Woolly Mammoths were wandering about at least a thousand years after the first Pyramids were built in Egypt. Us human beings were spending our time trying to co-exist with these animals and probably under constant threat of being savaged and eaten by them. To be honest, it’s a complete surprise that we got anything done other than run away.
Questions That Never Have An Answer
One Sunday, as I prepped the dinner (a joy given that normally it is a race to see what I can get defrosted and throw together), over the radio came the comment ‘…and this week, some questions that never have an answer.’ It got the rusty cogs of my addled and sleep deprived parts of my brain turning.
The example questions that were put were ‘Why can you never find the TV remote?’ ‘Why does the top of the ketchup bottle always get bunged up’. I laughed, realising that they are very pertinent.
Be Good Enough
Driving to school one morning, Chris Evans announced on Virgin Radio that ‘perfection is the enemy of good enough’. It had been the usual chaotic start to the day. I was running around making breakfast, looking for lost shoes, answering emails, yelling the time to the kids every fifteen minutes and praying that they really were getting dressed. The traffic had presented its usual problems and as is routine, I found myself hurtling along the back roads, hoping that nothing would be coming in the opposite direction.
Just as I rounded a particularly sharp bend in the wrong gear, Chris’s words reached my ears. ‘You don’t need to be perfect; you just need to be good enough’.