Motherload

This was the year I was going to crack it. I was determined to enjoy the summer holidays and family time. My daughter has just finished primary school, and this is her last summer before secondary. It feels like the right moment to push a little harder to get her to step gingerly out of the nest and start flapping her little wings. And it also feels like the right moment to get her to help clean the nest up, frankly. I put some activities in the diary, and sat back, thinking, "And they can amuse themselves around that skeleton structure". In those words, damn my hubris. As I sit here this evening, catatonic, I look back at the diary, and realise we've done an awful lot, and that I am simply tired. In the last fortnight, we have been to Sussex, the Cotswolds, and Wales, our son has starred in Frozen , I've had reflexology, and started running, I've worked on a book my daughter and I are writing, picked pounds of summer fruit, gone to an urban beach, daughter h...

Yesterday I made a glutinous Banoffee Pie for the first time in my life, so sweet that my son actually failed to finish it. The Banoffee Pie There's been a theme to desserts recently: (1) we've had some; (2) they've all been baked, brown and packed with sugar. The Salted Fudge After we came home from a brill 1970s stylee driving across Europe holiday (all 2700 miles of it, mostly un-air-conditioned, once we'd realized how much fuel aircon uses, and how pricey Italian petrol is), I felt the need to end August with a violent burst of baking. Suddenly, the dormant bread machine was mobilized, and produced streams of chewy pitta bread, and white loaves with glorious tanned muffin tops to match my own. We'd spent all our money on French motorway tolls, so I immediately reverted to type, and behaved as if we were in the Second World War, except with bananas. Out came the houmous recipe, and we all had to suffer through weeks of dubious chunky chickp...