Motherload

My daughter and I have agreed to give something up for Lent. I'm giving up extra sugar, she's giving up excessive time online, and limiting it to half an hour ( not including schoolwork time ( for terms and conditions read the small print )). It's as impossible to give up sugar completely as it is to stay off the internet now. Some form of sugar is in most everything we eat, whether it's processed or not, and since my girl was given an iPad by her school, there is literally no way she will be able to remain internet-free from now on. The techno tsunami has washed into our house. In the run up to Lent I was eating more and more sugary nonsense, in a bid to cope with stress, and my lack of time to write. Meanwhile she was always creeping off to her room to message friends, and spend extraordinary amounts of her time on apps entitled things like, 'Tropical Fish Bundle', 'Hollywood U: Rising Stars', 'Kim Kardashian: Hollywood' etc. She has al...

My daughter has just blown my mind. After we came home just now, she called down the stairs, "I had 310 new WhatsApp messages!" I was duly horrified. What could I possibly do, the helpless middle-aged woman, against this new scourge? Just how much time was my child going to waste on pointless online activity? A few minutes later, I was pouring out a cup of tea (Fifty Shades of Earl Grey as a well-known stationery shop puts it), and she came down to collect it, nonchalantly telling me, "The messages didn't take that long to read. Most of them were on the new non-swearing chat I set up." The what now? My child, my eleven-year-old child, my child who is only a term into secondary school, had taken it upon herself to start a chat with her friends, saying, "You don't have to join in, but on this chat we're just not going to swear. The chat's not about 'not swearing', it can be like the other chats, except, we just don't swear....