Words from a Bird

Working with the glorious general public has its moments, as I found out while helping in my lovely friend Emma's shop. 'When you say she is 'large', do you mean like me?  I'm fairly solid looking?'  Such was the question put to a customer shopping for his wife who was casing the joint for the perfect Christmas dress.  It shouldn't have taken him long to be fair.  There are at least three dresses in the shop which are perfect for Christmas Day.  I should know, I bought all of them and quite fancy doing a Mariah Carey with costume changes between the Prosecco and the sprouts and then between the After Eights and the Alka Seltzer.   Anyway, I digress.  Back to the man shopping for a dress. I'd given him the opportunity to say whether his wife was smaller or larger than me, but what he actually said floored me. 'Yes, she's about the same as you.  A SIZE EIGHTEEN'. Well.  I managed to keep smiling and was terribly polite and help

We are getting our Christmas tree next week... You probably remember from previous years' diatribes that the husband has a penchant for a big one when it comes to a Norwegian spruce.  Big enough to warrant having all male children and the girls' partners on hand to lever the tree into a bucket of stones without wiping out the pictures on the walls or the downstairs loo. (One year this was inaccessible for two weeks.  Say no more).  But this year is different.  For some unfathomable reason, the Tree Farm is insisting that we collect our tree next Thursday.  I expect that this is because when gone it will free up space for six normal trees, a five foot tall wicker reindeer, a whole shelf of Nativity scenes and a sledge (well, you never know).  But the problem is that on a Thursday afternoon, it will just be me and the husband wrestling the tree into the house.  With all of our children in gainful employment or cooped up in a university library, we are very thin on the gr

Ladies, I have a confession to make... After eleven months, twenty seven days, twenty hours and thirty two minutes, I broke my New Year's resolution. As you probably remember, this was the resolution not to buy myself any new clothes or shoes for the whole of 2019.  The nearer it got to the moment when I could actually go and replenish my dwindling wardrobe, the harder it got.  So hard in fact that when I was working at the lovely Emma's vintage shop last Thursday, I finally cracked. And boy, did I crack in style... The trouble is that ever since Emma opened her shop, I have known exactly which dresses I was going to buy as soon as Big Ben completed his New Year's Eve job of ringing in 2020.  And so, when I said those fatal words to Emma on Thursday about 'trying on the dresses just in case they don't look as fabulous as I think they are going to look' I knew that I was a lost cause. Ten minutes later, I had three dresses, a skirt, two cardi

Well, I've done it again. Every November, I make myself promise that I will pace myself in December and not say 'yes' to every single invite I happen to get. We are not even in December yet, but I am already signed up for five Christmas parties, and my pocket diary looks like a spider has jumped into an inkwell and done the lambada across it.  Any empty space is rapidly being eaten up by various Christmas invites.  Throw in a couple of afternoons helping out at my gorgeous friend Emma's fab shop, some blood donation, a sneaky facial, an oven clean (long overdue as having to use a torch to see if my chicken is cooked as the lightbulb is thickly covered in gunk) and an appointment at the hospital for someone to take a look at my stupid knee, and there is little time for anything else before Christmas Day. We have a full house this year.  My lovely sister in law and her beau are down for a week or so, and I something between sixteen and eighteen for dinner.  N