Author: beckyjo125

There’s a rat in my kitchen!

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Tuesday 19 March 2019
Another new skill is added to my repertoire – this time, it’s pest control !!

It’s after 10 pm as I reach home from tonight’s rehearsal. I am pretty hungry and tired, but all thoughts of food and sleep are cast aside as I espy a parcel on my bookcase. My SparkPod Ultrasonic Pest Repeller has arrived – hip hip hooray!!

The girls are convinced that we have mice in the loft, following a few nights of ‘strange scratching’ noises. Now I do try to take most things on …but rodents are my limit. So I shot straight online to locate a skilled mouse remover, whereupon I came across the world of ultrasonic solutions to pest problems! They had absolutely rave reviews and so I was enticed to give home remedy one chance to succeed before I call in the pros!

And here it is! Feeling quite giddy with excitement, I rip open the packaging … oh goody there are three of them but yikes ….they are plug in devices and I don’t think there’s a socket in my loft! Undeterred, even though it’s now close to 11pm, I turn the garage upside down to find my extension lead and am teetering up the stairs, with a SparkPod repeller under my chin and a chair (to stand on) in one hand and the extension lead in the other, when Prom Dress Daughter potters out. She shares my delight and upon hearing that they also deter spiders, whisks the device away and plugs it happily into her own room! ‘Never mind‘ I think smugly, ‘I have 2 more!‘

Sensibly I decide to leave the chair and extension lead in the bedroom that leads to the loft before popping back downstairs to get devices 2 and 3 and now I do hit an unstoppable barrier. In that bedroom, sleeping soundly like an angel is my eldest daughter! I do come to my senses and realise that I do need to resume this escapade tomorrow. Prom Dress daughter and I cheer ourselves up by plugging all three devices into various sockets around the house before I pack her off to bed and direct myself to the kitchen for a snack that’s now almost a midnight feast.

‘Til tomorrow rodents…

Time to think

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Friday 8 March 2019

Aug 2018: visiting Lissadell House


My house is quiet and full of space … and it’s utter bliss! Small Boy is out with friends and the children’s Dad has taken both girls out for tea. I have wine, I have egg and chips and I have precious hour of peace to stop and think about the week that has passed by.

It’s been very much my kind of week at work. Always on the go, with a couple of new projects reaching their peak and the demands of organising evening events and public presentations. And always full of buzz and excitement, such a welcome change from the usual routine. I sip on my wine and reflect on how much I happier I am at work when there’s something new and the challenging focus on. Perhaps instead of ‘giving up’ chocolate for Lent this year, I should be ‘taking up’ or even ‘making’up’ new opportunities in the workplace.

And as today is ‘International Women/s Day’, there’s no shortage of inspiring words to strengthen my resolve. I choose Countess Markievicz of Lissadell House, which I visited in Ireland last Summer,
“…. take up your responsibilities and be prepared to go
your own way, depending for safety on
your own courage, 
your own truth and 
your own common sense,
and not on the problematic chivalry of the men you may meet on the way ..”

Now clearly, chilvalrous men are rather less of a problem for me than for the lovely Countess! Otherwise, her call, to be guided by your own truth and courage, really does chime with me. I raise a glass to taking on fresh challenges and to learning new things, to aiming high and encouraging my children to do the same. I am revived and inspired, it has been good to have some time to think…

What’s NOT on your CV?

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Pancake Tuesday 2019


Feeling pretty proud today as I review my ‘to do list’ for last week:

  • House painted
  • Weeds killed
  • Prom dress bought
  • Driving lessons booked
  • First College Parent Evening survived

Believe me, behind every tick there’s a story, and tonight proves to be no exception. The next item on my list is a school ‘Mock Job Interview’ for Prom-dress daughter…

Prom-dress daughter is the style guru of our household, with a passion for Pinterest pages on design and decor. It is she who guided me away from a dull Magnolia paint of the house last week, and persuaded me to be a little bolder with colour. When she tidies a room or re-organises Small Boy’s den of despair, it really does look as if the professionals have been in. She’s a dab hand with a flat pack, daring with DIY, never misses an episode of ‘Grand Designs‘ and mathematics is her favourite subject at school. So Architecture seemed a reasonable pick for her Mock Job’. We spent a Sunday afternoon penning our ‘Mock Application Letter’ and tonight we set off to school, a little nervously, into the unknown world of interviews for fictional jobs with fictional bosses…

It’s an abrupt start. Prom-dress daughter’s interviewer has a free slot and so instead of joining me in the waiting area for a calming coffee she is whisked off instantly for her grilling. I am catching up with a friend, over a polystyrene cuppa, when she re-appears. Her 20 minute interview has only taken 12 minutes so I know it can’t have gone too well. In addition although she is smiling bravely and telling everyone that it has been ‘fine‘, the eyes that meet mine are screaming ‘Get me out of here!‘ We hurry back to the car, pausing only to collect our ‘Invitation to the Prom’ – the reward for completing the interview – as we pass School Reception.

Back in the car she relives the experience. The interviewer claimed to be so impressed with her ‘Mock Application Letter’ that he elected to put aside the standard question sheet and use some of his own! So it is that Prom-dress daughter, a shy teenager, sitting in a school room, talking to a complete stranger about a job that doesn’t exist, is completely thrown by an opening question of
“Tell me something that’s not on your CV?” followed by
“What’s the biggest decision you’ve ever had to make?” and
“Who has been the most inspirational figure in your life so far?”
(It’s not quite the ‘Tell me a little bit about yourself and why you are interested in Architecture‘ that we were expecting!)

” I said you mum” she continues, shrugging forlornly , ‘Would it have been better to say Zaha Hadid?”

That pulls me back from my own thoughts, (about my biggest life decisions), with a jolt! I hug my lovely girl and announce that we are ‘chalking this one up to experience’. She may feel she could have done better and can do next time, when there is an actual job to apply for. Surely that is the whole point of the ‘Mock experience’. At least the questions can’t actually get any worse and she has told the make-believe boss that I am her greatest inspiration in life -so Zaha Hadid, stand in line!!

We treat ourselves to take-away food, as a reward for coming out the other side of a tricky ordeal, and by the time I am flipping 9 pm pancakes for my trusty trio, her smile is beginning to creep back. I’ll tell you what’s not on my CV, Mr Make-believe Boss, it’s that I have the three greatest children in the world…

This mum runs too

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1 March 2019
March gets off to a great start with the return of the work Friday Run Club!

I have been running for about 5 years now. It began with me huffing and puffing my way ‘around the block’ which was exactly a mile. Gradually, I’ve built it up, to a Park Run, then a first 10K, and I now manage a couple of 5 or 6 miles runs each week. It is the perfect sport for a single parent because it’s cheap (all you need is a pair of running shoes), and it’s totally flexible (you go running when you have a spare hour.) But what a huge struggle and often a dreaded chore it was at first! I think it was about 3 years ago, that someone recommended running a bit slower and that was a complete revelation! I went from enduring running to loving it overnight! I did slow down and now I run further and, ironically, faster than I ever thought possible. To quote Matt Frazier, author of ‘No-Meat Athlete Cookbook’,
“If all you know of running is running fast, then you don’t know running. You know gym class mile-run torture, and almost nobody (not even runners) thrive on that kind of pain. If you’re having trouble running consistently, just slow down.”

Anyway, back to our Friday Run Club. Friday was once a day when I just didn’t want to get up. The teens have a Friday rehearsal which finishes at 7 and I am the ‘pick-up’ parent! By the time I finish work it’s not possible to make the pick up if I go home first. So every Friday, I’d leave for work at 7:30 am, and finally make it back home by 7:30 pm, instantly have to start cooking so that our hungry and grumpy household could eat before 9! There was also dismal, dead time at the end of the working day when I’d try, but utterly fail, to be productive and get ahead with jobs for Monday. Let’s be honest, who wants to work late on a Friday?

At the start of October, a work colleague suggested a Friday run and it has been a ‘Friday transformation’ ! My week now ends with a small group of us running together for an hour, clad in bright clothes (even I’ve dug out a pink running top) and never once mentioning, ‘pace’ or ‘PBs’. Instead for the first 2 miles we talk work, and with every sentence and every step I feel work being put aside and laid to rest until the start of the next week. For the next 2 miles, as the incline we’ve been climbing steadily intensifies in steepness, I actually can’t speak! But I come back to life on the glorious 2 mile descent back to work , and now we discuss weekend plans and life, the good parts and the bad. ‘Never stop!’ is our motto, but if anyone gets tired or feels under the weather we all slow down. It’s running for fitness but, more importantly, for friendship and it is the perfect start to my weekend. Back home, Small Boy’s Friday technology class have been cooking since January and so we have had the added bonus of (cooking class) meals ready on the stroke of 7:30 pm too!

Logo of the Doing it for Laura campaign

I marvel at the achievements of Jasmine Pace, a mum who became the first female winner of the Ultra Marathon. At Christmas, one of our runners bought us all buffs in support of the ‘Doing it for Laura‘ campaign, that you may have seen on the the BBC news, and I marvel, not only at this inspirational teen, but at her runner mum, too. I marvel at my own mum friends who have run with their children, or around their children, and now complete astonishing running feats. And because of them and because running keeps me fit and sane and because running’s made me appreciate that my amazing workmates are so much more than the jobs they do, I am proud to say ‘This mum runs too…”

Some days are an up-hill …

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24 February 2019
A mood of back-to-school gloom hovers over the house today and for me the weather is only making it worse! Whilst everyone else rejoices in the unseasonably warm weather, my single-mum eyes just look out of the window and think ‘Garden!‘

Assisted by my trusty team of decorators, I was feeling on top of the house and my grown-up homestead duties until the sun came out! The garden, which I’d hoped to cheerfully ignore until mid-April, is suddenly a verdant abundance of weeds and rapidly growing grass and it demands more immediate attention. With a sinking, and all too familiar, feeling of being impossibly overwhelmed, I add ‘weeds’ and ‘lawn’ to my to do list! Coping with the endless demands, of all the adult jobs at home, is a daily battle for any single parent and, for me, the garden has to be the worst. I think about starting a Single-Parent co-operative where we all help each other out. I don’t mind a bit of extra ironing or a few more bathrooms to clean, if someone is going to weed my garden, and deal with drains and pipes in return! However, as that’s not likely to happen soon, I consider heading out in search of weedkiller.

But the thought of gardening is not the worst thing for me today. The sunny weather has reminded me of the ‘pretty nice fella’ I broke up with a few months ago. This is just his kind of day. I picture him dusting down his shorts and heading out for a glorious hilly bike ride. I remember how he used to come clattering triumphantly back from his adventures into my kitchen, a little bit sweaty, but his face alive with energy and smiles.And I know he won’t be clattering into my kitchen anymore, because he clatters into someone else’s now, and that hurts. And what hurts even more, is that the sunny weather marks the arrival of Spring and I realise that it’s not enough that I have made it through Winter, I have to make it through Spring, Summer and all the seasons ahead. I have to make it through year upon year without my ‘pretty nice’ friend, partner and lover by my side. And that is …heartbreaking…

I am overcome by a wave of sadness and I know I need to do something to stop it, because if I let these tears start to fall I don’t think they will ever stop. I decide that weed killer can wait, pull on my trainers and head out for a run instead. One thing to love about running is that it’s a perfect analogy for life. You know that the reward for every up-hill struggle is a downhill where you can recover and repair. There’s sometimes even a fantastic finishing line. And although I know there’s no magical happy ending for me this time, I’ll settle or a bit of recovery and repair right now …

Slam dunk!

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Thursday 21 February 2019

One definite advantage of single parenting is that you are always learning new skills. This week it was assembling a basket ball stand…

Small Boy ordered the stand in question with his birthday money, and it is delivered at the start of the week.

It’s quite a large parcel to arrive in a house already coping with decorators. By the end of Tuesday, we all bear the scars of at least one encounter with a sticky doorway and Small Boy holds the record, with gloss paint on his feet, his arm and his bum! In addition, we have the daily challenge of rehousing the contents of whichever room the decorators next plan to whip back into shape with their rollers and brushes.

In the middle of this interior upheaval, it seems perfectly sensible to ask Small Boy to wait until Friday for his hoop to be built.


‘Friday is going to be dry‘ I reason, ‘We shall be able to put it all together outside‘ 

Small Boy however is a third child, and he has learned to ignore parental procrastination if he ever wants to get anything done. And so it is that I return home on Tuesday night, from a night out of cocktails and catching-up, to find not only the entire contents of the lounge in my kitchen but also a semi-assembled basketball stand!

I decide to bow to the inevitable. Next morning, with two of us on the job, we make quick work of the allen keys, nuts and bolts and presently the only job remaining is sand, to weigh down the base. I head out to Wickes on this seemingly simple mission but soon find myself gazing in bewilderment at an unfathomable array of choices for our ballast. Who knew that there were such things as ‘sharp sand’, ‘tarmac sand’,  ‘flagging sand’ , ‘yellow’ and  ‘grey’ and ‘silver’ sand  in this world? Thankfully, a very helpful woman points me towards the ‘Building Sand’ shelf and I am soon staggering back to my car with two 25kg bags clearly up to the task of ensuring that our basket ball stand, once filled, will never move again!

Back home, despite the grey gloom and drizzle, Small Boy and I wheel the stand outside and now face a whole new challenge. How on earth do we get 50kg of heavy wet sand into the tiny aperture available on the plastic base?

Small Boy is an inventive child and fashions a few funnels out of paper and card but none of them are a match for the sand and eventually we are just scooping the stuff up with an old kitchen jug and ramming it through the hole. Our hands and clothes are covered in soggy red sand, we see the decorators chortling away from an upstairs window and we thank the Lord that next doors’ builders had finished their tea break before we began. We brave it out, as a team, to the very end. Triumphantly we wheel the completed stand into place and high five with gritty hands and grubby grins. 

Not the prettiest of jobs but we did get the job done and it feels great.  As Small Boy happily heads out for a few slam dunks, I do feel like a half decent mum….

Spring time spruce up!

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Tuesday 19 February 2019
Marie Kondo eat your heart out!

Half term has met Spring fever and we are clearing out and sprucing up with avengeance. A seemingly endless array of outgrown, sometimes never worn, teenage clobber is tempting buyers on Ebay. Kitchen and lounge cupboards have been ruthlessly cleared and we have made several satisfied trips to the Charity Shop and the tip. But best of all, decorators are in my house…

Three years ago, I did naively take on the task of decorating all three of the kids’ bedrooms myself. It was a week of untold misery, chaos, back pain and as, one by one, my initially enthusiatic trio of helpers trickled away, isolation from the world. I got paint on the carpet, on the furniture, on the bed sheets and I swear some of it is still in my hair. ‘Never again!’ I vowed by the end and have been saving up,  since that day, to get other rooms done by a professional. That day has arrived and it’s a whole new world. I sit sipping coffee, taking a breather from our Spring clean fest,  whilst Soft Taupe brings warmth to my lounge and Goose Down’ grey, adds pazzazz to the kitchen. I have nodded sagely and I hope convincingly, as the the decorators have talked a new language of  ‘filling cracks and holes’, ’emulsion’ and ‘primer’. I have certainly made them plentiful cups of coffee and think that tomorrow my gratitude will extend to a plate of biscuits too!

But that can wait for tomorrow because tonight I am out with a friend exploring some of the newest  bars in our corner of the North West. Which means, even though there’s no paint under my nails, I better start getting  myself spruced up…

I have no words…

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18 February 2019
Prom-dress daughter is safely back from her school History trip to Krakow. This time the pick up is 1am and when we get home we make two drinks and sit on her bed to look at her pictures.

I see the photos she’s taken in the Jewish Quarter and those she’s been allowed to take at Schindler’s Factory, Auschwitz and Birkenau. It is deeply shocking and …. I have no words….

Book Club

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Friday 15 February 2019

Book Club


Dropped my middle child, Prom-dress daughter, off at 2:30 am this morning for a school trip. Not wearing her prom dress, I hasten to add, rather sporting a new Top Shop jumper and very excited. I found the ungodly hour a little harder to cope with and the 6 am work alarm, chirping into action after only a few hours of snatched sleep, particularly tough. Somehow I made my way through a busy and productive day but I am now fading fast and relishing the thought of curling up in bed with ‘The Lover‘ …this month’s Book Club read!

Inspired by last Summer’s holiday in Sligo, and a trip to the Yeats Visitor Centre, I joined a Book Club a few months ago. If you don’t know it, the Sligo Yeats Visitor Centre is a pretty inauspicious building and I’d probably have seen off the display of artifacts and extracts in under 10 minutes, had it not been for the tour guide. Brimming with enthusiasm, knowledge and a whole ton of Irish charm, this man brought the world of Yeats, in an era of political unrest and a thirst for national self-determination, to life. Suddenly I was reading every word in the place with fresh eyes and a brain stretched completely out of its comfort zone and I was converted. Converted away from the ‘easy read’ drivel clogging up my Kindle and back to a world I’d once loved of challenging, beautifully crafted literature, steeped in the culture of its time that stirs your emotions and sometimes makes your head hurt with questions and conflicts. I did think seriously about signing up for some OU literature course, but looked at the calendar, had a reality check and have put that one on hold for a few years. Small steps then, I’d start reading better books and discussing them with better minds than mine. I’d join a Book Club. 

After a fair bit of searching I found one. We meet each month in a local pub. It’s actually the pub of my teenage years and I do often giggle inwardly, wondering what my teenage self would make of our room of middle-agers, nursing our drinks, and talking books! That is …when we do talk books! A little like Yeats himself, who, I learned last Summer, found time not only to discuss matters literary but also to talk politics and pursue affairs of the heart, we can often wander from the plot of the book.  Current affairs, personal memories, stirred by a setting or a story-line, and even Piers Morgan have all been topics of debate but that’s the joy of a good book; you never know quite where the journey will take you! And the books have been good. I’ve read more and read better in the last 4 months than I have in the last 4 years. Much as I would recommend running as the physical exercise of choice for any parent, but particularly us doughty single parents, I’d go for reading for the mind. For me it’s affordable, it fits into any spare moment and it’s a total brain stretch, sparking curiosity, overtaking my thoughts and just transporting me away from the every-day grind for a few precious moments each day. 

But enough blogging for tonight, ‘The Lover‘  is calling this weary woman to bed …

The pen is mightier than the sword!

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Thursday 14 February 2019
This week Top Shop and I went into battle over the case of the ‘Missing Parcel’. I followed the suggested Customer Service channels, only to be fobbed off with standard replies about 48 hour response windows and nobody taking responsibilty for anything. The thing is, I’d paid for next day delivery, because I didn’t have 48 hours to spare. And, I’m a single mum who is used to fighting her corner, so I abandoned politeness and patience with their incompetence and wrote this review on Trust Pilot.

The parcel that still hasn’t arrived.
Ordered online from Top Shop on 10th Feb and paid £6 for next day delivery. Received a confirmation email from Top Shop on 10th .
That was the last I heard from Top Shop until, by the end of 12th Feb, we wondered where our parcel was. No emails and no texts from Top Shop but, on my account, a tracking message claiming that my parcel of 4 winter jumpers had been delivered ‘through your letter box’. I contacted them to say that we had no parcel and that fitting jumpers through my letter-sized letter box was unlikely. Thereupon, they suggested checking with ‘neighbours’ and in my ‘safe place’. I did check the shed and the bins. I even knocked on a few neighbours’ doors before I came to my senses and thought ‘What are you doing? You have paid for premium delivery, not to be out after dark scouring bins and randomly knocking on doors!’
Contacted Top Shop on 13th requesting a call, no call came so I called them. I now have to wait for 48 hours for them to contact Yodel. I have no parcel, a £75 hole in my account, and no confidence at all that Top Shop will ever resolve this. Learn from my mistakes and AVOID this store!!

Lo and behold, within 12 hours of the review being published, the parcel arrives!  (Along with a 10% discount code.) Will modify my review when my delivery charge is refunded, but until then it’s a celebratory cup of tea raised to that old adage,  ‘The pen is mightier than the sword!’