single-parenthood

Malham Cove

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Easter Monday 6 April 2026

Well there’s a walk to get your step count up!

The spectacular 230 foot limestone cliff of Malham Cove is our destination for a ‘nice Bank Holiday’ walk!

Golly – that looks steep!

Up to this point I am having the loveliest of days. A leisurely lie-in. Chauffered through the Yorkshire Dales by my favourite person. A tasty lunch of soup and sourdough at a trendy Skipton cafe. Blue skies and a rare bit of Spring sunshine and then… one very sheer cliff to scale!

Happily, in an apt analogy of life, climbing it isn’t actually as bad as thinking about it the trek ahead. Yes; there are dusty tracks and around 400 stone steps and yes; I do stop, at least once, feigning interest in ‘the view’ to catch my breath, but before too long we have reached the summit and the famed ‘Limestone Pavement”, resplendent in the April sunshine and a far cry from atmosphere of eerie desolation when it featured in the Harry Potter ‘ Deathly Hallows’ movie. Today by contrast, this maze of eroded limestone blocks is a lively scene of walkers gathering sit and chat, eat and drink and enjoy the view.

As readers of my blog will know, I love a Bank Holiday. Something about the communal day off, just fills the air with shared happiness and joy. Family time, friend time and a seemingly endless length of time. We wend our way back down, find a pub garden for a cheeky beer, before finally heading home.

Good times, good company … what more does anyone want from a day?

Small boy’s freshly baked bread …

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Tuesday 29 July 2025

“Mum, what’s for lunch?”

This is my nineteen year old son! I am in the middle of a work meeting and have been up since seven, he is still in his dressing gown and has not looked up from the X-Box screen for the last two hours! It is safe to say that I am not amused.

Making sure I am on meeting-mute, I call back ‘sort yourself out; I am busy‘ and then I return to the day job.

A couple of hours later, I head downstairs for a coffee break and… what a sight greets me! Smallboy still in dressing gown but vigorously kneading bread dough in the kitchen!

“What on earth are you doing?” I half-shriek

Smallboy give me a floury smile, and looking pretty pleased with himself explains

“Well you told me to sort my lunch out, there’s not a lot of food in the fridge, so I decided to make a loaf of bread”

Well there your have it! I can only laugh out loud. It is so typical of my third-born. My theory is that being born last into a house of three under-fives, there was so little attention left that he long ago gave up waiting to parental approval or permission before launching into his latest exploit.

As a tiny toddler, he learned to assemble lego models independently … because everyone else was ‘too busy‘. I often lost him in the large Supermarket near our SouthWest house .. and invariably found him sitting happily in the coin operated trains and planes outside the cafe. Then, of course, there was the building of the basket-ball hoop and … on and on it goes.

In Harper’s Bazaar around the time of the birth of Kate and William’s third child , an article claimed that

You get wiser parents with each kid ….So third-borns grow up with more relaxed boundaries. These are the children most likely to be creative and risk takers.

Well, ‘wiser parents’ or just more pre-occupied ones I’m not so sure? The traits, for the child however, they  definitely fit my son!

It is actually nearly 6pm by the time he has finished his masterpiece. As I have no advice to give, because I have never made bread, I set about putting the rest of our evening meal together. We triumphantly sit down to a feast of freshly baked bread, with cheeses, salad and red wine!

Tomorrow he’s baking again, as he thought that loaf number 1 was ‘a touch too dense‘. Many years of parenting him have taught me that it will just be easier to leave him to it…