Watching my children tuck in to afternoon tea in the manner of two starving hippos, I can’t help but wonder what Anna Russell, the 7th Duchess of Bedford, would think. The Duchess is widely considered to have started this quintessentially British tradition, which took root in England back in the 1840s. Not satisfied by the […]
Travel: Stapleford Park hotel review – a country house that’s grand, not grandiose
‘Are we really going to stay here?’ asked my little boy, wide-eyed, as we pulled up outside Stapleford Park Hotel. It’s a fair question, given the grandeur of this Grade-I listed country house in Melton Mowbray. The mansion’s pristine exterior is nothing short of magnificent, and the approach – through a 500-acre buffer of neat […]
Travel: il Magico Paese Di Natale, Govone – Our family trip to Italy
My job as a copywriter – which is mostly for travel brands – usually means I’m writing about exciting, exotic locations on the other side of the world while sitting at my desk in the draughty bay window of my bedroom (more about that in my post about how not to go freelance). Occasionally, though, it […]
Travel: So…We’re Flying To Turin For A Christmas Adventure In Italy!
I’m already ridiculously excited about Christmas. The kids are at that lovely age where they’re old enough to get excited with me, and young enough to still believe in all the magic around it. And that’s why, after a fair bit of umming and aahing, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and take them to […]
Food: The New Children’s Menu At The Knife & Cleaver, Houghton Conquest
Five-year-olds are funny creatures when to comes to food, aren’t they? On the one hand, my eldest eats his school hot dinners without any complaints, counts mussels as one of his favourite things to eat, and gets excited at the thought of trying out a new restaurant. On the other, he has days when all […]
Travel: The George Inn, Maulden – 7 new bedrooms and a gin bar to boot
I’d never been to Maulden until a couple of weeks ago. The pretty Bedfordshire village sits about half-way between Bedford and Luton on the A6, and ten minutes from Center Parcs Woburn Forest (which we’ve been to a lot), so I must have passed it a million times. But despite having lived down the road […]
Travel: A family day at the zoo – Paradise Wildlife Park, Hertfordshire
I’ve finally had a chance to make a little vlog of our day at Paradise Wildlife Park just before the kids went back to school last month. The zoo is in Broxbourne, about an hour’s drive from us, or half an hour out from London, and in all honesty I don’t know how we’ve not […]
Travel: 7 easy ways to get children and babies to sleep on holiday
‘How do I get my baby to sleep when we go on holiday?’ It’s a question I found myself frantically typing into Google before our first overseas trip with our 9-month-old baby boy. Fast-forward four years and that baby boy is at school, now has a younger sister, and has been on more holidays than I did in […]
Travel: The best bath of my life at Ellenborough Park Hotel, Cheltenham
‘This place is bigger than our front room. And our kitchen. And our upstairs. Put together.’ Those were the first words to come out of my mouth as I walked into our suite at Ellenborough Park hotel in Cheltenham. Apart from an unintelligible combination of ‘woooooah’ and ‘ohmywordwouldyoulookatthisplace’, of course. And it was no understatement, […]
Family: Tomorrow you start in Reception (a poem for my son)
Tomorrow you start in Reception, The calendar tells me it’s so. It’s been scribbled in red for months now, But wait: where did that time go? I bought your uniform, your shoes, your PE kit; Spent hours labelling all of your clothes. We’ve tried them all on in the front room, But tell me: where […]
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