A hospital emergency waiting room is a great place to watch people – assuming the reason you are there is not too consuming of course! In an emergency waiting room you can observe a cross section of the community from the comfort of hard plastic chair! I was sitting people watching in a waiting room recently. Just to be clear, I hadn’t gone there for that purpose – I was actually waiting to be let through the doors to be with a patient.  But as I waited I watched.

My daughter arrived at our place recently with some clothes for me. A friend of hers had passed on some near new clothes and from that collection she had selected three tunic tops that she thought would be right for me. Each one fit perfectly and each one was just right colour wise. In fact, as I wore these outfits over the following weeks I got more comments about how nice I looked in them than I had about anything I had bought myself recently! That was a little depressing! Getting free clothes was nice; receiving compliments was nice but what really made an impression on me was the fact that my daughter knew me well enough to recognise that those clothes would suit me well.

I know how to swim. I love swimming in the sea. But I am not a confident swimmer and the ocean frightens me a little!
I blame the movie ‘Jaws’ which I saw as an impressionable thirteen-year-old! As soon as I get out of my depth in the ocean all I can hear is – da-da; da-da; da-da, da-da, da-da!

Every second Friday I help out at a Music and Movement program for 0- 5 years olds. Some Fridays I channel my primary school teaching days and present the program -  dancing and singing and generally leaping about the place with enough enthusiasm for it to well and truly count as my exercise for the day!

Friends of mine have a son who decided he was going to join the army with his best mate when he grows up.  At first it seemed to be the standard sort of fascination that you see in kids - I’m going to be a fireman, a doctor; I’m going to rescue sick animals and be a vet; I’m going to be whatever the hero of the moment is!
But a year on the boy wasn’t showing any sign of losing interest.
My friends knew that because their son is deaf he would never be able to enlist or serve in the army and it started to feel very uncomfortable joining in conversations with the boy about what he might do one day knowing very well that this particular dream would always remain just that – a dream.