Everything, by date
No categories to click through and no search — there isn’t enough here to need one yet. 35 entries, in the order they were written.
My mum has said “don’t get me anything” every year since about 2011. For a decade I treated that as a politeness to be worked around, and bought her nice versions of things she already owned, and she thanked me properly every time.
Home
We tried a laminated star chart, a shared app, and a rota with everyone’s initials on it. The thing that worked is a piece of paper with four jobs on it, and it took us three years and about £40 of failed systems to get there.
Home
It is not a good recipe. It is a repeatable one — four things we always have, one pan, and a texture that survives being reheated on a Tuesday by a man who is not paying attention.
Table
Three of those fixes were wrong and one of them was wrong in a way that took a year to show up. What I should have done on the first evening, written down so I stop doing it.
Things We Keep
Nell started being invited places, and then people started being invited here, and I discovered I had no idea what I was doing — including a fairly frightening twenty minutes about a peanut that turned out not to be a peanut.
Table
One night. We booked one night, forty minutes from home, specifically so that it could fail — and it did fail, comprehensively, and we are going again in August.
Road
One tray, one oven, forty minutes, and no attention required in the middle of it. It is the only thing I cook that produces a second and third meal without me having decided to make a second and third meal.
Table
Between November and March we had two sickness bugs, one ear infection, hand foot and mouth, and a fortnight I have mostly deleted. This is what’s in the drawer now, and what I wish had been in it at three in the morning in January.
Home
People ask me what to buy and expect a list of twenty. It’s three, plus a torch, and the money is better spent on one decent version of each than on a set of forty in a plastic case.
Things We Keep
A pound a week, paid on a Saturday, not linked to anything. We got there after two more complicated systems, one of which taught our six-year-old that kindness has a price of twenty pence.
Growing Up
Three nights in a house that is not childproofed, with a three-year-old who sleeps badly anywhere new, and a grandmother who would like to help and mostly cannot be told how.
Road
We see my parents perhaps eight times a year, and for a long time our presents were an attempt to make up the difference — bigger, posted, apologetic. The thing that helped was giving something that produced phone calls instead of parcels.
Road
For two terms I made a nice lunch and it came home. Not some of it — the same three things, every day, in the same box, having travelled to school and back untouched.
Table
We made a rule in January that lasted until the second week of February. The rule that replaced it is worse on paper, has no numbers in it, and has now been running for a year.
Growing Up
He didn’t want a party, he didn’t want a fuss, and he had specifically said, out loud, in front of witnesses, that he didn’t want anything. So we gave him something that required him to talk about himself for six months, which on paper was a catastrophic misreading.
Growing Up
The washing was never finished, which I had accepted as a fact about life rather than a consequence of doing four loads on a Sunday. It is the second thing, and the fix took about a week to bed in.
Home
A school letter came home in October about a trip in November, went into the pile on the side, and surfaced on the morning of. We paid on the day, in cash, in an envelope, and I have thought about it since.
Home
Two children, one dog, one A1. We have had four incidents in three years and the fourth one taught us more than the first three, mostly because it happened forty minutes from the nearest anything.
Road
Four people, twenty minutes, and nobody in this house is at their best before about nine. What survived is three things on rotation, all of which can be eaten by somebody who is not fully awake.
Table
Not a meal plan. A list of the six things we can make without thinking, stuck inside a cupboard door, which has done more for our week than three years of proper meal planning ever did.
Table
Pooling for one present is obviously sensible and everybody says so. Nobody mentions that it means three siblings and their partners having an explicit conversation about money, which our family had successfully avoided for about twenty years.
Growing Up
Not because we’re minimalists — we are visibly not minimalists — but because a room with sixty things in it was a room where nobody played with anything, and the tidying took forty minutes a night.
Home
It wouldn’t drain, it was eleven years old, and we’d already looked at new ones. Then I took the filter out. There was a 2p, a hair clip and something I have chosen not to identify.
Things We Keep
Cold at the top, hot at the bottom. Anna had put a jumper on and mentioned it twice and I had said I’d look at it, twice, over about five weeks. It took four minutes and a fifty-pence key.
Things We Keep
Not a routine we designed. A routine that assembled itself over about four years, and which I only wrote down because my sister asked and I discovered I couldn’t say it out loud in the right order.
Growing Up
Three of us, two parents, and a WhatsApp group that starts in early November and achieves nothing until the 19th. This is the year we stopped buying six adequate presents and bought one.
Home
The drive to my parents’ takes two hours forty without children. With two children and a fourteen-year-old dog it takes three and a half, and the extra fifty minutes are entirely under our control, which is the annoying part.
Road
Rowan is three and eats pasta, toast, yoghurt and apples. We spent a year trying to fix this and made it worse, and then we stopped trying to fix it and it started, very slowly, moving.
Table
Ten minutes a night, says the school. What we had by half term was ten minutes of misery a night, four nights a week, and a child who had worked out that books were something that happened to her.
Growing Up
We were late four days out of five and I kept trying to fix it by getting up earlier, which is the one thing that doesn’t work. The fix was writing down what the door actually needs and moving all of it to the night before.
Home
Nobody warned me about the fourth day. The first three were fine — she was fine, I was fine, everyone was fine — and then on Thursday the whole thing arrived at once, for both of us.
Growing Up
The train to my sister’s costs more than the petrol and takes twenty minutes longer, and we do it anyway, because two hours in a car and two hours on a train are not the same two hours for anybody involved.
Road
Six weeks of summer holiday, two adults working part time, and the discovery that our children were measurably happier at a river than at the place that cost £46 and had a gift shop at the exit.
Road
Anna had been cutting tomatoes with a knife that could not cut a tomato, and had adapted by pressing harder, which is how people cut themselves. Ten minutes on a stone and it is a different knife.
Things We Keep
Four ingredients, no kneading, and a loaf that is somewhere between rustic and structurally concerning. I have made it about sixty times and it has been genuinely good perhaps eleven of those, which turns out to be enough.
Table