You know those moments when you wonder about what happened to people who were important to you in your youth?


well tonight I found out.
Listening to the BBC new I found out what my first serious boyfriend had been up to. The photo was taken on my 21st birthday.

Just one thing - How the hell did he get to be 61.

Robert Frost wrote

Was there ever a cause too lost
ever a cause that was lost too long
or that proved by the passage of time too vain
for teh generous tears of youth and song.

I have over the past few weeks been reliving the time when I gave generously of my youth and commitment. I have listened to the last days of Martin Luther King, I have listened Robert Kennedy announcing to the democratic party that MLK has been killed, I remembered people walking behind the donkey cart carrying him to his grave, and I will, in May, be remembering the paris riots, and in June the death of Kennedy himself. It seemed a time when we felt we could change the world, and all around those who would lead that change were being killed. When Kennedy was killed it felt as if hope itself had perished - for me at any rate

Over the years I have watched protests come and go. I never went to greenham common, I never fought the police in the poll tax riot . I never, may God forgive me, marched against involvment in the Iraq war.

But a new generation of my family has found a cause worth fighting for.


they are however anonymous



Go them

I think I may have to make a cake

Way back in the mists of time when he whose boots now fill the entire hallway was 4 years old, he wanted, for Christmas a Tracey Island. They were like gold dust. On Blue Peter Anthea Turner showed you how to make one using papier mache and sticky back plastic. I being the super mum that I am managed to get the real thing.

Yesterday was my birthday, and I had asked for one of those small kenwood food processors that Delia uses in her new how to cheat at cooking. What I got was a bird table and a set top box for my bedroom tv. because she and her husband had phoned all the places they could think of in South East England looking for teh said machine. They thought they had got one in Curry's at Collier's Wood, but it turned out to be an error. The woman there told her. *"these things are like Tracey Island you can't get them anywhere". Lizzie told me I'd have to get weaving with the papier mache, and suggested 2 pairs of scissors and the motor from a remote control helicopter that no longer worked well to create the blades.

This morning after having been to the Doc's. I wandered along the main street in my little town and popped into the local hardware store *just in case* to find, on the shelf exactly what I had wanted. £19.99 exchanged hands and I left with my *Tracey Island*

I guess all I have to do now is cook.

So it's April Fool's day.

The biggest joke so far was when my clock said it was 6am and my body denied it.

The clock won.

this article in teh Torygraph appears to be rational and well thought out. That is as much as I can say.

have never seen the Humber Bridge like this. I have seen it in other lights and it is indeed very beautiful. I have also driven across it. It is very long and very high.

I think scrapping the tolls is an excellent idea, but for me I'd need to go a step further. They'd have to pay me to drive across!

Do you know that feeling you've been there, seen that and got the tee shirt, well this morning I was reading the Guardian and saw this article about Lidl. I had that feeling that I might have read this before. So I searched and it seems that I ( and the Guardian) covered this story at almost the same point last year. Their article is here.

Seems they didn't improve their employment practices then.

( I shall be looking out for a similar story next March)