When speaking to clients in my capacity as a divorce solicitor, I have learned the hard way that it is always important to check the date and be prepared to discover you are talking at cross-purposes. Once upon a time in the days when High Streets closed on Shrove Tuesday for pancake races, I recall conversing with a client. She worked part-time and had taken to ringing me during…  Read More →

Long term followers of this blog will know that Dom and I made a commitment to each other some 2½ years ago now. However things have been getting a little difficult over the last 3 weeks and this morning I found myself telling him “to get a grip.” I know you’re meant to talk these things through to find a mutually acceptable compromise because there’s never  Read More →

Get families together and, if they’re anything like ours then after a large meal (priorities first) there’s nothing better than a game pitting brother against sister, in-law against out-law or husband against wife. Charades is probably still one of the most popular party games for such occasions. At New Year with a bottle of whisky in one hand and a Christmas cracker in the other, …  Read More →

It started a week before Christmas when all that white stuff fell from the sky and lay and lay. It got harder as the temperature lowered. Cold and impenetrable it just sat there for two whole weeks. Then yesterday, on New Year’s Eve, there was a visible thaw and at the same time I saw our lawn or at least some blades of grass, as the blanket of snow and ice appeared to recede. Not for long though. By 4pm it was snowing heavily and a silent,... 

I am what might be described as a regular contributor to local radio. Hence yesterday afternoon I was interviewed on BBC Tees’ Drive-time show. I understood that the presenter wanted to quiz me about my reaction to the survey referred to in my blog entry yesterday. Imagine my surprise therefore when in opening she referred to the results of a survey by the consumer watchdog Which? suggesting that a child’s lunchbox can contain as much sugar... 

I was on vacation last week. The trouble is that as regular readers of this blog will know I keep coming across divorce everywhere I turn, not just in the office. So it was that whilst I was wandering across a beach in out of season Cornwall, a complete stranger, dressed in a wetsuit and holding a surf board, looked at me and said: “It’s not working. We can’t communicate about anything important; in fact we can’t communicate at all.”...