Dear Reader

...Do You Want To Lose Your Mind? Dear Reader, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that you have been talking about my next subject as much as anyone else has...Clowns. Poor misunderstood clowns. Not so much clowns but the people inside the clown costumes. I mean good grief... When the craze first started in America I saw it mentioned on Facebook, I had been reading an article just before I saw it about Stephen King's famous novel 'IT' being made into a film once again. It had just finished filming so they were attempting to create some hype around it. Now for those who do not know, the leading character in Stephen King's 'IT' is a clown called Pennywise. He is really quite scary, feel free to Google if you wish...in the morning, and he morphs into the shape of whatever children fear the most. Following the last months siege of clowns, I would assume that this is quite possibly what children are most afraid of currently. After seeing the article about

Dear Reader, Yesterday I found myself looking up at the building that my mother used to live in with her parents and brother. I stood, my eyes drinking in the old red bricks, the huge windows and the stairs which I could see through the window in the front door. I had heard about this stairs from stories from my mother. My grandfather was a butcher, the building was his shop Read & Co. and the stairs lead up to the house. At Christmas, when overrun with orders they would have to stack the turkeys up the stairs with little name tags on them. When the customer arrived to pick up their turkey my mother and her brother would have to run up and down the stairs trying to find the right customers name on tens of turkeys. The thought of it always made me laugh. I wasn't sure what I was meant to feel, I had never been there with my mother and had only heard about 'Chapel Street' through stories. Suddenly I was here, standing in front of the window she used to look out of,

Dear Reader, I have recently started helping out at my local Brownies group, I was once a Brownie myself in the late 90's early 2000's and fellow Brownies of that era will be saddened to hear that alas, the mud brown culottes did not last. As a 23 year old, being surrounded by around 20-ish 7-9 year olds is slightly daunting. Some of the girls are sweet and shy, some talkative and wanted to tell you all about their lives no matter how lengthy and unrelated the story, and some are just wonderfully nutty. All, however have the power to lift or dive bomb an adults confidence at the blink of an eye. I call it the rise and fall of self confidence at the hands of small people. N.B. I do not consider myself an adult but one must act the part when one is in charge of said children. Even if you want to cry following an empowering talk with a young girl about skin care when she tells you "yeah you have a massive spot on your head". I have learnt a few things about worki