The Boy and The Coconut Tree

The week of April 15 th 2013 will certainly be recorded as a memorable one. What should have been a memorable week for good reasons began in tragedy and ended in fear and many people feeling a lot less safe. I was looking forward to this being the week we finally sad farewell/adieu and good riddance to Mrs Thatcher who has been a hero for some a divisive and unpopular figure for many more, especially in the area I come from. The Boston marathon bombing started the week off.   My thoughts go out to my friends in Boston. I lived there in 2000-2002 and loved the city, it was a slow burner for me but work took me there and as my director said “be careful what you wish for”, it took time for me to settle but only a very strict INS forced me to return to the UK and to a promotion then redundancy. I could have easily stayed in a city that was only 1 hour from New York and 6 from London. I made friends there and worked with lovely people. The marathon bombings which were t...

Scotch Eggs are, for me, the perfect picnic food; they sit alongside sausage rolls, flasks of tea, ham sandwiches and pork pies as ideal for a picnic, no matter the weather. The picnic is an English tradition that has been exported all around the world in various guises and adopted by various cultures so I was delighted to be invited along to a picnic in Hyde Park recently. April 14th was the warmest day of 2013 so far and it seems everyone was heading to the park or the beach (though 18c doesn't feel like beach weather to me). I was invited to a picnic in Hyde Park with a Catalan friend and 6 of his London based Catalan friends, in all the group was made up of 7 Catalans, 2 Englishmen and 1 French girl. It was a marvellous day, the sun shone and the rain vanished for a few hours. We all had brought something along to share. I bought Scotch Eggs (which, for the un-initiated are: a hard-boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat, coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried ) and some o...

We are already 6 days into April, it is cold outside and my big move is only 2 months away and right now I am incredibly nervous about the whole thing. I think my recent visit to my family has given me a dose of nerves. Being with my family is lovely but it often makes me feel like a slight outsider. I left my family home 25 years ago this September to go to University. I returned for a year and that was unsettling for us all as I came out to my family in those 12 months and they say moving house or the death of a relative is stressful, try coming out to your mother the week of her birthday, now that is hard!  I don't feel as if you can ever truly go back, you are there, but you are not fully the person you were before you left, and neither are they. So my visit home was lovely, it is important that I never forget where I am from and who I am but I never feel like I fully belong and if I stayed there more than 5 days I would go crazy and so would they. It is strange but I li...