Blog Archives

I’ve started researching the history of 49 Kelsey Lane, Beckenham. At the moment I’ve just started collecting relevant documents and links. I’m using Notion to keep track of what I find and you can see my Notion database here. If you have any information that could be relevant please let me know. If you can…

In this post, I’ll explain how I’m making a database of all the plants in my garden and house and I’ll signpost you to the resources I’ve used, including my own Notion template, in case you’d like to try this yourself. We recently bought a new house which has a mature garden with lots of…

If a breastfed baby or child needs to have a general anaesthetic, how long before their surgery do they need to stop breastfeeding? I’m researching the instructions given to parents by NHS services across the country. It appears that most hospitals say the last breastfeed should be at least 4 hours prior to surgery, but…

DS1’s secondary school requires the children to wear black coats and bags, in addition to black trousers, shoes and socks. I believe this makes it harder for the children to be seen by drivers and increases their risk of being involved in road accidents. I don’t think this uniform policy is unusual – I know…

I’m sharing something my family has started doing in the last few days. If you’d like to encourage people in your household to do what is right, then there may be something you could adapt here. When we play card games with counters, (Nain Jaune is a favourite thanks to DH’s French ancestry), our children…

This is my first post describing a fun family activity. I’d like this to be the first of many such posts and hope that I can build a library of fun things families can do together that I and others can turn to if we’re stuck for inspiration. This post describes an activity that my…

I recently adopted a new habit – to share something of value every day. I was inspired by listening to Ali Abdaal’s video about passive income in which he emphasised the importance of creating useful content consistently over time. And while I’m not likely to match Ali’s level of productivity, I thought maybe I could…

We’ve bought a house. It’s a special house, not just any house, probably unique. But it’s not a perfect house. It sits on its own little plot, like a tiny bit of countryside in the middle of a suburban neighbourhood. It has some pretensions to grandness – wooden pillars, “imposing” double doors and stuck on…

Fellow Beckenham parents often ask me for my thoughts about the local secondary schools. Having responded to this question to someone in writing today, I’ve decided to also share my response here in case it’s of interest to others. However, please understand this is just my subjective impressions as a local parent and not based…

I’d never heard of a Randomised Coffee Trial (RCT) before, but when I read about the MatExp RCTs being organised as part of NHS Fab Change Day I knew I wanted to sign up. What a great idea, to link up two random people with an interest in maternity services, one from inside the NHS…