Sue’s World

If ever a problem has followed me through life, it’s damp. Not sweaty armpits or monsoons but the unwanted capillary action in the home, type. The first house I ever owned, well co-owned with my last husband (L.H.), was only a few months old when disgusting slimy flowers started growing from underneath the kitchen door mat. This turned out to have been caused by a leaky toilet pipe and was soon sorted out but it was the start of a very moist trend.

As we became more affluent we decided to look for a more interesting house and fell for a Victorian cottage which had formerly been a barn. It was full of charm: low ceilings, sloping bedrooms, open fires and the garden was an English idyll with little footpaths and rock edged flower borders, lawns and two old chimney pots, formerly on the roof, but now attractively filled with flowers. There was also a septic tank which made the vegetable patch bounteous although we tried not to think about that too much, and there was a path across the garden to give access to our adjoining neighbours, who also shared the septic tank. (more…)

I’m not a Townie I’m a country girl at heart. My mother was raised in the Sussex countryside and as a child I learned from her the names of most common wild flowers, trees and birds.

That being said, I had never lived in a village and I had never been a full time mother until I met my present husband, “The Whiz Kid”. Not that he was a villager, far from it, he was living in West Ealing when I met him. His family live in Welling, in Kent and his mother was a true Cockney, born in Bow.

I had lived for many years near Mold in beautiful North Wales but when Whiz and I first lived together, it was in the concrete jungle of Byron Cavendish. We chose BC because of its accessibility to the M99 and its sympathy to family life. (more…)

Do you ever have that fantasy, you know, the one about being offered one wish by the good fairy? I’ve spent many happy daydreams working out how to get health, wealth and the body of a model in one wish and picturing the looks on people’s faces when I met them with my new, svelte figure. Of course the fairy never came neither did the wealth or the Twiggy shape. The truth of my life is a whacking mortgage and a figure which owes much to an enthusiasm for extravagant cooking and a gregarious nature.

But as I contemplate the disappearing navel of my middle years the thing I would wish for from that elusive fairy, above anything else, is a good memory. Any memory actually but preferably my husband’s memory. To find in your declining years that your already woolly brain is getting woollier and your new, younger husband can simultaneously watch the telly, read a book, surf the internet and remember everything he’s read and watched, is not only demeaning, it’s also guaranteed to reduce your confidence to the size of a new 5 pence piece, a dull one.

My mental ebb started as soon as I had my first daughter. I ran a delicatessen at the time with shelves full of exotic foodstuffs. Indian pickles rubbed shoulders with Italian sun dried tomatoes, a truly multi-racial assembly. If you were to ask me the location of any item I would go to it without wavering. I would identify missing items instantaneously.

I got through my pregnancy without too much trouble, apart from a weekend in hospital when my blood pressure rose after heaving sacks of potatoes up stairs to the stock room all morning. Then I had the baby. (more…)

This is my magazine, I call it Sue’s World. If you enjoy reading it, hate it, wish to make some constructive criticism of my writing style then please add your comments. I just enjoy writing and would like to improve my skill.