Tears at a conference on childhood…

In a good way.

Alice and I were presenting Playing Out to hundreds of attendees at the April 2013 Flourish Conference.  It was organised by The Save Childhood Movement, set up following UNICEF research findings that children in the UK are among the unhappiest, most pressurised and commercially vulnerable in the developed world.  In itself, enough to make you want to cry…

“We may not have the answers,” the Movement’s founder Wendy Ellyatt said in 2012, “but what we can no longer say is that we don’t have a problem.”  Flourish brought together Continue reading

Our Northern Adventure…Back to Childhood

“Shut up!”  “No, you shut up!”

Last June, my sister and I travelled by ship up the coast of Norway, across the Arctic Circle, to the far northern border with Russia and – inadvertently – back to childhood.  We were taking my Dad, who had long wanted to do this trip, and we two sisters were squished in a tiny cabin.  It was the time of the Midnight Sun when

Continue reading