Tuesday Treats

Hello!

I’m back online and feeling very refreshed after a couple of weeks with minimal Facebooking, Tweeting, blogging and general web based faffing around! Thank you to all my excellent guest posters for keeping things busy over here.

What better way to get back into things than with Tuesday Treats – the weekly roundup of great reads from blogland, as chosen by myself, Chris at Thinly Spread, Becky at Baby Budgeting, and Lizzie at Me and My Shadow.

As ever, I’ve been spoilt for choice, but here are some of my top reads from recent weeks. I’ve tried to make it a good mixture of parenting, politics and general ramblings, but if you feel like I should be including a broader range of posts, please do let me know in the comments.

1. “Twitter is the here and now. Don’t let Ed be the only “trendy” one.” –  This post from Not My Year Off – Dear George Osborne. How to Use Twitter and Be Trendy Too – made me cry with laughter. I hope to goodness he reads it.

2. “In truth, I think that if you had put any group of SN parents in that room, given half the opportunity most of them would have be tempted to just swipe the draft of the bill away from Mr Timpson, going through it later after the kids are in bed with the help of a bottle of red wine and some Malteasers.”   – Renata from Just bring the Chocolate is one of the most powerful writers out there, and her post Dear Man In A Suit  about meeting Edward Timpson to talk about the proposed Children and Families Bill is really worth taking the time to read.

3. “She truly was the matriarch of our family and her traditions, her sayings and her famous Christmas party piece lives on.” – Some of my very favourite blog posts are ones where people write very simply about someone they love. I thought this post from Capture by Lucy about her Granny was a wonderful one, with many beautiful pictures in it.

4. “At 7.30am, after my attempts to cajole him out from under the bed failed dismally, I resorted to the most controversial tactic known to parentkind. Bribery.” –  I think I am developing quite the blog crush on Sarah at Grenglish, because I could really just list a dozen of her recent posts as my favourites, but this one – Dear Employer – was particularly good.

5. “Do you remember that moment (over Bacardi Breezers & a shared Marlboro Light) you’d admit to your besties your latest playground crush, at which point conversation would halt and they’d stare at you open mouthed like you’d just ordered the grilled baby burger… rare. Horrible wasn’t it?” – For a good giggle, check out this post from Little Rascal Reviews about Shameful Crushes… and make sure you share your own!

6. “When I was little and reading Little Women for the first time, I was struck by the romantic idea of Jo, curled up in a garret weeping over her book with a pile of apples.” – I loved this post over at Tales from the Village about comfort reading.

7. “I’m an avid reader of blogs and there are some out there that make me sigh with longing. You know the ones? Perfect clothes, perfect hair. Perfect homes, perfect parties. Perfectly behaved cute kids. Perfect blogs. These are the women who definitely clean their teeth before 8am and always hoover their stairs. At least that’s what they make you think.” – Alice at More than Toast asks whether our blogs portray an overly perfect and idealised view of what our lives are like. (*coughs* I’m pretty sure there’s no danger of anyone thinking that about DorkyMum, but I definitely agree with a lot of what Alice writes!)

8. “An emotion is a thought that shows up as a sensation in your body.” – This is a fascinating post from Ellen at In A Bun Dance who is in the middle of a course on mindfulness, and asks where in the body we feel our emotions.

9. “My slightly left of centre politics is worried by the exodus of average middle class families from the state sector in areas like this. It feels like ‘rats leaving a sinking ship’ rather than trying to help to improve standards in our local schools.”  – Another very thought-provoking piece from Cat at Yellow Days, as she tries to decide whether to choose private or state education for her family.

10. “Within living memory it was considered basic common sense that essentials like food, water, energy, access to health services, housing, sanitation and sewage, social care and core manufacturing industries were too important to expose to the volatilities of the free market.” – I found this a REALLY useful and informative post describing how the language of business is now used to describe services that were once run publicly, and why that’s a problem.

11. “You’re about to embark on one of the most radically sedentary careers known to humanity. Your working day will involve mostly sitting down, with the odd exertion when you need something from the kitchen.” – Some very honest, funny and useful advice from Sarah Ditum on what it takes to be a freelance journalist.

12. “Writing is a compulsion, something I do almost without thinking.  I’ve been putting my words on the internet for free for more than a decade in the hope others might enjoy them, and I gauge my success not just in financial terms, but in positive encouragement from readers.  Fifty hits on that last post?  I’ll take that.  Someone hit the ‘like’ button?  Ace.”  – A really interesting post from 12 Books in 12 Months about where writers get their ideas from, and what constitutes success.

13. “John Humphrys, the BBC broadcaster, once dismissed “texters” as “vandals who are trying to do to the language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours”. He’s wrong.” – I’m finishing with an article from the FT rather than a blog post, but as it’s about how social media has improved writing, it should help ease our collective guilt about the amount of time we spend online.  How could I not include that?!

If you’ve read any posts recently that you’ve loved, please do share them in the comments below.