India

I am stripping my daughter's room of its old, manky wallpaper. I am doing it very slowly: a little bit each day. Goodness knows how the decorator stripped our sitting room in one day the other week. I would lose the will to live.

Anyway it's interesting but when you are stripping wallpaper it invariably comes off in long tapered wrips, leaving India behind it.

IT is a coming

We are not a particularly proficient IT household. Our children don't have any gadgets on which to play computer games. We have a laptop and the children play a few games on that. That's how it's developed. The children haven't asked for gadgets (I can't even name you any devices!!) and we haven't encouraged them. Thus far we have got away with it. We did think that last Christmas might be the one where we had to buy something computer -related but we still got away with lego and the like.

They play lots of make-believe, watch TV, play outside, indulge in family games and seem fine about it. It's not to say that if they got their own computer game thingamajigs that we wouldn't do all of the above too but it's saved on our pockets at least.

It's my little girl's 7th birthday soon and she would like a camera. My little boy will be 9 in June and he says he wants a camera too. I asked him if he really wanted a camera or was he just copying his sister.

" I have no technology!" he pleaded with face aghast. Perhaps the time is a-coming.

Plants or children?

Yesterday we visited a nursery. I told the children we were just popping to a new nursery down the road. They looked at me a bit funny but clearly thought they would indulge their old mum.

We arrived and they looked very puzzled. There were greenhouses, flowers, plants, compost but no little kiddiwinks. They are used to garden centres but not plant nurseries. Indeed we are so used to big garden centres selling plants plus gifts plus the kitchen sink and the ubiquitous café that plant nurseries where they grow their own from seed are quite rare. Just think a garden centre that just concentrates on plants and only plants.

Well I am happy to say we have one down the road from us now. The gardener at my mum's old people's home has just bought this nursery that although on my doorstep I knew nothing about. It must have been there quite some time for it sits on Nursery Road.

The gardens at my Mum's are absolutely stunning in the summer so I have high hopes for the nursery and that somehow if I visit it often enough our garden may take on the same hues as at the home.