Happy Friday and welcome to September. It’s time for schools to go back and to think about autumn (which is not a fun happy time!) and launch ourselves into the last four months of the year!
Being good at one thing doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be good at another but Jeremy Hunt needs to stop having a go at Stephen Hawkins. He knows about the NHS through personal experience and he’s able to look at a problem objectively. And he’s right. Jeremy Hunt can attack me all he wants – but he is wrong to say the NHS is working
Dear Sadiq: pocket-sized homes are the last thing London needs
Living on the breadline makes me cry. I dread to think how it affects my children This just sounds horrific. Ma sometimes talks about hard things were when we were children and if I look back, I can see it. The house wasn’t decorated, Ben and I had carpet and so did the living room (and the bathroom!) but no-where else did. Ma had a strict two packets of biscuits and one bottle of squash a week policy. I thought the biscuit limit was because Ma didn’t want to rot our teeth and as Grandad brought us fruit and the cousins sweets at Ma’s request and we didn’t get sugar generally it seemed to fit the status quo. I had better holidays than the cousins and most of my school friends but we didn’t go on family holidays but then given what a disaster the ones we did go on were, it didn’t seem that that was about money but about Dad. There were a lot of frozen sausages in my childhood and I knew that money was limited and we did know that if one thing was going to be paid for then another couldn’t be butI didn’t ever, ever feel that we were poor.
Overall, I want to prepare myself for the darker days, I need to get more rigid about bedtimes, the golden hour and no screens, I also need to start walking a bit more to compensate for the lack of allotment work that’s coming up and doing bedtime yoga.
Plot – all of this comes from the work list I made a 
Some of the broccoli had flowered so we cut the rest and took the netting down. We’ll leave it alone until the flowers die so the bees can have a feed.
The summer squash are slowing down production and the leaves on one of the butternut squash are dying back. The smaller butternut squash plant has suddenly started to produce fruit but it needs to hurry as it’s getting colder at night! We had a very hot weekend, which caused some bolting amongst the pak choi but the chard I planted out seem to be doing ok. 
This has been even more true this August because there has been an increase in produce overall and a decrease in courgettes! That aside August is just not a time for much innovation in the kitchen, the month more or less starts me having a week off and family lunch for my birthday. The food is usually the same, garlic bread, roast chicken, new potatoes and salad and so it was this year. Although the whole thing seemed more organised this year and Joe stole my garlic bread! The difference is that more of it was homegrown, the garlic butter was made with my own garlic and herbs, I grew the salad.
I’ve come to accept that this is a feature of August and I’ll get my cooking mojo back sometime soon, probably as the allotment slows down, although I will need to find some new ways to use butternut squash….
Now, I know that I’m a big of bust, but the day before, I had walked into Bravissimo and walked out with three new bras in my size, the bra I had asked about they didn’t have in store but could get it sent to the store or my house. We were dealing with a range of bras that I had bought before so it wasn’t neccessary for me to be fitted but they could have arranged that and I could have probably found a lot of new styles in my size. At M&S, when I asked, they didn’t have any of the bras I was interested in, in stock and couldn’t order for me but I could look on their website. But with a new bra, you need to try them on.
Generally, I’m just fed up of clothes shops always being out of the sizes I wear, whether it’s clothes or shoes. Is there a special vortex that larger sizes disappear to? because I’m getting really tired of shops only having the clothes I might want to buy in all sizes from 4 to 14 and then nothing until size 22. I also finally bought a dress a wanted (remember the East dress back in July) in the sale but although it said it was the blue dress, they sent me the pink dress because the blue had sold out. Then I tried again with a top and the 18 didn’t fit (in a shop when the 18 is often too big for me).
A day to read. That was yesterday, I did very little and just read books, it’s my favourite thing to do, I have lots of books….
