wandsworth

Happy Hot Day, everyone. I hope you’re all keeping cool somehow. If not, wait until tomorrow when the temp will drop by about 10 degrees!

I had a nice start to the day today – I woke up this morning to notifications from WordPress telling me that my blog had been visited more often than usual for a Tuesday morning. I had loads of views at around 7am. I have spent ALL day trying to work out why – Was it something I tagged in a post that is currently trending? Nope. Did someone famous signppost their Twitter followers to my blog? Nope.

Then I had a brainwave about an hour ago.

I regularly receive the Nappy Valley Net weekly e-newsletter, which is aimed for parents in the SW London area. A couple of weeks ago they posted an article/discussion about something that was written about my grandparents in the press (They live locally, too. Upstairs, in fact). The article said that my grandfather was sad to have to sell their Wandsworth home. This wasn’t true, and the words that were actually spoken were taken way out of context. I’m sure it went along the lines of ‘We probably should downsize, but we can’t bear to leave this house’. The discussion on Nappy Valley Net garnered a lot of lovely comments from local parents who have enjoyed their Great Canal Journeys programme and showed real compassion for their situation. I felt that I had to set the record straight about them – That they are not reluctantly selling their home at all. So, about a week or so ago, I posted a comment on the discussion.

Early this morning I received the new Nappy Valley Net e-newsletter which contained an update on that story mentioning me and my comment! And, because I posted as Not So Goldilocks, I guess some of the other parents who were browsing through the newsletter at the crack of dawn, like myself, wanted to see who I was (now that they knew where I lived!).

And that was it! My ‘Eureka’ moment.

So, thank you so much to Nappy Valley Net and all of its followers – Not only for the welcome traffic, but for the beautiful and supportive messages you have posted about my grandparents. I will pass them all on.

NSG xxx

Hello followers! How are you all? I hope you’re having a good week, whether it is raining, windy, sunny, or all of the above.

It has been an interesting week in NSG Towers. Khaya turned a magnificent FOUR on Monday, and we took a rather brilliant trip to Hamley’s on Regent Street in order for him to choose his birthday present. We also promised Nathi an ‘unbirthday present’, which is a tradition in my family. Here are some of the highlights:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

We have also been busy seeing family, and making Baba Bear feel comfortable in his London home after being away for over a year.

Mama has been on a bit of a fundraising jolly, having raised over and above my goal for Ovacome through my birthday fundraiser. We now have an active family fundraiser for Comic Relief through JustGiving, which went live this evening. The boys took part in a cake sale at their nursery today, and we will all be tuning in to the Comic Relief live show on BBC1 tomorrow evening.

I was also very moved by the awful Ethiopian Airways plane crash this week. It was, quite frankly, way too close to home. Not only have we used that airline, and possibly that very aircraft, in the past, but my partner told me that he could have been on that flight if he’d decided to stay in Ethiopia a little longer for a work launch. He said that he would have flown any route to get him back to the UK that didn’t cost the earth, which very well may have included flying from Addis Ababa to Nairobi for a connecting flight. I can’t imagine what the families of those poor victims are going through right now. My thoughts are with them.

I have ordered more merchandise for my company, just for me, and have been working on a business plan to find out what I can do next. What kind of journey will this venture take me on? I never saw myself as someone who would need to know anything about business, but perhaps this is what I was meant to do after all.

I am currently halfway through my amazing Start Writing Fiction course, which I signed up for through FutureLearn. It is free, and it is run by the Open University. I am really enjoying it, and am getting lots of interesting and useful guidance for my fiction writing. And, did I mention, IT’S FREE! I urge you to go to their site and see if there is a course for you. I bet there will be. Here you go: https://www.futurelearn.com/.

And now, we are gearing up for our friends at Two Gents’ production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Tara Arts Theatre in Earlsfield, SW18, which closes on Saturday night. If you’re local and fancy a night out, please book your tickets here. It’s a two-hander, both females, and should be a very interesting and entertaining night of theatre!

So, I hope everyone has a great weekend, and please donate anything you can to our Comic Relief fundraiser over on JustGiving. It all goes to the people who need it the most and, as much as I believe that this shouldn’t be how the world is in 2019, every little will help. Thank you, and goodnight.

NSG xxx

PS. I learned a little lesson in reblogging today, and how not to do it. I reposted a lovely post that I had enjoyed by another blogger on WordPress, but hadn’t made it clear enough that it wasn’t my own post… Needless to say, I had a concerned friend contact me by text about it, so immediately took it down again. Huge apologies to the blogger who wrote the original post – I am still learning!