Blogs

For my final blog of 2012 I was going to do a review of the year. I mean, no one else does that do they? However I’ve been worn down by the endless stream of reviews so that’s a no go, writes blogger Ali.

So what to write about? 2012 has been a huge year of change for me. And I guess along the way I’ve learnt a few things. Only a few mind – I still don’t have any basic plumbing skills, and frankly technology is a baffling world of acronyms, none of which make any sense to me at all. But there are a few things I’ve learnt. And I guess that’s the hook on which I will hang my blog...

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure (and I do mean pleasure) of not one, not two, but three Christmas performances to watch in one day. All very different, of course, but in their own way each one of them was special and warmed my heart. The first was at Pip-Kins Day Nursery, Barnfield Hill to watch our three-year-old (and three quarters) son taking part in a rousing post-lunch performance of 'Jingle Bells', 'When Santa got Stuck up the Chimney' and 'Twinkle, Twinkle Christmas Star'. Led by an enthusiastic Rosemary, Pat and Eileen, who visit the nursery on a regular basis for sing-alongs,...

Behind the gloom of this week’s Winter Statement from George Osborne promising at least six more years of austerity because of his failed economic policy there were two bits of potentially very good news for Exeter and the South West, writes Ben Bradshaw.

The first was that Exeter was being invited to bid for a slice of Government money to help fund the upgrading of our flood defences. It shouldn’t have needed the recent floods and Exeter’s “near miss” to spur the Government into action, but this is welcome none the less. We’ve been campaigning for more than two years – ever since...

It was meant to be straight forward. We had booked in for our 20-week scan and had both agreed that we wanted to know the sex of our baby.

My partner was keen to find out so that she could plan the nursery’s colour scheme and I’m, well, just impatient.

If the baby was a boy, we’d already decided we were going to call him Harry but the jury was out on a girl’s name.

We’d even taken something of a gamble and had bought a beautiful patchwork cushion with Harry emblazoned across the front in huge letters from a craft shop in Fowey during a summer break.

So there...