Category: Reviews

Writing about my passion for children to not play games like Grand Theft Auto is something that I am likely to repeat over and over. There seems to be less time made for many children in a family capacity these days, but we’ve kept up a game tradition as we’ve taken caravan holidays with our kids which always involves a game around the table in the chilly evenings.

I have great memories of my Christmas mornings before the onslaught of electronic gadgets and I used to look forward to the new game each year.  It would be nice to spend a bit of time as a family to recreate the effect and feeling for more simple things that we do at the moment.

What would you rather do?  Is it a good idea to encourage our laziness in front of the telly after a slump inducing feast while the kids blip, zip and bop with bleep bleep bleeps on their gaming machines or mobile phones?   I know how easy it is to not find the time to spend quality time with our kids and I think we all suffer to some extent from it as our kids grow older.

I have heard my kids utter the “boring” word on occasion when we think about playing games, so we make up our own rules to make things more interesting.   No matter how our board games go, the aftermath of a sore loser pales into insignificance against an interrupted electronic gamer who throws a tantrum at the thought of having to stop playing to do anything else.

I enjoy spending the time with my kids on games.  I suspect more parents would enjoy them if they actually made time to play.   I really do like it when one of mine comes into the family room with a game in hand and chivvying his dad to get up off the couch and play a game with him.  The initial sigh is ear shattering, but after 5 – 10 minutes there is usually some laughing, talking and positive interaction.

We were asked if we’d like to try some new games as part of a return to traditional family life and we have to thank John Lewis for sending us some lovely board games to try out on a games night.  Our games sessions have been over several nights and have seen the kids learn some new things that they’d never played before.

Littlest is a Cluedo expert as he’d played it many times at a club he goes to, but we managed to lose the doggie and spent the first half hour tracking it down.  We did have a go at some semblance of the rules, but we ended up just playing littlests rules which kept him happy, and I suspect a bit of cheating made it in there too.

We received the Hasbro Vintage Cluedo The box is lovely and won’t get dog-eared over time like the regular cardboard games.  It’s a lovely game for 2 – 6 players and is modelled on the 1949 version of the game.

Spending lots of time playing dominos in the caravan, we missed the set that got lost in transit.  I suspect we left it in the van when we traded it in and I hadn’t got round to replacing the set as it was the set that belonged to my grandfather.  It was nice to revisit some of our old favourites from the van when it’s raining and miserable outside and it does play better with the bigger table in the kitchen.  I don’t know why we’d never played it at home before, but the set just lived in the caravan.

My kids are big fans of The Cube, so a game based on the games has given them hours of entertainment already.  They can manage this alone and just love it.

Backgammon is a game that I had never played and we’ve had a go at trying to play properly.  I think we need to sit and read the rules better, but we did get the general gist of it.

Playing cards just never go amiss and it makes a change from the usual UNO that we’ve played a lot recently.  My boys have taken an interest in poker recently as the man plays once a week in a local league and although I was keen to keep that out of the scottish mum house, they really do enjoy playing it round the table, so who am I to complain?

We’re all having a lovely time with the games and when they do play board games, they’re interacting, talking, laughing, sometimes sulking if they lose, but it’s a great break from the gaming and online world that so many of our kids seem to slip into at very young ages.

Hotel Chocolat sent us a box of their Signature Christmas Collection to try.

The box is gorgeous and my boys eyes were all agog when they saw it.  It’s a classy box with a lovely texture and looks reassuringly expensive.

There are a mixture of white, dark and milk chocolate with a focus mostly on soft centres which was right up my eldest child’s street.

The selection consists of : Rum & Raisin Truffle, White Caramel Praline, Pistachio Praline Crunch, Hacienda Iara Salted Caramel 90%, Hacienda Iara 63% Ganache Milk , Christmas Mess – Dark, Mulled Port, Nutmeg & Almond Praline, Cranberry Cup, Christmas Stars, Caramel Supernova.

At £25 a box, for most people this really is a luxurious Christmas present to giveaway but I found myself wishing I liked dark chocolate so I could enjoy more of the ones in the box.  The boys however finished them all off pretty quickly.  I do however, know one very particular chocolate lover who is going to appreciate a box of these on Christmas day.

The one thing that is never far from the minds of most of us in winter is just how much it’s going to cost us in energy to keep our homes nice and toasty.  Last year, we had a spell where our heating broke down and it was a very cold winter that we found quite hard to cope with minus our heating.  We found it difficult to keep tabs on how much energy we were using and as a home that budgets, we find it disconcerting not to know how much our bills will be at the end of the year.

The costs for energy are high in comparison to our month outgoings for other essentials and any help to make those costs more obvious and help reduce those costs is very much welcomed by us.

E.ON has launched a special online tool to help you work out how you could make savings and there is a wealth of energy saving information on their website for customers who manage their account online, to help you see how you use energy and where you could make positive changes.

You can even compare your own figures with those of similar homes to see how you stack up.

The tool helps us to take control of our energy use and help us to understand that reducing energy in our homes need to help us stay warm and comfortable while making a difference to the pennies in our pockets.  It’s about helping us to waste less energy now and in the future and allows us to compare our energy use with similar homes in our own area.

Customers will need to register to be able to use the new tool and from then on, they can take greater responsibility over the energy use in their own homes.

As a family, we had got into a very bad habit of leaving many appliances on standby at bedtime, and even when just going out.  We now know what over 30% of us could leave a dozen or more appliances turned on.  It wasn’t something that we even thought about, we had just got into such a bad habit.

E.ON’s website also features a number of handy tips to help you become more fuel efficient, like not leaving your television on standby quite so often. If you’re an E.ON customer you can also use the comparison tool which allows you to see how your home is performing in relation to those in your area – giving you greater motivation to save energy. You won’t need to be a qualified expert to put these into practice, just a dash of common sense will do!

We used to leave many appliances on standby or by leaving them on charge when they had reached fully charged status:

• 4 TV’s
• Sky Box
• Microwave
• Inside and Outside Lights
• Internet Hub
• 4 Phone Chargers
• Printer
• Tablet Computer
• Oven Clock

34% of us admit we leave up to 15 gadgets and appliances turned on at once.  This was an easy area for us to make changes in. We’ve long replaced lightbulbs with energy saving versions, but with 15 spotlights in one room, there was room for improvement. We’ve learned to go round the house every evening and switch off every appliance at the wall. We do make exceptions for the Internet Hub and for 2 mobile phones, but after seeing just how much our meter was still spinning, we turned everything else off, including the cooker clock.

We have a cat and he uses a cat flap.  I don’t particularly like the idea of my animal having to wait outside in the cold to get in, but I did realise that the old seal was causing the flap to blow open in the wind.  Contacting the supplier meant we could replace the seal on the cat flap and stop it opening with every gust of wind.

Our front door was an energy stripper as it has never seem to stop any drafts from coming through it.  It’s quite difficult to keep a home warm if the cold air is constantly coming in and the heat heading out the door, so we identified that something had to be done. With no time nor budget at the time to replace the door, we simply hung a heavy curtain behind the door which slides open when nobody is at home.  We remove it in the warmer months and as the colour blends in with our decor, few people ever even notice that it’s there.  Blocking the draughty door also allows us to keep our heating a degree or two lower to keep the house warm.  That’s a win win situation all round.

Thinking smart about our energy at home could reap rewards for us all.

Each and every year of my childhood life, I received the Beano and the Oor Wullie Annuals.  It was just a tradition and every other child I knew also had them as a pressie on Xmas morning.  We’d sort of got out of the tradition over the last few years here so it was nice to be given a copy of the Beano 2014 Annual.

One of the first things I used to do on getting mine was to sit down and read it before Christmas lunch.  It was nice to see all the old favourites there and for a while I had a subscription at my local paper shop for it.

The annuals are great for boys who are not massive readers as it’s in small chunks and this will be perfect for us.

The comic is now into its 75th birthday with all the usual favourites most of us will remember.

• Dennis the Menace
• The Bash Street Kids
• Roger the Dodger
• Minnie the Minx
• Gnasher
• Billie Whizz
• Lord Snooty

The newer sections my kids loved, ie the Revolting Rhymes.  Perfect for tween boys that really like that sort of thing.  Boys and trumping jokes seem to go together like peanut butter and jam.  Our copy has now been squirreled away and wrapped for a xmas pressie for one of my boys and it is bound to be bedtime reading in the school holidays.  It really does seem like a blast from my past and I am looking forward to my boys rediscovering the joys of xmas annuals.

It’s priced £7.99 and available from WHSmith, Waterstones and all other good bookshops.

My boys have just realised how close it is to Halloween and I’ve had to promise them that I’ll go and get their pumpkins tomorrow.

Mine are just at that in-between age when they really don’t know if they should go out guising (trick or treating) or not.   Middler is still going to want to go knocking on doors when he’s about 20, but somehow I’ll have to find a way to get him round a few doors by asking people if they’d mind me still knocking with a fully grown man sized cub.

Halloween excitement has taken over since Marks & Spencer sent us some Halloween goodies for the kids to enjoy.  They spent a lovely afternoon reminiscing about last year, their costumes and what they’re going to wear this year.  We looked out the photograph of last year and they decided to change this year as they were cold in 2012.  My boys all got furry onesies earlier this year and are all thinking of going on with those on to keep warm.

Up here, to be safe, we only allow our children to knock on the doors of homes that have pumpkins outside.  We know those homes are child friendly and indicating they are happy to take part.  There’s nothing worse than going to a door of someone who is clearly not prepared, interested or wanting to have their door knocked on.  We’ve had fruit shoots to tangerines and lots of sweeties in the past with a couple of novel ideas and little toy treats from some who put a lot of thought into what they’d give out to the kids.

The M&S goodie bag had a fairly large black “Halloweeen Terrifying Table Cover” which fits our kitchen table really well and will be kept ready and waiting for the 31st.

We had the spooky paper chains which were surprisingly easy to make with pull off tabs for adhesive.  It kept two kids amused for half an hour to make it in total and now I just have to think of where I am going to hang it for best effect.

The sweeties were popular, as sweeties always are.

We had witches hair, chocolate eye balls and stretchy sweets that kept the kids amused for ages as they are really sticky and difficult to get out of the package.

We’re looking forward to Halloween, pumpkin soup, bags of sugar and lots of laughing.  What about you?

One of the things that I’ve always enjoyed on holidays is the ability to chill out on a lazy afternoon and just enjoy spending time with people I really want to be with.

In April this year, the BBC reported that there are “more than 160m cups drunk every day – and a resurgence in the popularity of afternoon tea.”

I don’t think tea is limited to just the afternoon, but it really does give the impression of sitting down with best bib and tucker over a plate of tea, scones, dainty cakes and cucumber sandwiches.

When my kids were wee, I used to love taking them out and we often used to just stop off for afternoon tea.

That’s something we’ve grown out of a little since they’ve got bigger, and it’s only now when I’ve written about it that I remember how much I actually miss that interaction and discussion time with my children.  It’s just not the same going into a kids cafe or local greasy spoon for a cuppa.

I used to work in an oil services company so I’ve had afternoon tea in many hotels with lots of plates of gorgeous cakes and sandwiches to choose from.  It was more often called lunch than afternoon tea, but it was 100% afternoon tea.

When I visit my dads girlfriend in St Andrews, she always takes me to a hotel for tea and it seems to be a staple in her crowd and a popular thing to do.

I know that our local Dobbies does a roaring trade in a more watered down version where we don’t get served but have to make our own choices.  I can’t help thinking that being served is the whole point of enjoying the full experience.

Someone asked me how I pronounced scone.  It sounds simple at first glance, but apparently it divides nations.  I pronounce mine sc-on where some people prefer sc-own.   Perhaps there are other versions too, a bit like potatoes, potatos.

There’s even a whole etiquette around afternoon tea in a posh place, so take note.  I found the piece by William Hanson on the Gino and Mel entertaining but I obviously know very little about how to have afternoon tea in the old fashioned way. It’s a really good watch.

The Telegraph outlines the history of how sitting for afternoon tea came about and it’s fascinating to read that it was a Duchess in the early 1800’s who felt hungry between meals and began to make a social occasion of a snack between main meals. It was a secret activity at first, it quickly became the norm and is still practised in all shapes and forms today as a formal ceremony between meals and to gather friends together.

Nowadays, afternoon tea can be as simple as sitting at home with a friend or two and a mug of hot tea with home bakes, to the formal tea sittings in large hotels.  The beauty of it is that afternoon tea can take whatever form we want it to, but it is nice to be served by staff in a crisp and smart uniform.

Afternoon tea for me recently has mainly been sitting at a kitchen table with a friend or two, putting the world to rights while our kids are at school.

I think the biggest question for most with English tea has to be how to add the milk and sugar.   I’m a teapot or teabag gal with no sugar, and milk put in the cup last.

My mother is a teabag lady and prefers her milk in the bottom of the cup with the tea poured on top.   I understand that with teapot tea, but with teabag tea, the tea masks in the cup and I think the milk in first would interfere with that.

Perhaps afternoon tea should be on my agenda more.

Brought to you in collaboration with Hotel Direct.