I’d like to introduce you to my good friend Faith Eckersall. Faith is an award winning journalist and talented writer and we have known each other for well over 10 years. During that time our sons have become the best of friends. As youngsters they were inseparable – you could pretty much guarantee that wherever you found one son, the other would not be far behind. And the same can be said even now – despite them both coming up to their 18th birthdays. We have waited on the playground together, collected our boys from parties together and in more recent years, consoled each other with the trials and tribulations of raising teenage boys.
Faith writes lifestyle and interiors for magazines. When she’s not writing news and comment for a daily newspaper. And running round after her husband and two sons. And the Enormous Ginger Cat. She’s a big fan of family and parenting websites but sometimes wonders where the advice is for people like her … L x
Aren’t websites like TMK brilliant? All that help and information on what to do to entertain the tinies, where to go with the Small People and how to experience happy, family things that make you feel like something out of the Boden catalogue.
Like the truth, advice and ideas are out there. But only if your child isn’t on the wrong side of 17 or, (gulp) even older. How do you get everyone together when you suspect they’d rather be in their bedroom fiddling with their iThing, or watching cats doing daft things on YouTube?
In order to engender more family feeling a few months back, we decided to subscribe to LOVEFiLM. Well, OK, I subscribed us to LOVEFiLM.
The theory was this: instead of migrating to separate parts of the household every evening we would all sit happily together to watch entertaining and improving movies.
And we would have done, had the dear children not hacked into my email account, got the password and hastily re-arranged ‘our’ (my) choices. So that Gone With The Wind and American Beauty haven’t arrived yet. But the following film did…
Now call me old-fashioned but I don’t think Al Pacino’s Scarface actually counts as family viewing unless your surname is Corleone. I knew it was all going the shape of the pear when Son1 enthusiastically declared (after the 17th time Al bellowed “F*** you): “Hey I’ve had a great idea. We could have a drinking game based on this. Every time he says (expletive deleted) we down a shot!”
Great. By the time Pacino’s character; defeated, exhausted and confused, fell into the giant pile of cocaine I felt like joining him. Or secretly ordering The Sound of Music.
We’ve still got LOVEFiLM. But we’ve also acquired an iPad and a new MacBook. So when we’re not watching Dirty Harry, Lord of the Rings and Jack Black movies (yes, the boys are still controlling the film account) we can all enjoy watching cats doing daft things on YouTube.
Faith is available for commissions and you can find examples of her brilliant work here www.faitheckersall.com
Words: Faith Eckersall
Photographs: BlueCloud Photography
