Going on a day out en famille is nowadays no mean feat. There being five of us, it is not an insignificant amount of people suddenly to enter a small café or shop. Add into that mix a thirteen year old with autism and all the associated bag of tricks, then the fun really begins.

Having spent this Christmas with Alan Bennett, via his diaries and the film ‘The Lady in the Van’, and Raymond Briggs, via both the book and film ‘Ethel and Ernest’, this set me to thinking how with most writers the stories are simply their recounting their own histories; a massive element of…

This week it was my turn to deliver the assemblies at our secondary school. At this moment of time, the theme for an assembly for teenagers very much writes itself, when one takes a cursory glance through the newspapers and reads of the apparent — and to my mind very evident — increase in mental health…