When You've Been Let Down AGAIN by Someone You Depended On: 5 Ways to Cope.

America has expended a lot of energy, trying to change Putin. Sanctions, threats and many meetings and discussions have not made any difference.

Typically people don't change just because we want them to. 

I'm no political theorist and I don't have a solution to the Russian conundrum, but I do understand something about relationships. 

Whatever kind of relationships we are talking about, one thing I know for sure: we can't change other people. Only they can change themselves. 

So where does this leave us?

How to Win The Productive Aging Award.

A few weeks ago I finally had to admit defeat and buy a pair of reading glasses. I did not plan to celebrate this milestone, thinking of it as the beginning of my physical demise. Then I recalled my grandmother's remarkable life.

My late grandmother of tea-making fame started to lose her hearing at the age of 28. She lived in the UK and had just given birth to my mother at the beginning of WWII. After The War, my grandfather travelled for 6 months of the year trading in precious watch parts and my grandmother was essentially a single parent for much of my mother's childhood. She dealt with her hearing problems by learning to lipread and donning hearing aids without a second thought...........

"How the Turkey Ran Away From This Thanksgiving Day"-An Expat's GuideTo Choosing How to Celebrate Thanksgiving

Our first Thanksgiving meal experience was in Hong Kong, seventeen years ago, when we were allowed, as the only Brits to join a truly Hong Kong- American celebration.

During our 5 years in Hong Kong, we learned to make turkeys out of socks. Jonny wrote a poem about the challenge of finding a kosher turkey, when the only kosher store in Hong Kong did not have one. And we discovered that football does not always involve kicking a ball around a pitch with your feet.

An Expat's View - If I Can Move, So Can You! Some Tips For Success

As the world gets smaller we find ourselves with bigger opportunities in faraway places. 

Over the weekend, we met up with a British family who had just moved into the Washington DC area. They came for tea    (what else?)  and as I listened to their week of firsts in a new country: first visit to the grocery store, hunting for a rental, finding a school, buying coats for the kids etc,  it brought me back to the beginnings of each of our moves to new homes in countries around the world.....

2 Things I Have Learned From A Rookie Firefighter

Aerial view of the boarding school

Seventeen years ago this week, when we lived in a house in a boarding school by the River Thames in rural Oxfordshire, England, we had a fire in our bedroom.

We had just returned from London late on a July Saturday night. It was an unusually hot weekend by British standards. No houses had air conditioning and ours was no exception. The air was still and humid.

Anything But Routine

I do not like change. I am soothed by the 8.00am to 3.30pm school routine and the rhythm of the school week. Half days of school, the beginnings of school holidays, even the first couple of days away from home can unsettle me.  

This must sound pretty funny since we have lived on 3 continents, in 7 homes in our 23 years of marriage. But I always imagined that I was going to be the one who lived in London around the corner from my parents and grow old close by my family and the friends I'd known since I was fifteen.

The Queen's English

The longer I live away from England, the more patriotic I get. I hung our British flag outside our front door for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee which in case you were unaware, was this past weekend. I am more obsessed with tea, English chocolate, British television, films and novels than ever before and I am an avid Daily Mail fan (mainly for the pictures of royalty!) Looking at the UK from a distance the rose coloured* spectacles, only get rosier.

Four Girls and a Bar of Chocolate

** This post is dedicated to  strong, resilient, brave friends  all over the world  who are living  with serious illness:  patients  and  caregivers. **

Here we sit, four of us in Edgar’s in Manhattan on a Saturday night. We’ve all gathered for the weekend for M’s son’s Bar Mitzvah and it is obviously time to eat again. Four of us in our forties, each dealing with medical issues of our own, or our family’s, are at crossroads in our lives.

There is much to discuss.