No, the She-Devil and I do not communicate at all, haven’t done for many years. She still resents me for being alive and I can’t forget the miseries she put me through. Besides, she’s as daft as a brush.

What a mean sister. She must have been jealous of your intelligence indeed if she had to demonstrate it that violently in order to gain the upper hand. Or even just a perverse sort of equality in her eyes.

Re the blogging – even I can manage once a fortnight at worst. The trick is to alternate short and long ones if time is at a premium. And something short can be as good or pithy as something long.
Oh I don’t think the She-Devil ever saw my intelligence as anything more than a poor consolation prize for not being as pretty and personable as she was. She just never forgave me for coming along five years after her and screwing up the family dynamic, which had revolved around her until then.

Good advice on the blogging. I think about stuff I’d like to blog all the time, but I just never seem to get around to it.

My family were mostly readers, and when I was a teenager my mother, sisters and I used to read out loud to each other in the evenings in Florida (while we did needlework)! This is all on the distaff side, though. I remember my father insisting that only the young read novels, and in the 20 years I was married to him, my ex husband only read one novel (The Name of the Rose). The year after we were divorced he read Captain Correlli’s Mandolin. Other than that he mostly read time management books. And my mother declared that one of her brothers, long dead, never read anything but the RCA.

Apparently 80% of fiction is bought by women.

My older son reads novels and my younger son has read more plays than you can shake a stick at, so maybe the gender gap is narrowing.
Reading to each other as you do needlework, like a scene from Little Women; how I envy you. I read aloud to #1 Son from the time he was a baby, not just stories at bedtime, but also from the newspaper as he was slurping his bottle. And I labelled everything in our flat – doors, walls, fridge etc. – in the hope he would become interested in words per se. He didn’t begin reading for himself until he was almost 6, but when he started, he took off at a gallop. The first book he read was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, because he wouldn’t believe me that it had a character named Slartibartfast, and he’s been an avid reader ever since, with a catholic taste in books. I can’t imagine having a child that didn’t like to read; it would be like giving birth to an alien. I’m glad your sons aren’t aliens.