The Talk Back Unicorn – A sugarless Easter gift, brimming with charm: reviewed by Annie Clarke

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The Talk Back Unicorn is a winner. A grandchild tested it, loved it, and has kept it – there’s no way Grandma’s  having this little beauty back any time soon. And I’m not surprised. The Talk Back Unicorn from Thumbs Up is a ‘stayer.’

Unicorns are special, magical – of course they are. This one especially because it repeats anything that’s said to her. So no whispering, thinking you’re safe. This gift is great for small children exploring speech and friendships, and ideas. it has really brought on our little one.

I noticed that the words uttered by the ‘grand’ became more distinct, especially if I joined in.

It’s really cleverly thought out, because it doesn’t just repeat, it mirrors non-unicorns – because this little rascal’s head bobs up and down just as ours do.

Basically, it’s cute, magical and helpful. What more could one want? White, with neon pink tufts of fur, mane and fetlocks (yes, really) and the most splendid mane on the block.

Such magic needs 3xAAA batteries.. Suitable for 3YRS+The  unicorn is 22cm tall. And a great gift.

Talk Back Unicorn available on line for £14.99 from Thumbs Up

 

 

Hape Diesel Freight Train and Steam-Era Passenger Train by Dr Kathleen Thompson

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As someone who spends far too many hours shivering on the local railway bridge, feeding my grandson’s train addiction, these Hape toys are a joy. Hape always provides fabulous quality and these trains are typical examples – they are made with traditional wood, but have magnetic couplings for compatibility with other train sets, and they run on standard rail tracks, so your child can use them with his other toys. They are beautifully painted in bright colours and a perfect size for your youngster to enjoy.

The Steam-Era passenger train comes with two detachable bright red carriages and the Diesel Freight train comes with two orange trucks, which are filled with coal. The coal lumps have magnetic attachments which can be used with the magnetic hoist on the Hape Large Boom Crane. Both the steam engine and the diesel are in matching green.

After a cold and windy day at the station, my grandson loves to take both trains out and play with them, reliving the steam trains and diesels he has just seen. OK he hasn’t really seen steam trains, but he thinks he has, and whilst Grandma is warming herself up with a cup of tea, she’s happy to let the misconception run.

The Diesel Freight train costs just £9.99 on Amazon (including the two trucks) and the Steam-Era train is also £9.99, including the two carriages. A good price for such beautifully-made toys. I can really recommend them as a birthday present, or simply as a surprise gift for your little one.

 

 

By Dr K Thompson, author of From Both Ends of the Stethoscope: Getting through breast cancer – by a doctor who knows

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01A7DM42Q

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01A7DM42Q

http://faitobooks.co.uk

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: CATHERINE BOARDMAN ON CULTURAL BLOGGING

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Catherine was a BBC News Producer for 20 years specialising in Business and Economics with a side line in travel writing for national newspapers, then she had twins.  Now Catherine writes about what she loves, Arts, Culture and Travel on her blog Catherine’s Cultural Wednesdays.  If you are seeking inspiration about where to go and what to see or need someone to write about it, she is your woman.

 

What is it about writing?  I love it.  I adore telling stories.  Yet I am the queen of procrastination.  Tales tumble over themselves waiting to be told.  My laptop awaits.  Coffee, I can’t write without coffee.  Ping, a group chat on Facebook messenger surges into life.  Cheap, cheap, somebody on What’s App has an urgent bon mot. Trillll, a twitter group surges into life.  At last somebody suggests a word race and we’re off.

Writing is something that I have always done.  Long letters to distant friends, fragments of ‘Famous Five’ style stories, breathless accounts of everyday occurrences in my tiny childhood village.  To begin with this need to write beyond the demands of study was a solitary pursuit.  I knew nobody else who scribbled endlessly.  Then I became a journalist, suddenly everybody I knew wrote, cared deeply about punctuation and was certain that they had the makings of a novelist.

After twenty years as a BBC News Producer I fell pregnant with twins and took the Corporation’s kind offer of redundancy.  My life changed, utterly.  Thoughts about writing a witty and engaging account of parenting identical twins in your forties came to nothing.  For two years it was all I could do to keep all of us fed and dressed.  Eventually when a sleep pattern was established that involved both boys sleeping at the same time as each other for longer than two hours, the fog began to clear.

Now my thoughts turned to a blog about what interested me.  Catherine’s Cultural Wednesdays started out as an account of my weekly jaunts out of the house and widened out to include travel.  I published the first post and was then overtaken by fear.  What if I couldn’t write?  What would people think?  Worse, what if nobody read it.  For the next six months I wrote posts and didn’t post them.  Paralysed with fear.

Without the support of friends and fellow writers I would still be writing posts that never got published.  Where did I find my support network?

Put #amwriting into the search box on Twitter and all manner of people pop up.  Daily word races take place.  The same people kept on popping up, so we set up a chat group, called ourselves the LLs or Literary Lovelies.  We went on writing retreats together.  We supported each other through first drafts, agent hunts, publication days.  Well some of us.  The rest of the LLs are proper novelists, I realised that what I like doing is telling immediate stories, fiction is not for me.  We chat virtually most days.

Wonderful though virtual friendships are flesh and bone is important too.  When my confidence was rock bottom, I joined a local creative writing class.  Slowly, week by week my confidence returned.  After a year or so the formal structure of a class was no longer the right format for some of us.  Now a group of us, the EveryGirl Writers, meet every week for two hours just to write, to support each other in our writing.

Telling stories is what I love to do.  The solitary nature of sitting down to write suits me perfectly.  Yet it is the support and friendship of fellow female writers makes the procrastination so much more fun.

 

Catherine’s Cultural Wednesdays https://www.culturalwednesday.co.uk

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/culturalwed

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/culturalwednesday/

Instagram: https://www.facebook.com/culturalwednesday/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/culturalwednesday

 

The Hape Robot Factory Domino Set Review

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My children loved this interactive domino set. It is unique and gives hours of fun. Smart and original, it builds lots of different skills.  We highly recommend it. A brilliant toy. 

 

Sure to be a big hit amongst both parent and child, take the domino phenomenon that one step further with this thrilling Domino Robot Factory from Hape, suitable for 4 Years +. Jam packed with a series of additional fun and interactive elements including; tipper car, crazy ball track, tipper arm and ramps help form an exciting robot themed production line to add plenty of drama and spectacle.

With the Robot Factory Domino Set use stored energy to catapult the wooden ball into the air, motor along the double sided track before momentum travels through the spinning arm. With the end in sight watch as the finishing flag begins to fly, that’s just one suggestion of ways to play. With no instructions or rule book to follow the build is in your hands, with each creation is sure to result in a different outcome.

 

Surprise awaits round every corner with this fantastic Domino set. As momentum builds through the course helps to introduce children to the concept of potential energy, momentum and gravity, as well as understanding the principles of (STEM) Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics learning.

 

Beautifully crafted from the highest quality natural materials Hape are proud to use only water based paints, tested rigorously to ensure that customers get the best value for money and quality in their toys. So what better example than Hape’s very own Domino set.

The Robot Factory Domino Set is available to buy online for £49.95 from Wicked Uncle.

 

A Day in the Life – Glenda Young

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Glenda Young by Emily Pentland

My day begins with tea made in the pot and warmed by a tea-cosy. I try to schedule my days in advance into writing and non-writing so that I know, for instance, on a writing day I won’t even look at email or social media or do anything other than crack on with my work in progress.  This may make me sound as if I am incredibly disciplined. But in truth, as anyone who works from home will know, the lure of the hour-long coffee break, daytime TV and the call of the biscuit tin are often difficult to ignore. In order to get any writing done at all, I have to be very focussed. Hold on a moment, would you, while I go and pop the kettle on?

On writing days I aim for 2,000 words and no matter if I’m in the thick of it or not, once I reach those 2,000 words, I force myself to stop. This leaves me itching to get started again the next day, rather than being stuck as to how to start. It might sound odd, but it works for me!

And if it’s a non-writing day, then it’s admin – emails, social media, appointments, arranging talks and events. As a debut novelist, giving talks is very new to me. It’s exciting but more than a little scary as I’m really quite shy and have to force myself out into the world to stand in front of people and talk. Fortunately, all talks so far have gone down well, and (I hope!) people are laughing at my anecdotes rather than laughing at me.

Research is also a key and ongoing part of writing a novel and it’s one I enjoy tremendously (although, yes, just like the hour-long coffee breaks mentioned above, I know it can work as displacement activity from the real task in hand of writing!). My novels are set in the northeast village of Ryhope, where I grew up. It prospered as a coalmining village and there is still a very strong sense of community there. My family still live there and I visit Ryhope often. The Ryhope Heritage Society have been extremely generous with their time and resources in helping me research for my work.

On a Wednesday afternoon all writing of my novels and admin come to a halt. Wednesday afternoons are sacrosanct. This is when I write my weekly soap opera Riverside for The People’s Friend magazine. I’m honoured to be writing the first ever soap opera in the history of the longest running women’s magazine in the world.  I love Wednesday afternoons and writing Riverside. It’s a fun, sunny break bringing life to a community I’ve created.

And whether it’s a writing day or not, one thing I like to do as long as the weather allows, is take a bike ride outside in fresh air. I’m very lucky to live on the coast and we have cycle paths stretching for miles in each direction. As a writer sitting at a desk all day, getting outside to cycle is a real luxury and one I enjoy a lot. It’s also important for me to get out and talk to people and so I try to arrange meet-ups with other local writers. Mondays are my “day off” when I’ll go shopping in town or treat myself to the afternoon at the cinema – phone off, cup of tea in hand, cocooned in the dark and utterly, totally switched off.

 

Belle of the Backstreets by Glenda Young is out now in paperback

Headline £6.99 RRP also available in E-book and audio

Glenda Young credits her local library in the village of Ryhope, where she grew up, for giving her a love of books. She still lives close by in Sunderland and often gets her ideas for her stories on long bike rides along the coast. A life-long fan of Coronation Street, she runs two fan websites for which she sometimes interviews the cast of the show. For updates on what Glenda is working on, visit her website glendayoungbooks.com and to find out more find her on Facebook/GlendaYoungAuthor and Twitter @flaming_nora.

Unrestricted View announce the return of its North London Film Festival by Michael Rowan

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Great news for lovers of film as Unrestricted View announce the return of its North London Film Festival which this year will run from Tuesday 23rd April to Sunday 28th April 2019.

Better yet submissions are still being accepted and the final extended deadline for submission is the 15th March 2019.

Launched in 2016, and following three very successful years, the 2019 festival is set to be will be bigger and better than ever before with the addition of some exciting new venues.

The UVFF festival is run by filmmakers for filmmakers and holds at its core, a passionate desire to celebrate the very best in, and encourage all aspects of, independent film making.

The Festival’s main hub will as ever, be situated at The Hen & Chickens Theatre, an independent theatre and cinema in Islington, North London.

Films will be screened there all day and each evening for the duration of the festival, alongside workshops and other events.

Building on last year’s success the opening night film for UVFF 2019 will again be shown at The Screen on the Green as well as the new addition of screenings held in Islington’s Vue Cinema.

Tickets for all shows will in due course be available from www.unrestrictedview.co.uk or on the door. Details of category finalists and full details of the programme for the festival will be announced on 26th March – the day after the nominees are notified.

Full information about the launch event and details of the judging panels which will be made up of leading industry professionals, passionate about independent film will be announced on the same day.

The festival will culminate in an awards ceremony held at The Hen & Chickens on 28th April, where winners from each category (listed below) will be announced.

 

Offline by I Rashid and S Kenner – A timely and erudite book review by Dr Kathleen Thompson

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Offline is a fascinating and important book co-written by a doctor and a marketer.

It explains how internet companies track us continuously; the sinister addiction-inducing marketing techniques used; and how our web activity is tracked and sold to third parties.

Do you, like me panic if you’ve left your phone at home?  Why? Well, it’s not by chance. Companies invest a great deal to control your need – read on.

Offline explains human psychology, and how various websites utilise our brains’ release of dopamine – the pleasure/addiction hormone, to keep us returning repeatedly.  On Facebook, we get messages and Likes – but we can never predict when – this craving-action-reward cycle releases dopamine and keeps us needing more. Stickiness is the buzz word.

Social media apps exploit our primeval socialisation need, and Offline explains how replacing actual with ‘fake’ digital socialisation can lead to depression and low self-esteem, and how these apps impair impulse control.

Facebook advertisers are able to select target groups – based on location, gender, age, interests, behaviour and many other attributes. Facebook continuously monitors our user activity to update this information.  Hence why if you search for a product you then get numerous adverts for the same item.

Kosinski studied 87 million Facebook profiles, and found that analysing just 68 ‘likes’ could predict skin colour, sexual orientation and political affiliation. With a few more, intelligence level, religion, alcohol/drug use, home circumstances, personality, affinity, and behaviour could also be deduced. To do this study, he asked 270,000 consenting volunteer Facebook users to allow him access to their entire network – ie not just their own profiles, but those of their friends AND friends of friends. Thus he accessed 87 million Facebook accounts, mainly without the users’ knowledge or consent.  Offline explains how Cambridge Analytica infamously also accessed Facebook profiles without permission – by piggybacking into Kosinski’s data. How many more companies did this before Facebook closed the loophole?

Offline demystifies cookies too. These collect data when someone visits a website – some track what websites you browse subsequently – and some share this with third parties, even providing your name and address on occasions.

Offline discusses other practices, such as ‘Zuckering’ –after the Facebook CEO – where you’re tricked into sharing more information publically than you intended.

It reveals that Google searches are not random, but are biased, based on previous web activity – this can distort reality, creating  ‘confirmation bias’ (interpreting new information to confirm existing beliefs) and thus promote social intolerance and polarisation. Maybe we would rather decide ourselves what we see in searches? It leads to cognitive dissonance too – you’ll need to read the book to find out more.

Offline discusses the deleterious effects of social media on mental health – giving a balanced view, highlighting when studies are flawed or inconclusive.

Finally it advises how to protect ourselves. It stresses that the web has many benefits and with awareness and behaviour changes, we can minimise bad effects – I agree, but knowledge is key and this book is an excellent summary.

 

By Dr K Thompson, author of From Both Ends of the Stethoscope: Getting through breast cancer – by a doctor who knows

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01A7DM42Q

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01A7DM42Q

http://faitobooks.co.uk

Why I am Embracing No Sugar Days

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Sugar has become the new smoking. So dangerous that even the government has brought in a tax to protect us. It all feels a little overkill to me. There is no doubt that too much sugar is bad for our health, and obesity and diabetes is on the rise. So I have been trying to cut back. Dieting, however, is a word that encapsulates everything hard and boring. I have lived my life and have only been on one. A no sugar diet I did a few years ago. Which you can read about here.  It was brutally but I felt great after. I love chocolate and having an occasional coke. I do not prefer all sweet food to savoury but I believe a world without dessert is a sad one indeed. I have thought about going no sugar again. Each time the days seemed long and boring. I know sugar is not good for my health so I came up with a solution: no sugar days. Now I am not a dietician so this is just opinion. The problem with my previous attempts was obvious: they were for months or even forever. A lot to live up to. The truth is; sugar in moderation is fine. So why give it up completely? You can manage anything for a day. It is barely anything at all. I have noticed a difference in my health and in my body. In a world were having a no sugar, no gluten, no anything fun, diet seems to be the fashion I just want to rebel. And do not get my started on the whole clean eating thing. Food is not dirty. If you have a no sugar day once a week then the next day you taste sugar more and just eat less naturally. The key is to not just eat lots of junk food that is not full of sugar. A day of health eating makes you more conscious and kicks off more healthy habits. It also means you keep away from those horrible sweeteners. I have never believed that sweeteners are better for you than sugar. I keep away from them, and aspartame in particular, as much as I can.

You can eat fruit on your no sugar days. You can also have some cheese or an oat cake with peanut butter. Fix your body with good food and you are investing in your health and your future. Food is medicine. We forget this at our peril. Try having a no sugar day yourself. Or even a low sugar day. Write any comments or tips below, or email me at frost magazine at gmail.com