Last weekend my lovely friend, Richard, came to stay. It was a Sunday afternoon, The kind of slightly damp, not very cheerful afternoon that makes you want to light the fire and settle in. We had walked the dogs, the girls had run around outside, in the mizzle and in their wellies. And we were now at home, reading the Sunday paper, drinking tea and watching the girls.

I leant over to the section of the paper that neither of us were likely to read (the Sport, sorry) and I tried to make a paper hat. You know the kind. A basic paper hat, made from newspaper. A proper thrifty, make-do-and-mend paper hat. And something I used to make all the time when I worked with children. But the thing was I just couldn’t remember how to make one. And it really, really annoyed me.

(In the end I ended up making two very strange paper bonnets, that made the girls look like characters from Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale.)

So, in lieu of that failure, I have decided to add a category here of easy to make, old-fashioned, activities and objects. And my first post will definitely be that paper hat!