About

I’m a qualified journalist, author, lifelong Welshie and occasional musician when I feel like it. My husband and two girls, Wensleydale cheese with apricots in it, talking, playing the guitar, laughing, singing, and writing are life. I love words – incorrigible, mellifluous and felicity are some of my absolute faves – and the best one ever is Mum.

Like all human beings I’ve lost people I love, had my heart broken, felt humiliated, scared, unattractive, overwhelmed, depressed and all the usual stuff that goes with being alive. Like all families, we have experienced loss, grief, periods of poor mental health, extreme stress and more.

When my kids were old enough to start asking questions, I wanted to find a way to be honest with them about life’s biggest issues. They know when something is wrong and to pretend otherwise, as the person they look to for answers, just didn’t feel right.

My father took his own life before my children were born. When they ask me about their grandad, to pretend tragedies like these don’t happen to ordinary people like us didn’t seem fair, because they absolutely do. When my Mum lost her battle with cancer in the middle of a world pandemic it didn’t seem like sugar coating it in the short term, only for them to relive it once the rest of their world had finally gone back to normal again, was ever an option. And when their Great Grandmother succumbed to the virus just weeks later, it seemed like there was nothing left to hide anyway.

When I wrote Ivy And The Rock, which looks at the role loss and grief has to play in shaping our future selves, I wanted to help my children understand how it feels to lose something you love so much in life in relation to their own self development, and to also help them understand me better too. In 2020 I was lucky enough to find a publisher for Ivy And The Rock, which was adapted from a poem I wrote and read at my dad’s funeral, and this is how www.bigissuesforlittlepeople.co.uk came about.

It is my hope that through shared experiences and the telling of stories we can all help young minds face the realities of life in an honest yet child friendly way, and in doing so give them the tools they need to succeed in this big, wonderful, wide world of ours.