Hello everyone, Linda here!

There’s a well established debate about the influence of nurture versus nature. In my opinion it’s all in your DNA and you have to work very hard to escape predestination! You may ask why I say that well let me tell you about my mother………

You may have seen this photograph I posted on Instagram back in May when Mom turned 90. Now as you can see she’s a silver haired, purple wearing, jolly individual partial to a bit of cake. Nothing unusual there you might think.

And here she is again looking as glamorous as ever. What might not be so obvious at first glance is the print on the top she is wearing. First I heard was when she called me and asked how Laura and I neutralise bleach on fabric. Apparently when she woke that morning, and chose to wear that top, she noticed an orange stain on one cuff. She is a fiend for bleaching her breadboard from time to time and must have inadvertently dipped her sleeve into the bleach while doing just that. Now it seems to me that most 90 year olds would have sighed and thrown the ruined top into the bin – not my mother! Oh no, she got out the offending bleach bottle, put her breadboard inside the top to protect the area and started to paint at regular intervals all over the fabric with more bleach.

Here’s a close up of the once black and white print with its bleached blobs. One blob of bleach is a problem – many blobs is a pattern! Now, every time I subject an innocent bit of fabric to some kind of experimental technique I’ll know why I do it and exactly who to blame – it’s all in the genes! What the man who came to service the central heating system that morning made of her bleaching her top while it was stretched over the breadboard in the kitchen is anyone’s guess. Killed two birds with one stone though – top rescued and breadboard squeaky clean.

Linda x