Willingly suspend disbelief, if you will, readers – it’s still the sixth day of Christmas, ok? I’d really like to still get these all in before January 5th, which will mean a handful of posts a day most days until then, but forgive me. It’s still important for me to share what I’ve read and loved. Massive thanks also to Jade at Kink and Poly for saying how much she’s enjoying this mini-series.

So, Head in Book, aka Catherine. On the face of it perhaps a mummy-blogger, but once you start reading, so much more than that, even if you don’t have (yet, or never have any intention of having) children. Feminist, mum, lawyer and, as far as I can gather from our infrequent Twitter interactions, all round lovely lady. Oh, and her Twitter header is a picture of her bookshelf – what more can I say?

I tried to work out, reading through her archives, what post drew me into her blog and i think I must have clicked through from the post she wrote about the Michael Gove Of Mice and Men saga, or the Kirstie Allsopp ‘Just have a baby when you’re 25, darling’ furore, both of which I went on to write about myself.

I love her writing, and as usual, I had more than three posts that I wanted to link to here – for the first time though, two of them were consecutive posts, on totally different subjects. The first is a post from back in February, called How to talk to boys about periods, which I hadn’t read before today, but which struck me because a) I had noticed that going to the loo with small children is a pain for women, but periods hadn’t even occurred to me and b) there’s a paragraph in the middle which makes Catherine seem at one with her body and her menstrual cycle in a way that, at the moment, I can only dream of.

The two remaining ones are the consecutive posts, written in May. Marriage guidance for my six year old showcases Catherine’s humour and sees her daughter trade an X-box for married life in a mansion with a man who makes cake for a living. Seriously, what’s not to love?

And finally, Mother tongue, which resonated not only because of the shared languages-graduate background and love of words, but because I too have that habit of thinking ‘I don’t the like the word we commonly use for x or y – the connotations are all wrong.’ There’ll be a similar post from me soon, hopefully. Anyway, here’s an extract:

‘Words matter. Words don’t reflect what we see, they refract and reframe it. This isn’t the subject of a blogpost, of course, it’s the subject of a life’s work. But I have been thinking more and more, about the words we use around motherhood and the way in which language itself distorts our perceptions and colours – poisons, even – the debates about stuff which really matters.’

You can find Catherine’s home page here.