TheBoyandMe

Last year I was very keen to sign my son up to the Lawn Tennis Association's #TennisForKids campaign in its inaugural year. He was fortunate to have one of the 10,000 spaces available throughout the UK and received six free sessions learning some basic skills and having a brilliant time. At the end of the six sessions, he was able to take home the racket that he'd been learning with in order to continue to play. The campaign was a roaring success for us, free taster sessions and a free racket to see if tennis was 'his thing'.

It turned out that tennis was very much to his taste as he continued playing tennis after the sessions ended in June, attending the Saturday morning sessions until the end of November and even going on some Summer camp days during the holidays. We've recently signed him up as a junior member of our local LTA club and he starts proper lessons in the first week back after the Easter holidays; those six free sessions have really started him off with a passion for the sport.

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Twelve years ago my old headteacher decided to sell the infant school piano to the piano tuner for £100. I interjected and asked if I could buy it for the same price.

At the time, we had a shell of a sixty year old house. The only floor which had not been dug up due to a dodgy dampproof course was in the living room and the day when we would make that house our home seemed a long way off.

Yet sure enough, the following Saturday morning saw two men in a van transport the battered and coffee-ring stained mug that was a feature of my own childhood infant assemblies, to our 'new' rubble-strewn house. We protected it from the constant dust for six months, encasing its wooden, badly varnished carcass in many layers of plastic sheeting, cursing the hefty lump of wood and wondering why I'd had this bright idea when neither of us could play the piano.

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Date night has become a staple of modern family life, allowing mum and dad to take some time out to reconnect and reaffirm their relationship away from the pressures and demands of family life.

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