Spring lodge

 One evening my mother made dinner after a hard day's work. She put a plate of eggs, salad and burnt toast in front of my father ... I immediately noticed, the burnt toast .... And, I was waiting to see if he was going to complain about it, but my father started to eat them, smiling and asked me how I spent my day at school ... My mom apologized to my dad for the burnt toast. I will never forget his response to her: "Honey, I love burnt toast!" Later when I went to bed and my dad came over to kiss me goodnight, I asked him if he really liked the burnt toast? He hugged me and said, "Your mother has had a difficult day and she is really tired. She went out of her way to prepare this meal for us, why blame her and hurt her. Burnt toast never hurt anyone; but words can be very painful! " We have to know how to appreciate what others do for us, even if it's not perfect, because it's the intention to do well that counts, and no one is perfect ...

  My personal life story begins like all of us at my birth. Being born in a small village in the West African country of Ghana gives me my uniqueness and an identity that has culture, history and politics in it. The village is called Dixcove after the British Captain who was called Captain Dixon who colonised the region in the 16th Century. My Mother is a Ghanaian and my Farther is from England, the North West a West Cumbrian. When I was four it was decided by my parents that I would live in England with my dad’s sister my Auntie Dot. ‘It was for the best reasons ’ I have remembered my Auntie saying and after all it was the brave new world of the nineteen sixties, where the ‘civil rights’ movement was in its ascendency. Being sent to live in Egremount in West Cumbria had a number of challenges, not just for its white working class identity which served up a lot of prejudice for me; it was also the beginning of the sexual abuse that I had to endure as a child. My Auntie had two Sons and