Happy 70th Birthday Mummy!

My mother is just too damn awesome. Today she is celebrating her 70th Birthday. 

She has six children and thirteen grandchildren. How blooming fantastic does she look?

My mother, daughter and I were featured in Company magazine last year.

Growing bananas in her conservatory

This banana plant is growing in her conservatory in Thornton Heath, Croydon.
If you know your plants you may have noticed sugar cane growing in the background.
This will be the second time that my mum has produce bananas in not so sunny England.
This is quite an achievement as they usually only grow in places like warm and humid Kew Gardens.

 "Only a handful of other amateur gardeners in the UK have been successful in growing banana trees that actually bear fruit. Until a few years ago it was thought impossible to grow fruit bearing plants in a domestic conservatory"
 11 October 2009 Voice online

 Last year she grew her first pineapple and it was delicious!

She's very fit and likes to keep active, taking a twenty minute walk to the allotment a few times a week, spending hours pruning and weeding and tending her patch. She has grown sweet potatoes and yam as well as corn, peas, potato and anything else she fancies. Hopefully her guava and avocado will yield fruit this year. She has the greenest fingers ever!

 She is very creative and an amazing painter. 

This is just a few, but her walls are all covered with her art work.

Mum writes children stories and has recently published her third book 'Emily's Great Adventure'.
They are all available at Waterstones

I didn't realize my mother couldn't read until I was in my late teens. She always made me fill out forms for her, write out Christmas cards, read letters to her, the list goes on. Most of the time I hated doing it, I thought it was just her way of teaching us to read and write, never realizing her own inability. I now realize it was beause she wanted us to have what she never had as a child, the ability to communicate through witing. She loved to tell us stories about her life growing up in Jamaica and our home was always full of books, big fat encyclopedias. Every summer the six of us (a sister and four brothers) would pile down to the local library and join the summer reading challenge. We always had our heads in books, though sometimes very reluctantly.

She was featured in the local Croydon Gaurdian newspaper earlier this year.

"An author, who only learned to read and write at the age of 40, is due to publish her third book this month. Muriel Kingsley, who was born in Jamaica, has written three children’s stories with her latest book Emily’s Great Adventure, due to be available in Croydon libraries and online..." If you'd like to read more click here.

We were not very well off, but she always provided for us and we were never without. She would sew and make clothes for all the family. She still makes her own clothes now. To top it all she cooks the best chicken curry ever even though she's a vegetarian.

I can't believe my mummy is 70!
 I'm so proud of my mother,
she was always there for us and I hope she knows that we will always be there for her too.

Happy Birthday Mum!!!