If I ask my children to do something a lot of different things may happen: They could do it , they might do it, they ought to do it, they must do it, they should do it.

Learning English can be so much fun, but those pesky little prepositions are often very tricky. They may be small and seem like no big deal to look at, but they can get on your nerves, get you into trouble and can mean the difference between: going with your friend for lunch or having your friend for lunch! Yuck!

There is an old fairy story, from France I think, about a princess who kisses a frog and he turns out to be a handsome prince. Out of this has developed the adage, 'You have to kiss a lot of frogs, before you find your prince'. In other words you will get what you want if you persist, but getting there might not be that pleasant.

My grandson had a great time over Christmas, being loved, hugged and given lots of presents. He is however only a few months old, so he won’t be able to remember it. Here’s hoping some of his presents last a while, so that he will at least have something to keep as a memento of such a special day.

The hedge needs a haircut.

As far as correct English is concerned this sentence ‘The hedge needs a haircut.’ although grammatically correct, does not make sense. Hedges grow leaves and twigs rather than hair, yet when I said it to my husband on Sunday morning he understood and replied ‘O.K. I’ll do it tomorrow.’, and a few minutes ago he came in and announced, ’I’ve done the hedge", and the fact is, even if he had said ‘I’ve given the hedge a haircut’, we would both have understood exactly what he meant.

In a survey conducted by Time Magazine in 2013, people were asked to vote on the most overused words, the top 3 were: Twerk, Selfie and Passion.

If I were asked to come up with a perfect word, there would probably be a different word every day, but one of them would definitely be ‘serendipity’, which means coming across something good very unexpectedly.  However, there are other words I’m not so fond of: I.M.O. ‘Nice’ is overused and so is ‘very’, even though they didn't feature in the survey.