Look how far we’ve come!

Sometimes I think that Ella and I have come such a long way since we left the Children's Home at 18 - in my case it was a 3 year battle against poverty to get a degree followed by marriage, parenthood and a job as a teacher. Some people might even call me an author now that "How I survived in and out of Care" has been published!

But some things - both happy and sad never seem to change.

The joy I feel when I go into the nursery each morning, the sound of Ella singing to herself as she cooks the breakfast, the gentle surprise shown by our husbands when the fridge hasn't mysteriously restocked itself with food or when I hear Nicola and Alice playing together in the lounge.

But sometimes, like happened this half-term week, I felt cross and sad when people who should have known better treated me like rubbish. I had been asked if I would go to a meeting in the next-door county to share my experiences of living in a Children's Home. It would have been about 90 miles there and back but the invitation didn't make any mention of paying my expenses. I phoned the organiser up but she was out of the office and her promised return call never happened.

So I phoned again the next day - exactly the same thing happened.

So I made one final attempt to get in touch, this time I was successful. I was then told that she had spent their entire allocated budget for speakers on somebody from OFSTED and that she was hoping that I would attend on a "voluntary basis". This was a seminar that people were paying to attend but also one where one speaker would get paid a fee plus expenses but the other speaker was to be taken for a total mug.

She really, really didn't couldn't understand why I was so cross!