Words can be hugely powerful – as anyone who has ever read any DH Lawrence (or indeed any of the wordsmith authors) will recognise. When I was in my late teens, I thrived on reading Lawrence, Forster, Shakespeare, Dickens and a whole range of classic authors. Even now, I reckon going on holiday with a Charles Dickens is one of life’s great pleasures. These days, I find myself being constantly attracted to funny books rather than the great and the good as a way of relieving stress.

There is a compilation of short stories by DH Lawrence that had a profound effect on me in those days – England, My England. The collection is fab and in particular the story that gives the collection its name. It’s the story of a soldier whose life in rural England is flashing past him as he lies dying in a muddy field in France in the First World War. Despite its bleakness, it is a truly great story and the use of our language is perfect.

More often, words are bandied around with abandon and we seem to have developed a culture of why choose one word when half-a-dozen will do instead. After my revelations last week about my Dad’s insistence on good grammar, I thought I’d talk about my Mum’s language barrier! For my Mum, use of a phrase like ‘at this precise moment in time’ is a great example of a waste of language. She gets really worked up about why people can’t just say ‘now’. I reckon it’s actually because this phrase is usually trotted out by people being interviewed on the TV or radio and they don’t recognise the power of a pause or a few moment’s silence so they blather on extending the few words they really want to say and padding them out to fill the ‘sound bite’.

Both of my parents are advocates of good English and I sometimes wonder how they would respond if they saw some of the stuff I get to see at work. It goes from the sublime to the ridiculous – from too many words to too few! I had an email recently from a young chap who was working on a placement from Uni at a client’s offices that was written entirely in ‘text message speak’.

‘R U rnng ffl this yr? Let me no l8tr’ – loosely translated ‘are you running the fantasy football league this year? Let me know later.’

Even I recoiled when I read it and I’m at least partly used to text message speak. Mind you, I must be the only person alive who texts in full sentences and with proper punctuation! I just can’t bring myself to communicate in that way.

So, a second hand on a fixed date with a tiny, weeny depth of field is my analogy for my Mum’s pet hate!

Last year, my wonderful Louise was doing inappropriate things with a knife! It seems hardly possible that two years ago, our first family of fledgling wrens had just flown their nest.