Word trapping

Just can't resist a new start

2012-01-03T18:38:00.001Z

I'm too tired for resolutions, aren't you? One gets so weary of the whole self-improvement blind optimism thing. I want to roll over and go back to sleep on all those fresh-face bright-eyed dreamers who make me feel old. Except all of a sudden I'm not sleepy at all. I'm uncomfortable and wide awake and damn it, I think that itch on my knee is Hope, reminding me it's still there. I'm going to have to get up and join the tribes who decide to throw everything at a new start, no matter how many new starts have been used up already.

Attainable goal setting, then? Ahem. You remember me, right? The person who in 2011 alone tried to write a book in 2 months, join a tap dancing class, audition in front of the film director Danny Boyle without any experience whatsoever, make a quilt, sing in front of a packed church, and in the meantime more or less hold together a day job and my family and friends (with a few bits of string and crossed fingers)? The less we dwell on reasonable expectations, the happier we'll be.

That said, I lasted all the way until the 3rd January with only one measly and very pedestrian resolution for 2012: open all post on the day it arrives.

This is harder than it sounds if you are anything all like me, who eyes each arrival through the letterbox with suspicion and leaves it to mellow a little before facing it. Occasionally something gets REALLY mellow and its deadline passes, and when I open it I make little squeaks of panic and have to expend lots of energy sorting things out. I am not like this with emails. It's something about envelopes. So: just open the flipping things, that's the resolution. (Maybe for 2013 I'll consider then doing something about the contents, but let's not be hasty.)

I am pretty awestruck by other friends' resolutions (excluding everything to do with giving up biscuits or taking up triathlons - there's medication you can take until you feel better). One in particular has vowed to blog every day. She is a total star, and a bit of a maniac. I plan on ... enjoying reading them, but there's no way I could copy her. However, however, however, I have been taken by her theme, which is thankfulness.

And so I have decided to scribble down on a scrap of paper just one thing each day that I'm grateful for, and pop them into my special store (picture below). At the end of the year I will have either:
a) Over 300* things to look back at, and realise it's been a blessed year, or
b) a soggy papery mess for when I forgot that I appointed a non-tea-making use for this teapot.

* because let's face it, "every day" is never going to happen...

Dance like no-one's watching (with clipboards)

2011-11-19T00:06:00.000Z

I write this exhausted, still about ten degrees warmer than I'd like, and periodically breaking off to giggle about what my friend and I did tonight.

I'm not sure what the universe is up to, but somehow we found ourselves with a couple of hundred other people in a warehouse "somewhere in London" auditioning to be part of the 2012 olympics. Now, I'll give you a moment here to try and think of something to say other than "You????". No? Never mind, I understand. Quite clearly, we are not talking about being an athlete here, but the truth is only slightly less likely. I'm sure the "don't call us, we'll call you" is already in the post, but tonight's selection was for people to be in the opening ceremony. Yes. IN it.

The hilarity has been building between Nicola and I for weeks in anticipation. She has great hopes of being allowed to wear a giant mascot suit, but we eventually rejected this plan due to the considerable risk of falling and being unable to get up.

We did select our own personal role model for this endeavour though: Eddie the Eagle Edwards, we salute you. We channelled your dogged determination in the face of obvious unsuitability, as best we could.

I'd also like to specially mention the heartfelt encouragement from my sister, who sent me a text just before tonight began, that read: "One. Singular sensation. Every little step she takes. One. Thrilling combination. EVERY MOVE THAT SHE MAKES."Yep, thanks for that.

Now I've signed a confidentiality thingy, and I'm going to stick to it. Not least because tonight's scrutiny included having all our measurements taken, as well as being photographed and filmed, and I'm scared of the reciprocal information leaks that could ensue. I can say that Anton du Beke was not there and therefore did not teach us the lambada. There was also minimal pushing of pineapples or shaking of the trees. There was about 2 hours of being constantly on the move, and not just moving (in time) but also Smiling. I don't think I have ever smiled so much at strangers. When sober. My face hurts.

There was also a fair bit of being told to "strike a pose". I fear this resulted in something rather less Madonna from Vogue, and rather more "Model from 70s knitting pattern".

For most of the evening I couldn't look at Nicola without dissolving into wheezy hysterics. I was trying hard to do that stupid positive thinking slogan I have always mocked. You know, the one about "dance like no-one's watching" but it's hard when they ARE watching, and they're wearing tabards and holding clipboards. You try it.

Whatever happens next Nicola, we'll always have tonight, the night where we held hands. Because we were forced to. And then rushed for the anti-bacterial hand gel. Kudos to you, woman of courage - I never really thought we'd go through with it!

Where everybody knows your name

2011-11-01T12:12:00.001Z

True friendship is hard to define. The closest I can get is that it's like walking into the place you call home, the place "where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came". I like to think I'm thankful for my friends on a pretty much daily basis, but over the past few days, I've been giving it a little more thought than usual.

They say that you know who your real friends are by who's still standing next to you when things are going badly. That's true, and as a measure, it's one that my friends have proved themselves against over and over again. But tonight I choose to think instead about the other times - the best of times, with the best of friends.

I have one particular friend who is stellar. She's the one I think of first when the crazy comes upon me - sometimes she talks me down, sometimes she joins in. I love that I never know which way she's going to jump! I can't remember any of the things she veto-ed just now which perhaps proves they weren't such crash hot ideas in the first place. Here's a taster though of the things she's not hesitated over:

"Hey, what do you think of taking a week-long intensive art class although we've never done it before?" She was 100% in - with a little arm-twisting. My friend is the only person I know who could spend 3 hours at eye-level with a male model's bits, then have a cup of coffee with him afterwards and ask him if he recognised himself in any of the class's drawings. (The answer: rarely...)

"I'm bored so I signed us up to audition for the X-factor - are you free in April?" This took a teeny bit more pressure on that contorted arm, but I got her to say yes in the end. Let's just say we have a LOT of material on each other, and I used up quite a bit of my leverage that day. (Yes, readers - we got through to the second round - and then withdrew for sanity's sake. So technically, we won, I reckon.)

"Shall we do 12 hours on a train and 4 hours in a car, for a 4 hour party in Scotland?" She was completely up for this, but it was conditional upon agreeing to be dressed as a goth. A visit to the goth shop in Edinburgh left me feeling like an escapee Stepford Wife - I looked WAY too alive and wholesome to be in there (appearances can be very deceptive). Still, pink streaks in my hair and a black frock: not as bad as I'd expected.

We have had some quieter times together. Like the silent retreat where she did the best mime EVER when realising the apple crumble had nuts in it and she needed to tell me before I took my first fatal mouthful. She was nearly given mouth to mouth herself by the concerned onlookers, but has tragically refused to re-enact the scene for me to cheer me up, despite much begging.

Tomorrow is a very big day for this amazing woman. We'll be facing it together. And we will always have this, sweet friend: in memory of the walk we took under the oak trees, and the acorns we picked up and kept in our pockets until they were shrivelled, and the promise we made to grab life by the um, throat, and hang onto until we've had the ride of our lives.

Blinking into the sunlight

2011-10-07T16:03:00.003+01:00

What happened to this year? One minute it was April and everything was exciting and Springlike. Oh, and then I had to write 98% of a book in a hurry, while still showing up at the day-job (in body if not in mind). I remember now.

Never edit alone - where's the fun in that?

The summer disappeared in a blur of paper, coffee, and re-writes. It has been punctuated by attempts not to lose my mind. These have perhaps not all been entirely successful, like the time I thought I'd hack a hedge down for light relief, and it took me about ten minutes to realise the buzzing noise was not the electric trimmer, but the cloud of angry wasps circling my head. Retreated to wait for winter to solve that particular problem...

Anyway, last weekend was my reward for completing a mammoth session of edits and sending the poor chapters out into the world again to see if they find a happy (dark) home. And the reward was Rome.

It was so much more beautiful than I was expecting. I don't know why. I think Italian people I've known before had dissmissed it airily with comments like "Well, it's just a city. You should see Siena / Vicenza / Cortona..." Which are indeed lovely, but this was something else entirely.

It's a city alright but it's stunning. It categorically refuses to let go of its past, with ancient stones and towers as integral to the life of the city as the tribes of vespas, street vendors and languid carabinieri. Even now I can't quite get my head round something the scale of the Colosseum sitting calmly about ten minutes' walk from the railway station, with everyday life butting up against it.

Every time I think for certain something was my favourite thing (like the Pantheon) then I remember something else. But definitely labouring up the Janiculum (I think...) hill in Trastevere and finding a gorgeous shady fountain at the top, where precedent had already been set for the dipping in of limbs - that was a good moment. 'One foot in the fountain' is my new preferred position at all times. They'd even laid on a view to pretend that was the real reason for stopping, rather than urgent need of oxygen.

They're good at views in Rome. Going through my photos at home, I had to get the map out to work out where I'd been standing, and keep the pictures in strict order - there were so many glimpses of skyline, each more stunning than the last. This one is from the Ponte St Angelo, when we were crossing the river on our way to visit the Vatican Museums.

My second favourite fountain was, predictably, Trevi. OK, it didn't have the peace (or the foot-dipping) of my absolute top choice, but by day and by night it was mesmerising. I failed to throw in a coin, because a lot of the time there was a very real risk of taking someone's eye out (tiny bit busy in that area). There were enough coins in there already to make a million wishes; mine might only have been to have the time to look all over again.

Starstruck

2011-07-24T20:10:00.005+01:00

It's been an exhausting couple of months, but it all came together this weekend. On Friday I was chauffeured to Harrogate by my obliging family, for the CWA Dagger Awards. The evening reception would announce the winners of 5 Dagger awards, including the Debut Dagger for which I'd been shortlisted. Although I wasn't to be the winner this time, the room was packed with exciting people to meet.

I was a bit frozen to begin with - where to start? Quite clearly we started with the (excellent) canapes and freely flowing wine. But after that, the question became, how do you tell who's who? I like to think I settle just on the legal side of 'stalker' in terms of fan-dom, so I had no problem identifying the faces of a whole fistful of writer heroes. But the more practical part of me had in mind that the people I really needed to connect with were the ones who could help me actually get into print. Oh, so not just here to dribble compliments at my idols then? Shame.

Well, I'm happy to say that with the help of my social butterfly sister, we worked the room and met some tremendous people. There's one business card in particular that I am guarding with my life. And then we allowed ourselves some fun and so we persuaded famous people to have their photographs taken:

Mr Suave - Lee Child (hearts were a-fluttering)

Mr Generosity - the great Mark Billingham (who pointed out key people for me)

Peter James, Chair of the CWA

This next one may be my favourite photograph; it makes me laugh every time I look at it. When we were still shy early on in the evening, my sister decided to take what might have been her only opportunity for a celebrity snap.

I think you'll agree her paparazzi career beckons - blur out your sister to get the shot of D.I. Thorne's creator! The party's over and it's back to work, but it was a fantastic night.

The missing bits

2011-06-09T12:19:00.000+01:00

I haven't posted for ages due to a proper head-down marathon attempt at finishing the current book. Inevitably, at some point I was going to test my own inventive capacity for procrastination, and this morning it was apparently imperative that I deep-clean my computer keyboard. At once. Thoroughly. Including removal of all the keys and liberal scrubbing with cotton buds, followed by the violent attentions of the vacuum cleaner to get rid of all the fluff (is the cat actually sleeping ON the keyboard?).

There's just one tiny problem now. The keyboard is gleaming. As is the rest of the desk, as one rather threw the other into sharp relief. The thing is, it turned out to be quite an art removing each key with a tiny flat screwdriver and for the first one or two I attempted, they pinged wildly round the room landing with glee in cups of coffee, plant pots, lampshades and ... well, somewhere else I've not yet discovered. So hypothetically speaking, just how important is it to have 2 "Alt" keys? I mean, surely one is all anyone really needs? Even if speed touch-typing, you rarely reach for Alt in haste, do you? Hmmm.

Oh well, at least now my keyboard matches the plot of my book. Let's hope I get to fill the holes in both sooner rather than later.

[Oh and I've just noticed I've put two of the keys on the top right back in transposed positions, in case you were about to point it out. I'll get right on that as soon as I've sieved the coffee cups for the missing key.]

Looking up, once in a while

2011-05-17T12:03:00.000+01:00

I fear this jumbled post comes from having had some very dubious television on "in the background" while I was butchering a jacket in the hope of making something beautiful. Or acceptable. Or not obviously likely to make strangers point and laugh at the wearer. I've since lowered my expectations. Said jacket was a £6 purchase from a charity shop that I've been allowing to settle into my cupboard for about 3 months. You can't rush creativity after all. Originally all that I thought was required for transformation were a few new buttons, perhaps a shortened hem, and a good wash. Hmm. It now rather resembles the philosopher's axe, in that it has few recognisable constituent parts. I'm sure there are seams in that jacket that sew themselves up again while I'm unpicking others. Now that I've almost finished tailoring and trimming it, I'm not sure I like the colour. Excellent.

But last night while ripping out seams, wrestling with slippery ribbons and trying to re-align buttonholes, the television has been chuntering away in the outer layers of my consciousness. I'm not sure where all these moments came from but I dimly remember someone repeating the same morning seven times before they learned to live in the present, some people whining about cutting hair, a jaw-droppingly awful trailer about posh people who think the word "sex" is terribly daring, and a lot of earnest romulans and robots delivering monologues to each other in lieu of dialogue. No wonder I had some very odd dreams.

At one point the vacuous moaners on the television distracted me enough to look up from my pins (and stab myself in the thumb immediately), which made me notice that the evening had begun with a beautiful sunset.

Stepping out onto the damp grass to get a better look, I saw some of the plants' flowers had almost faded. I nearly missed their late blooming. The purple of the clematis was even more gorgeous in the evening light than it is in daytime.

As it was, I took a few moments to enjoy the bright pink trumpets of the rhododendron, and to admire the still thriving honeysuckle.

It was a few minutes that turned the day around. A short while later the stars were out, and were so quietly wonderful that no knotted threads or argumentative aliens mattered any more.

You can do this one of two ways

2011-05-02T01:01:00.000+01:00

I have been wondering today whether we are all designed to make things more difficult for ourselves, without even trying. At one point in our synapses do we have that fork in the road, the "shall we take the easy way or the hopelessly over-complicated-doomed-to-failure way" moment?

I went to a lecture recently that was about how the brain makes sense of what the eye sees. I spent quite a lot of it blinking hard as if that would re-boot my struggling brain, but I managed to grasp and retain a few fragments that give a glimpse of the complexity of what happens inside our skulls.

The first thing that challenged my understanding of the world was learning that everything we think we see, i.e. all the information that flows in through our eyes onto the screen at the back called the retina, is upside down. Pardon? Well quite. But it's true - apparently the brain takes this upside down information, quietly and speedily flips it, and gives us the world the right way up. Still with me? Because it gets better. If you put someone in very strong prism glasses (I imagine it was a slow Friday afternoon in the lab when they came up with this one) to turn the world upside down, after a short while of bumping into everything, the brain will re-flip all the information and make the world seem the right side up again.

So, an awful lot is happening to the information we take in before the brain spits out a set of information. Might this have any bearing on the temptation to make life trickier than it needs to be? I'm not saying the apparently quick and easy way is always the best; there's always something to be said for the route that feels right, and for taking the time to enjoy the road. Which reminds me of a wintry day when my friend J and I set out to walk the Seven Sisters. For those of you not living in East Sussex, this is a stunningly beautiful stretch of 7 cliffs. The path runs along the top, so naturally involves seven sets of steep climbs followed by skidding descents. By about the 5th "sister", J stood and gazed out to sea taking in the sunshine and the glittering waves, and said "You know, what this route could really use is a bridge."

One thing at a time

2011-02-14T11:05:00.000Z

I am just back from four blissful days on retreat. No phones, computers, internet, music or television. Just open log fires, deep cushioned sofas, tea and cake at half-hour intervals, with all the time in the world to watch the wind move across the lake. And of course, two wonderful friends to share it with.

Remind me each day

that there is more to life

than increasing its speed.

Let me look into the branches of

the towering trees

and know that they grow

great and strong

because they grow slowly and well.

(c) The Marantha Community

Simply a paring down, a cleaving to

one object, as the star-gazer who sees

One single comet polished by its fall

Rather than countless untouched galaxies

(From 'The Diamond Cutter' by Elizabeth Jennings, published by Carcanet)

Each of the three of us went to be quiet in that beautiful place for our own reasons. But all of us needed to start to slow down, to remember that sometimes we have to wait. And of course to remember that we have each other, and that hours of whispered laughter are sometimes the best healing there is.

It's always the little things

2011-01-22T20:56:00.000Z

A candle flame.

The smell of fresh linen.

The sight of the first snowdrops.

A cat extracting every last bit of pleasure from a sunbeam.

They have a way of putting other stuff not into perspective exactly, because sometimes those other things are monumental and deserve a commensurate reaction, but perhaps putting them on hold for a moment, giving you a chance to catch your breath.

Life is, after all, in the details and in recognising something good when it's right in front of your eyes.

End of year report: satisfactory progress, still prone to day-dreaming

2011-01-02T15:55:00.000Z

A bright shiny 2011 has now arrived at platform 19, welcome aboard everyone. It appears I have been specially selected to begin the new year with a great big ... cold, so that's very pleasing (to those who are shareholders in Lemsip). Due to a combination of said cold, lethargy, red wine, and a vast amount of carbohydrate, for some reason my family did not really complete its annual review over the New Year's Day luncheon. I feel strangely short-changed. So I'm going to impose it upon you good people instead. Traditionally, we list the highlights or major events we've experienced in the year - limiting ourselves to the ones where we've actually been present, to avoid it becoming the sort of current affairs quiz in which I am doomed to trail in last. And then like everyone else we make token wildly unrealistic resolutions for the year ahead.

The big stuff (or the small stuff that felt big at the time):

1. Selling one house and buying another

This involved an awful lot of diplomacy and being tremendously facilitative and friendly to people when I really wanted to snarl. Other than that it went suprisingly smoothly, with the whole process completed in around 10 weeks. Which was just as well, as keeping the for-sale house "viewing ready" was something of a strain (I think we all remember the tray of half-full coffee cups in the wardrobe incident). I spent several weeks profoundly believing I needed to find a new house that had more storage. Then I started packing to move and realised I didn't want more storage, I wanted less stuff. Much entertainment was provided to my family when they realised my "broken the back of it now" meant I had finished packing all the books - alphabetically. In my defence, this did turn out to constitute almost half the total number of boxes. In the end, I didn't move any closer to the coast despite checking out numerous houses there. So for now it will have to remain somewhere to visit.

2. Getting things in print

According to yesterday's paper, "motivation follows action" not the other way round. Apparently if I wait until I feel like doing some work, I'll be waiting a loooong time. Tell me something I don't know. Unless I magically find a way to either enjoy it, or persuade myself there's a decent associated gain., progress can be glacially slow. I've been bribing myself through things for years, as fortunately I find myself quite persuasive. There was the mint aero mountain that was broken off piece by piece through my undergrad dissertation, and it's been downhill from there really. Still, somehow or other I do tend to get things finished (by "somehow", I mean blind stubbornness and pride), and this year a poem won a nice big competition, and a piece of fiction was published in an anthology. Now, probably time to get on and write some more. And see if I can do something radical like make more than coffee money out of it.

3. Actually completing a resolution

My resolutions for 2010 were threefold. But let's focus on the one I completed, which was to try at least 6 things I'd never done before. Fortunately, my wonderful Finnish friends provided me with about 60 examples in just the one holiday with them, including: walking on a frozen sea, taking a dip in an ice-hole, a snowy horse-drawn sled ride, touring the world's smallest handicraft museum... the list goes on and on.

Back home, I managed to top up the spirit of the resolution by doing a few more "firsts", including going to an opera, meeting the Prime Minister (unplanned, but still counts), recording a music CD with a local group, successfully assembling a piece of flat-pack furniture on my own (butcher's block trolley actually. Yes, I was impressed too.), and becoming a godmother. OK so the last one was entirely outside my own control but it continues to be a delight. There have also been a couple of food-related firsts: I was surprised to develop a taste for barbie-pink garlic cloves, presumably beetroot-ised in some way, in Helsinki. However, more recently, I hope to put the bacon-flavoured chocolate episode firmly behind me. It was alright until you sniffed it.

On that highbrow note, I think that's enough of an annual review.

What about those resolutions then?

I haven't been able to make my mind up about resolutions for 2011. Perhaps when the haze of eucalyptus and balsalm tissues clears, I'll be better able to decide. All I really know is I want it to be something about remembering to be thankful for the present moment. And with the CD volume on high and a pot of tea within reach, just now I've got that under control.

The Zen Art of Snow Raking

2010-12-23T11:59:00.000Z

Like most of the rest of the country, and indeed the wider world (although this last we take on hearsay since the UK has ground to a halt and cannot connect with it), there's been a spot of snow here in the shire. Even for my ice-queen sensibilities, conditions became too extreme for my routine of taking my first cup of tea of the day outside on the swing seat:

Likewise, the car has been out of action for a week or so. Car? I see no car. Over there, beyond the wall. What wall? Oooooh. Anyone got a shovel?

Walking to church on Sunday morning I was treated to a demonstration of the zen art of snow raking. Now I know not everyone will be as well accoutred as myself in terms of garden implements, but in the absence of a spade, would you really have tried a rake? Two people I passed were doubtless making some beautiful one-inch deep patterns in the twelve inches of snow, but I suspect the transient indentations echoing the futility of human lives in the face of eternity were not quite their intention. It got me to wondering about whether monks in asian monasteries rake the snow on top of the gravel gardens in winter. Strangely, these two appeared to have given up trying to comb their driveway clear by the time I walked back. (The man I later passed who was flicking snow expertly off his path using an oar was having more success, although passers-by had to take their chances as most of the clearance flew at about eye-height.)

So indoor pursuits have been the order of the day. The cat and I have formed a crack team whereby I put the cards and decorations up, and she takes them down again, thus keeping us both occupied all day and staving off the risk of boredom. She's particularly fond of hiding behind the TV cabinet and leaping out to catch the dangling hand-stitched snowflakes unawares.

I've also done a lot of "one day" jobs, including finally using the sewing machine to make things for my own house, rather than either profit or relatives. I've had this fabric for ages, but it's finally been turned into cushion covers and tablecloths.

And of course the rest of the time I've been trying to track down a Finnish kick-sled on ebay.

Hey hey it's nano time again

2010-11-01T11:39:00.000Z

OK *cracks knuckles and makes alarming faces* this is it now. Three times I've participated in nanowrimo, and only the first time was successful. Whether it was my super-cool writing partner (= competitor) that got me through that first time, or whether I was just younger, sharper, more stubborn... No scratch that one, I'm getting more stubborn as I get older, not less. Whatever the reason, 2008 and 2009 were not good nano years for me. But I am determined this year. Oh yes.

And I've decided to listen to one of their pieces of advice (about time) and not use this month to try and work on any existing projects. They're quite right, I get far too precious about them, and it means the full-tilt sprint to just get words on the page never quite happens. So, many of you have heard the big talk, swiftly followed by the whines, and then seen me go rather quiet, before. But just in case you, dear reader, have escaped, the principle of NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth (nanowrimo) is: write a 50,000 word "novel" in 30 days. Simples. Hmmm.

That translates to 1667 words per day (a number they will hear me mumbling through my false teeth in my care home). That doesn't sound so bad until you remember it's EVERY day. Thirty times in a row. In many ways it's strikingly like a diet. The first day you have the tide of moral righteousness to surf, as well as a semi-scientific interest in counting every single word/calorie that rears its head. The second day, a spot of tetchiness creeps in as you realise apparently, one day is not enough to either a) finish the novel, or b) be thin (sad that). After that it gets worse.

The website suporting all the thousands of folks round the world crazy enough to (repeatedly) think this is a good idea, is full of fun and encouragement. I particularly liked the article by someone who had decided the risk of monetary loss was the only way she would succeed - for each day she fails to hit her 1667 target, she has to buy her boss a coffee. I completely understand this mentality - rewarding myself with a coffee wouldn't work, I'd tell myself I could live without one. But coughing up £3 over and over again for someone else - well, frankly I am just not that nice. I'd better go now and either make a start (hahahahaha) or think up who the lucky recipient of many many cups of coffee in November is going to be. So long as they don't expect service with a smile.

(With a total absence of html knowledge I have attempted to add a widget - surely something that lives at the bottom of a beer can? - to this blog, which should show the cumulative wordcount. I'm hoping shame will be really REALLY motivating.)

Monkey magic

2010-10-25T10:46:00.001+01:00

Just a very short post to say that I've decided to separate out general waffling from craft-related waffling.

You can now find the latter on our Homespun blog.

You'll be welcomed there by this amazing monkey, made by H during our craft day together on Saturday.

All in the Pheromones

2010-10-18T17:34:00.000+01:00

It's that wonderful time of year again. Autumn? Term-time? According to many supermarkets, Christmas? Nope. It's booster innoculation time at the vet. Yay. Cue increased anxiety, scratching at the furniture, and hiding under the bed. And as you'll have guessed, that's just me. The cat is hovering somewhere up the nearest telephone pole waiting for my nerve to disappear (I only have one left and it's rather short on stamina).

I'm struggling how to convey just how badly my cat travels. There are few words that adequately describe it. Howl, is one. Spit, is another. Unfortunately, furball, is a third. She saves them up, I swear. It is at most a ten minute drive to the vet's. She spends the outward journey working herself up into a frenzy, and driving my heart rate into the triple figures as a claw and part of a paw manages to dig its way further through the wicker every time.

Then there is a brief respite while she tortures the vet face to face. It's been many years since one has been brave enough to take her temperature. This year, they fell at the "well, her stomach seems a little tender there" hurdle (wiping the blood from their arm on their scrubs and trying to look nonchalant), "I don't think we'll palpate that any more as you say she's eating fine" (wiping disinfectant over their arm and assessing how many stitches are needed). "Could you catch her?"

After the vet and I breathe a heavy sigh of relief having squeezed her off the light fitting and back into the basket, all that remains is to pay (ouch) and get her home again. Oh no. It never goes well.

However, it's markedly worse if there is any delay at all during the payment stage and she is exposed to the indignity of other animals. Dogs come off particularly badly. Last year a white scottie dog had its friendly nose slashed when it sniffed too close. This year, I'm afraid she treated an advancing puppy to, um, a furball. Normally these are saved for the special enclosed environment of the car, so I can't escape the joy. And trust me they are not as cute or hygienic as this one. (Strangely google images didn't supply me with actual images of furballs - it turns out there are limits after all. I'm quite relieved.)

For some reason, the rather distressed vet's assistant also sold me a plug-in cat calmer device this time. I have previously tried in vain to explain she is calm itself when queen of her own domain at home. They nod at me with the special smile reserved for people who call their pitbull 'fluffikins' and wonder why all the neighbourhood pets have disappeared and he's a little off his food. So, game for anything, I'm giving it a try.

I don't know that it's doing anything for the cat, but it's signifcantly increasing my middle-class anxiety levels because I think it looks like a plug-in air freshener, and frankly I would sooner have frilly net curtains than one of those. Which reminds me that I recently saw one advertised with the fragrance of 'open windows'. I wonder how long it would be before someone thought, "gee, instead of buying this thing, using electricity to power it, and buying another re-fill every four weeks, I could just turn this little lever on the window and ... "

Anyway, for now, the cat and I are warily giving this thing house-room, but I'm not expecting any change in relaxation levels any time soon*.

*if it turns out to work on humans I'll let you know

Containment

2010-10-07T12:57:00.000+01:00

The past couple of days have moved me to think about how we carry our stuff around. This is not about to be a deep emotional exploration of baggage. It's just about, um, baggage. This was triggered by the sudden breaking of a bag strap that deposited my belongings all over the floor of a busy train - inconveniencing some not very patient commuters who in some cases *gasp* had to lift their feet up while I scrabbled to rescue my stuff. I know. I'll be writing them and their therapists a letter of apology.

A mini-disaster. But a swift shopping trip resolved most of the pain. I then spent the evening (and by that I mean the night) with my kid sister who was conducting ninja-level packing for a long work trip. Her bags would have to withstand wind, fire and flood (possibly literally) not to mention airport baggage handlers. I absolutely loved how different our lives are, neatly illustrated by a contrast of our two packing lists.

I recently went away on a bookish weekend, and scribbled some "don't forgets" on the back of an envelope. My sister has a spreadsheet, regularly updated, which probably has different sections depending on the number of kilos in her baggage allowance, categorised by air carrier company (she denies this part but I can tell). Here's a comparison of our essentials:

It's a fair summary that with a notebook, pillow and ipod, I was confident that my main requirements were covered. And indeed, for a cosy weekend listening to authors in Sussex, I wasn't far wrong. If I had amended 'pillow' to 'cushion' it would have been almost perfect - there were a couple of speakers I missed just because I didn't think I could sit on the chairs for a second longer. Perhaps I should have stuck my chin out and cultivated eccentricity by just taking the large pillow into the room each day. Or perhaps not.

As you can see from the typed list, my sister's trips require a spot more planning than just bunging a thermal cup of tea in the car and patting your pocket to make sure there's a credit card as back-up. Firstly, I can't imagine being the kind of person who has a right and a wrong passport, but my sister is. Perhaps one has gremlins, who knows? I did try and persuade her that if she was taking string, she didn't need spare boot laces. She gave me a withering look and ignored me. (I never found out for what purpose the string was destined.)

So we carry on, in our parallel lives, now several thousand miles further apart than we were. I already miss having her down the road, and our daily phone calls offloading small grumbles and plotting our solutions to bigger problems. I know she'll be back. In the meantime, I'll think of her every time I pick up my new bag. I've even slipped a little torch inside it - strictly a city version with no headgear required - because after all, we're more similar than we look.

Steady State

2010-10-04T12:19:00.000+01:00

Just what is it inside the mush of chemicals in the space where my brain should be that decides whether the outlook for today will be full of gloom or perkiness? I'd love to be able to link everything with ruthless logic to events either positive or negative in my world, or the world around me. But it's just not true. Some friends swear their own degree of positivity is index-linked to the available amounts of sunlight, money, free time, holidays. It's fair enough that a drop in temperature is guaranteed to get me grinning, but it doesn't go much deeper.

Broadly speaking I am blessed with a relatively steady state: superficial cynical grumpiness covering quite a good level of contentment. So much so that even the tiniest blip changing that in one direction or the other has me sucking the end of my biro and wondering what happened. Whoever it was that said the unexamined life is not worth living clearly didn't have a house to clean, but nonetheless it's disarming to realise after several hours of navel-gazing that often I can't connect any cause to an outbreak of the sulks. On the other hand, even the smallest happy influence can have me trapping a secret smile all day, carrying it like an amulet against whatever crashing computers or puddle-strewn roads might have in store for me.

I'm also grateful for a fully-functioning internal cinema that projects the really great moments again and again inside my head. It used to only play the disasters, but I've mostly grown out of that. Which means that today, despite a scratchy feeling that I'm starting a cold, I can't help replaying the outline of a face, re-hearing words that make me laugh out loud now when walking alone, causing passers-by to skirt round me with worried looks. Today is a good day.

Meandering through books

2010-09-27T18:01:00.000+01:00

Well, it's been about, um, a hundred years is it? since I last managed to post on this blog, so I thought I'd see if I could remember how. I wish I could tell you I have been living the dream in the meantime, but if I have, it has been someone else's subconscious steering the ship.

I am just back from a weekend at Chichester Writing Festival. Which is an interesting choice of event title. I deduce that they didn't want to call it anything to do with "literature" for much the same reasons that Alan Bennett's wonderful creation in 'The History Boys' despised the term. But whatever you want to call it, it remains a gathering of writers published and aspirant, talking and listening in roughly equal measure, about writing and about books. And getting a little bit exercised about e-books, but being expertly diverted from that topic. No-one actually said "books furnish a room" but the thought was hanging plaintively in the air.

In my own study I have bowed to the inevitable, and accepted the beginning of stacking books two-deep on the shelves. It's entirely my own fault for going to three days of readings where there was a temporary outpost of Waterstones in the room between the sessions and the coffee. I had no chance. But it does mean the books are not so much furnishing the room as gradually drawing its walls ever inwards.

One of the panelists was the publisher of the rather brilliant online journal five dials - it's free to subscribe and packed with all manner of articles and fiction by the famous and those new on the scene. Admittedly the speaker held my attention by remarking that they had in the past paid their contributors in either chocolate or penguin books. I guess the mortgage company might be a little harder to persuade to buy in to this approach, but it sounds like heaven.

The location of the weekend (is between Friday and Monday, yes, yes I know) was West Dean college in Sussex, which is blessed with beautiful gardens and an arboretum. On Saturday morning the sky was the deep bright blue of autumn and I left deep dewy footprints walking through the grass. I came across this tree stump, which really ought to be a map of somewhere:

The path winds through open grassy areas full of sunshine, then through thickets of trees and rhododendrons. In each of the shady wooded parts I startled large families of sleepy pheasants, who wobbled drunkenly from side to side, trying to wake up enough to panic. By the time they decided which way to scatter, I had moved past and they settled back to sleep.

The paths ends by cresting the hill and opening up a glorious view of the hills and fields around. There is a perfectly placed bench for sitting in the sun and allowing your breathing to return to normal, while taking in the smells and sounds of autumn. On the grass beside my feet was a feather, trapped between the long blades. The strong light showed every filament tugging to be free to fly, so after a moment of appreciating its softness, I let it go.

Getting Out of Games

2010-07-18T23:25:00.007+01:00

It may have been in Stephen Fry's marvellous 'The Liar', or it may not, that a character muses on the benefit of having a simple term for those unlikely to engage in after-dinner games. The simple expedient of having the word was sufficent to de-mystify their reluctance, and force them to play. I am almost curious enough to go and look it up, but that would mean leaving my chair. and taking four and a half steps over to the bookcase. Hmm, it's a tough one. No, it's too annoying, I'm going to have to find out. Talk among yourselves for a moment or two.

Right, it's by Mr Fry's eternally endearing creation Professor Trefusis, who happily shares the following thought:

the simple Papuan word redatt which, as some of you may know, means 'unlikely to take part in evening games'.... Most people who do not like to engage in after-dinner games and sports in some measure hold themselves aloof and consider, with distressing hauteur, that they are somehow above the sportive frivolities of other men. To be told that their measure has been taken by a race thousands of miles away, whose life style might be imagined to be far less sophisticated than their own, is too much for them. The unsporting persons are not after all fascinating or alluringly enigmatic -- they are redatt, unlikely to take part in evening games.

Now, I wonder what my point was? Oh yes, participation in games. I am far more likely to show enthusiasm for games that allow me to remain supine. Much as the Australian sports commentators were fond of saying about the British olympians last time around, I do better when seated. So essentially, Scrabble: yes, Sardines: no.

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be invited to the beautiful garden of some friends, for an afternoon of croquet and cream tea. I was rather hoping to leapfrog, in a purely metaphorical sense as per the previous paragraph, straight to the cream tea. When we arrived a few minutes late, a game was already in full swing-clunk, and it looked likely I would be able to install myself on a sun lounger and engage in nothing more energetic than a little light applause.

I had expended due effort in meeting the dress code, which was "hats and gloves". Our little group pulled out all available stops and duly adorned ourselves with hats, gloves, and even petticoats under summer dresses. It was really a waste there wasn't a wedding photograph to crash on the way.

There were pages of instructions about how best to play the game, which I had a scant look through before deciding to admire the climbing rose instead. Regrettably there came a point where to refuse to get up and grasp a mallet would have attacted far more attention than almost any maladroit swing on my part, so we began an amble round the lawn. The expert host kept having to call us back from the tea table, where we'd tried to slip in a cream scone before our next turn. I think it became clear we perhaps weren't competition standard. Which is not to say we're not competitive - far from it. It's more what I've best heard described as a "can't win? won't play" attitude, poorly disguised as casual unconcern.

The game was mercifully brief, and I cast around for a useful future diversionary tactic. I remember these now from school, even then used for the purpose of Getting Out of Games. For a short while I managed to look very busy re-filling the teapot, and after that, longing for another nap, I had a brainwave.

I remembered my host had a stack of quilt pieces she had been tasked with sewing together. What a happy time was had by all, as the others continued their machiavellian tactics on the croquet lawn, and I progressed from tea to champagne, occasionally passing a needle through a quilting square. Well played.

Scope for imagination

2010-07-10T23:04:00.006+01:00

As all people brought up in the world of Avonlea, wishing they lived at Green Gables will know, the power of the imagination is a great thing - but optimistic over-use can occasionally lead to disasters such as dying your hair green instead of black.

Stuck on the circle line in London yesterday, wondering whether the sound in my ears was that of my internal organs reaching bubbling point, I tried to harness every particle of my imagination to persuade myself that I was lovely and cool. I hoped to convince my sweltering self that instead of being deep underground in airless temperatures somewhere above 32 degrees, I was in fact sitting outside in wintry Finland, congratulating myself on being wrapped up so well that only my nose was cold. I reckoned my chances of successful delusion were limited, and thought I'd start with the tip of my nose and work up from there.

I closed my eyes and concentrated as hard as when I was about 6 and believed clicking my heels together three times might actually get me home. Unfortunately, what might possibly be appealing in a 6 year old, is probably somewhat alarming on an adult woman with her eyes screwed shut and so much tense expectation in her posture that the words "pelvic floor exercises" were probably creeping into fellow travellers' minds.

I managed to maintain the illusion for about 3 seconds each time, trying to drag myself into conviction through details. It was no good, I needed something more extreme, some sensation from my memory that would be more intense than the heat.

Suddenly I had it: imagine you are walking down a slippery wooden path, in borrowed shoes, the cold air on the backs of your knees, snow falling on your bare shoulders. You grasp hold of metal handles at the top of a ladder, and take the first step down into a frozen lake. People have cut a hole in the ice, but the lake still wants to be frozen and the edges inch forwards overnight. The shock of the ice against your first toe makes you breathe in so hard your lungs shut. Then your friend takes a picture.

And before I knew it, it was my stop and I could emerge into the open air triumphant.

From wreck to relaxing home

2010-07-03T12:03:00.008+01:00

Week 5 in the Big Bombsite house. And actually, I'm nervous even typing this, but there's been real progress. For a start, thanks to the charming removal men and my fearless sister, all my wordly goods have been delivered here and re-distributed into either the house or the arachnid-breeding-house otherwise known as the garage (yes, I sent my sister in, and she was in flip flops. I've never seen such impressive self defence armed only with a garden hoe).

The really major change is that thanks to the ever-wonderful Anthony, I now have floors! I never realised quite how much of a difference these make. Not just because I'm no longer skipping joist to joist over the dodgy floorboards, but because the level of general dust and grime has decreased approximately a millionfold now that there are beautiful sealed floors everywhere. (Oh OK, not the kitchen yet, but give me time.) To the left is the hall floor of white ash laminate, which also goes on through the living room.

So the study, which already had carpet and painted walls and new curtains when I last wrote (it was very advanced for its age), now has lots and lots of nice white Ikea bookshelves. It also has a lovely radiator, but I'm less excited about this because a) it doesn't hold books, and b) I wasn't involved in putting it together. Sure it'll be much appreciated when it's not 28 degrees outside though...

Many thanks to the lovely Mark for doing all the tricky bits, like fixing hinges and attaching the unit to the wall for stability. And carrying all the heavy boxes. The more eagle-eyed reader will have spotted the "whited out" panes in the bookcase doors, in which I realised I could better conceal all my heaps of random paper by taping pictures in front of them.

The next room that I am thinking of as "finished" is my room. Or now, Molly's room, since she moved in a week ago and has almost finished sniffing everything she considers to be suspicious. In my next post I'll tell you about the World's Most Expensive Catflap, which involves a whole new double-glazed panel for the front door. If only she could just learn to use a key.

Here's the before and afters of my bedroom (clutter carefully cropped out of shot, hopefully):

Remind me why I bought this house again - looking at this now makes me want to run away.

After: phew, it was all alright in the end. The amazing power of white (paint, lampshade, bedlinen...)

And there's somehow also been good progress with the living room. OK, so if you look up you'll be greeted with a sort of equator across the ceiling, where I couldn't face painting the other half, but I'll get to it. Honest.

The main feature (and I use that word remarkably loosely) of the living room was a lumpy grey tiled fireplace. Here's the going, going, gone shots of that:

Mmm, bet you all want one now. Sorry, it went on the skip.

An excellent start, but not quite there...

That's more like it.

And now, it all looks like this. The TV is currently performing a purely decorative function (hmmm) since I can't find the aerial cable or the remote controller for the dvd player. They're probably hiding together in a saucepan, secure in the knowledge I'm not unpacking any kitchen boxes until, oo, I don't know, I actually have a kitchen.

No update would be complete without the much-anticipated evidence of the Finland canvas. This is a print from a photograph taken by Jere, of their beautiful view in Tampere. It makes me feel calm (and envious) every time I look at it.

Shouldn't it be looking better by now?

2010-06-15T22:55:00.006+01:00

Several gallons of white paint, and let's face it, rather a lot of swearing and perspiration over the past two weeks, so shouldn't the new house be starting to give in and look nice? You'd think. Actually, small parts of it look lovely, but it's the smug remainder that's starting to really tick me off.

Anyway, to focus on the good for just a moment, of the "To Do" List (shortly to be available in 10 volumes of hand-tooled leather for just 9.99 a month plus P&P), we have now (drum roll):

removed all the old flooring
removed all the old wiring
put shiny new wiring, lights, and fuse board thingummies in place
fixed lots of holes in the walls
yanked out all the old electric storage heaters
bricked up a doorway (2 doors are sufficient for one kitchen, the third was just showing off)
knocked out a severely ugly tiled fireplace and filled in the hole
knocked out a wonky brick larder and made it all look nice and smooth
ripped out the old kitchen cupboards
beat some giant built-in wardrobes until they begged for mercy and ran into the skip for a quiet life
painted the study walls and ceiling (twice - why is one coat never ever enough?)
painted all the study woodwork (with minimal bugs trapped like fossils in the sticky windowsills)
made and hung new study curtains

OK, so when I say "we", I'm only responsible for the last 4 of those. But there's a whole lot of painting and decorating I'll be doing yet, and I felt it was probably for the best not to mess with electricity myself .

So here's the first of (hopefully) many sets of pleasing before-and-after pictures. And no, it's not lost on me either that the first room I tackled was the study, not the bedroom.

Before: eurgh. Mildew on the paintwork, electric heater, pretty nasty curtains, and a desperate need for bleach and a lot of fresh paint.

After: a thorough scrub, two thick coats of white paint on anything

that didn't move fast enough, new curtains created by my paint-smudged hands during "a break" from DIY, and presto!

The more astute readers will have noticed there was no mention of installing either new heating or a new kitchen yet. And that would be why I'm still camped in my patient mother's spare room.

Goodbye House

2010-05-30T13:23:00.004+01:00

Well, suddenly I've been in this house 8 years (give or take a couple of months) and there are now only 3 more days left to say goodbye to it. This is the right thing, at the right time, but a little sad too. There have been some fairly awful times in this house, but some truly wonderful ones too, and many that were so hilarious I had to sit down and gasp for air while my cheeks cramped with laughter.

When we first moved in to the lovely number 19, the previous owner had nurtured the house from new (in the 1950s). He had maintained the entire long back garden as a fruit and vegetable plot, with no concession to anyone wanting to do anything lazy in the garden such as find an even spot for a sit down with a long cool drink. Over the first couple of years in the house, thanks to my sainted in-laws and family, we dug out about half of the "smallholding" and turfed it, so we'd have somewhere to lie down.

Then we dug out the next section nearest the house, and added a patio. In four words there I've just skipped over two weekends of sheer back-breaking agony. If you've never mixed concrete or mortar or dragged 54 paving slabs around, I recommend you congratulate yourself and try and keep things that way. My family have recently reminded me that when it was finished I swore if I ever moved house, the patio was coming too. However, their smug looks vanished when I asked them if they'd like to help with the re-location...

There was one plant that was rather harder work than most to remove. We named it the Mighty Root. It took two of us an entire half-day to extricate, digging a hole round it that was so big we were both in the hole with the root, trying not to slice our toes off with our shovels.

We kept the munificent apple tree so we'd have a little shade to lie under, in this very southerly spot. Not only did it provide shade, but gorgeous blossom every spring, and every summer a mountain of apples that we turned into pies, crumbles, chutneys, and gifts for the neighbours (whether they wanted them or not).

And yesterday we held a "house-cooling" party to say goodbye to the old place. It was lovely to have a selection of friends who've spent many times here, and new friends, to share drinks and cake leaning on the packing boxes. And now I guess I'd better finish the packing up and clearing out, and get ready for new adventures, in my new number 19 (I obviously like the number). As well as those two numbers, one piece of the garden is coming with me:

Loss and discovery

2010-05-15T23:37:00.004+01:00

I have spent the past week devoting my spare moments to proof-reading a friend's doctoral thesis. Fortunately, I've had quite a few spare moments, as last weekend involved an epic return train journey to Edinburgh for very warm and lively wedding. The thesis examines the effects of partnership bonds on cancer patients and their partners. I'm sure there's a whole level of technical information that's entirely passing me by, but I am strictly the "words girl" tasked with checking the English, since not only is the author a gifted academic, but she's also written this with English as her third language. I feel duly out-classed.

It's quite difficult for me to consider the detail of this subject, to scrutinise each sentence in order to be sure that the full meaning is represented, without my imagination getting drawn into the issues. Impersonal statements about 'levels of anxiety and distress during diagnosis and treatment' have morphed inside my head into scenarios of real couples in a consultant's office. Perhaps they are clutching each other's hands, or possibly clutching their own hands tightly together in their laps and trying to let their white knuckles be the only outward sign of fear, to protect the other.

There are charts and data about the different reactions of female and male at each age, depending on whether they are the patient or the partner. Each row in the table showing an age band produces a different set of characters for me. I see the under 30 band as a couple openly consumed by blind fear, by turns sweet or aggressive with the staff, wondering how they suddenly lost the path their life was supposed to take, how to bear a future that may be emptied by more and more loss of plans, children, growing old. The over 60 band are a couple who thought they were on a smooth path to retirement, their teeth now clamped down on the thought of loss of security, bedrock, loss of someone who shares the responsibility of holding all their memories safe, loss of someone who can remind them with a glance that they've always mattered, always been loved.

Loss apparently comes from the Old-English word for destruction. There is a deep resonance with the savage aspect that this brings to mind, which in turn connects to another Old English phrase 'to lay waste'. Waste is a good summary of this sort of destruction. In a strictly etymological sense, I also learn that loss is something you bear, not something from which you recover.

(Image by Clint Spencer)

But according to this thesis, and according to my own witness, it's something you do well not to try to bear alone. Partners, or in their absence, family and close friends, will surpass mere human limits to meet you on the wasteland and help you pick through the pieces, slowly re-growing.

Every home should have one:

2010-04-24T13:39:00.004+01:00

A Guard Cat. No-one's getting through this door undetected. And as members of my family and friends are well aware, you step over Molly at your own risk. The proprietor takes no responsibility for any damage to ankles.

I'm hoping Molly was using the scratchy doormat to rid herself of some general grime, as the last two lunchtimes she has re-appeared looking a) exceptionally pleased with herself and b) grey with dirt. I have no idea where she's been, but purely based on the state of her, I think she might be an apprentice chimney sweep or possibly a car mechanic.

As the greenery indicated in the picture above, Spring is properly getting into its stride now. Seedlings are doing their thing on my kitchen windowsill, and outdoor bulbs are almost over. These few brave souls are advance scouts from the flower bed, hoping to colonise my in-laws' grass:

I've got bad news for them - they've been spotted and someone's hand is twitching over the trowel.

Letting the colours run

2010-04-14T11:48:00.006+01:00

Over the past few days, my sister and I indulged in a short break to get away from tiresome things like selling houses (and therefore keeping them pristine at all times), job pressures, and general "how did my life become quite like this?" moments. I was hoping standing in front of a view like this would restore some perspective.

For reasons that escape me just now, we thought it would be relaxing to do some kind of activity. Not a calorie-burning activity, naturally, let's not get carried away. So we opted for things involving paintbrushes. Although sensibly, we picked water-soluble paints to avoid the need for extensive clothing replacement afterwards.

We went to West Dean college, which has beautiful gardens, great food and a range of short and long courses throughout the year (I'm not on commission, honest). It also has a lovely arboretum you can walk through, and at this time of year a wide variety of charming knock-knee-ed big-eared lambs.

In between deliberating over whether or not I could fit a lamb into my suitcase undetected, I managed to squeeze in a little painting. We spent quite some time on apples. Theoretically, I believe we were supposed to be able to see progression. Uh huh. Here are apples 1 - 4.

Apple 1

Apple 2

Apple 3

Apple 4

After this we were let loose on a camellia (this ended badly and I'm not prepared to share the results. Picture something like a cross between a plaster from a grazed knee, and a splodge of ketchup.) Then there was an attempt at cloudy skies because the teacher blithely promised "skies are really easy". Oh really? I beg to differ. My sky ended up with dripping letters across it proclaiming "I. Hate. Skies." It was very avant garde.

A few deep breaths and pints of tea later, it was time to have another go. The final day was free choice, so we bolted out of the classroom and sat in the sun, I mean sketched the lovely plants. There was a stunning magnolia in bloom. I had a go at one still in bud first because it looked easier.

(The water-soaked 'hills and valleys' in the cartridge paper presented a special challenge, but we were sensibly directed to use it for our early attempts since it's much cheaper than proper watercolour paper!)

Finally, I tried my hand at a single bloom of magnolia. Multiply this by about a thousand and you'll have some idea of how beautiful the tree was. It's planted by a long pergola, and overhangs a shady pool so you get the reflection as well as the original.

The sense of achievement...

2010-02-17T23:31:00.003Z

Why is finishing a job always over-shadowed by bad temper and exhaustion in my house, why? Hmm, nothing whatsoever to do with always leaving things to the last minute I'm sure. Anyway, leaving the bitter emotional tone of the place aside for a moment, the good news is that I've not only finally finished making the curtains for the hall (the fabric has been artistically draped, bristling with pins, over a dining chair for about er, 5 months now) but I've also finished the wall hanging / organiser.

It makes even miserable sleep-deprived me give a little smile every time I walk past. Until I remember the lower pocket is stuffed with month banners "for later months in the year" that I haven't completely totally entirely literally actually sewn together yet. I don't suppose anyone will bet me that I'll do a single one of them before midnight on the eve of each month-turn? Very sensible of you.

Still, February is up there, which is the main thing for now. The original pattern suggested using fabric printed with the lettering for each month name, but I decided to hand-sew them on for that delightfully wonky look that only comes when I make something myself. The buttons are ceramic and were from the art gallery at Waterperry gardens. The photograph doesn't do justice to their shiny buttony loveliness.

Another slight departure from the recommended pattern - these are little markers to act as reminders on key dates each month. They're supposed to have brooch backs on them, but the sewing shop I went to had run out and I was too lazy to search further, so I used what I had and these ones have little pegs instead. In case you're wondering (and let's face it, you were) the shape on the bottom left was supposed to be a musical note to use to mark in choir practice. In reality, I'll probably be staring at the relevant day wondering why I've pegged a wonky "d" to it, but I can live with that.

Guess the weight of the pig

2010-02-03T17:20:00.004Z

Over the past few days I've been playing the unusual role of host. Unusual because if at all possible I invite myself to other people's houses - it saves the effort of cleaning my own. As soon as I know someone's coming here I start thinking I should be polishing the skirting boards and hoovering the curtains. I don't actually do anything (except hide the washing up in the oven and then wonder how I'm going to cook anything) but I fret about it nonetheless.

Then there's the second worry of the role of tour guide, if the people coming haven't visited this part of the world before. I begin to feel personally responsible for the weather, the traffic, and the general experience of anywhere I take them. In less than a week I have dragged a series of guests (willing and less willing): through Christ Church meadow, along a walking tour of Oxford colleges, around the Oxford botanic garden, through various sections of the re-developed Ashmolean museum, around a number of bookshops and tea-rooms, and today culminated in a visit to Waterperry Gardens. Today's guest wasn't really a guest at all, she was my lovely ever-so-slightly-eccentric Aunty P.

She arrived last night for supper and a long chat, so we were well-rested and ready for larks today. I should say our past innocent but ill-fated outings have included happening upon a group of naked gardeners when we were going round a rose garden and abbey, and being asked to leave a garden centre for cackling and risking incontinence over the hideous display of "resin memorial plaques" lined up in a row that read "Grandma" "Father" "Brother" etc ... as Aunty P gasped between bursts of laughter, "fancy turning up to a view a house and seeing a row of those in the garden - you'd know what was feeding the dahlias!"

Snowdrops just coming into flower

Anyway, we were on a quest to see snowdrops today, and see them we did. Apparently the snow has set them back about three weeks, as cheery soul with a wheelbarrow (fully dressed, thank goodness - the man, not the wheelbarrow) informed us. But that, and the combination of rather a chilly midweek day, meant we had the place pretty much to ourselves and there was plenty to see.

Knot garden

As well as a wide variety of gardens, they do a slap-up lunch where we didn't stint - we almost over-stretched ourselves with the passionfruit pavlova and the apple pie, but we prevailed. I had been sharing my mystification with Aunty P that recently I've met quite a number of sane intelligent people who claim to believe in fortune tellers. We reckoned it couldn't be that hard to pretend to have "the gift" so she had a go at reading my tea leaves. All I can say is, I hope she's wrong, otherwise I'm going to meet a large figure in a hat carrying something out of a shed.

Tea leaves

I'm ashamed to say we were actually looking for the gift shop (but the large green sign saying "Gift Shop" somehow eluded us) but on the way out we stumbled into the museum. Although only one large room, it's beautifully maintained - all wood oiled and gleaming, all brass polished almost white - and has a fascinating combination of items ranging from Ronnie Barker's old-fashioned shop till, to some examples of boots designed for sheep and goats... But my favourite was this - a weighing tape for cattle and pigs. If you can't make out the wording, it basically says, run it round the girth and pull it tight - the figure will be the weight of the animal. I'm rather glad that human equivalents are not (as far as I'm aware) widely available...

The next big thing

Tree of Life

2010-01-28T17:28:00.003Z

I have recently discovered the lovely designs by Alice and Ginny which inspired me to get my needle out again. They had two designs I particularly wanted to make, from their book "Home Sweet Sewn", so I've decided to sort of merge the two ideas into something personal to me. The main design is a monthly organiser in the form of a wall hanging. I'll post about that later on, like when I've actually started making it! At the top there'll be a decorative panel, and that will have a Tree of Life design on it.

I've made the panel, and had enormous fun choosing the different fabrics for the leaves and apples. Some of the leaves are made from scraps of pewter velvet that I once had a cloak made from, and the apples are made from dark pink silk, taken from a very favourite much-worn shirt that is sadly too old and faded to be used any more. The tree trunk is made from a piece of material left over from making my friend's wedding quilt ... so all in all, every piece reminds me of something happy.

Step 1: decide where all the leaves should go (this takes a lot longer when done with wine).

Step 2: have the bright idea of hand-stitching a decorative edge to all the leaves (regret this after the third leaf but be stubborn enough to continue)

Step 3: admire. (And if you click to enlarge the picture, you'll see all the laboured hand-stitches, during one of which I actually managed to snap a needle. I still don't quite know how I did that...)

Just the rest of the wall hanging / organiser to make now. How hard can it be? (Oh, how we laughed.)

Body or soul?

2010-01-22T13:32:00.005Z

Well, here's a puzzler. Finances being, as for everyone, far from infinite, a decision must be made about how to divert a small chunk allocated as "disposable income". Meaning it's disposable as long as I don't think too hard about what I'll do if I need to repair the roof or anything major falls off the car.

My new year's resolutions for 2010 were:

1. Lose a certain amount of lbs of lard from about my person
2. Take piano lessons
3. Try at least 6 things I've never done before

Tomorrow will be my third piano lesson with a rather intimidating Hungarian person, who taps the rhythm hard on my "lazy wrist" if I don't play it right. She's quite expensive so I tried to say I only wanted fortnightly lessons but she said "No. Will not be enough." So I caved. Thinking "I can always email my way out of this later," but I've done nothing to remedy things so far.

I know I've only had two lessons, but I think any improvement is essentially down to the fact that I've at least practiced most days, due to a combination of my own impatience to be perfect, and general fear of the Hungarian headshake of disappointment.

This morning I had the chance to do something that would fulfill both 1. and 3. of the resolutions (at least partially). My gym rang me to offer a free trial personal training session. Intimidated but game for a laugh, I booked myself in and duly trundled off to meet Angus at 11.00 this morning. We had a little chat about weight and diet. I assume he's used to people lying to him and automatically adds a stone to their weight and doubles the amount of chocolate/wine consumption they admit to. If not, he'll soon learn.

In a weird kind of way, as long as I didn't under ANY circumstances catch sight of myself in the mirror, or think about the view he was getting when throwing a medicine ball at me doing sit-ups (I kept dodging, which I suspect was not the desired result), it was sort of fun. And he promised all sorts of magical results if I booked a million sessions. And of course his arms were about the size my thighs should be after the million sessions. Don't judge me - I was SUPPOSED to be looking at them to see what to copy. Honest. Demonstrating remarkable restraint given the wide range of things he could have criticised about me, he limited himself to commenting that I had very tight calf muscles.

So the puzzle is this: piano lessons with the Hungarian horntail, or a few months of sessions with Angus? Are my lazy wrists or my tight calves to get the attention they deserve? I feel I should set up an 0898 number and get the audience to vote.

( Attribution: If you think you have the physique to pull off the above t-shirt without public hilarity, you can get it from zazzle.com)

Happily stuck inside

2010-01-15T14:52:00.004Z

It's strange isn't it? I am quite happy on my own, can in fact get a touch grumpy if my solitude is interrupted at the wrong moment (members of my family can stop choking on the "a touch" part now). I really like my little house and have enough unread/re-readable material in here to keep me going for years. There are plenty of times when I don't leave the house for days at a time and consider it a gleeful treat to do so. In fact I keep extra reserves of teabags and bread mix in stock for just such a happy eventuality.

BUT, snow me in, make it so I can't leave the house whether I want to or not, and suddenly what was cosy becomes suffocating. I developed something close to mania that pushes me outside regardless, determined to undertake semi-polar expeditions just to prove it's possible, that I'm still free to choose. Of course, what I'm free to choose is chapped lips, sore joints from trying to limit the sliding about on the snow and ice, watering eyes, and the sudden appearance of a bunch of wrinkles that I'm sure weren't there when the weather was ten degrees warmer. But somehow I still feel like I won... Isn't self-delusion marvellous?

Anyway, "the big thaw" as every media output in the country is calling it, has now well and truly begun and we all live in the land of grey slush, so it's somewhat immaterial. I went out for coffee with a friend this morning, which rapidly extended into a large plate of brunch when the table next door's eggs were too good to ignore. I was somehow early so had a small incident in a nearby book shop (my extra new year's resolution is to try and buy more of my books from independent shops) and also found this greeting card, which had me spluttering with delight:

(I'm not sure I'm really allowed to replicate it, but the cartoon is by Judy Horacek and in the UK you can get it from www.reallygood.uk.com, so I've done the best I can with attribution.)

I am off for more tea and some indulgent hours with the writings of Robertson Davies. A treasured friend with impeccable taste bought me The Cornish Trilogy for my birthday, but it looked awfully thick and erudite so I've only just worked up the mental energy to open it. How I wish I hadn't waited, it's an absolute gem. If you haven't already, hasten to an (independent) bookshop and remedy the situation at once. How can you fail to be charmed by a narrator who by page 2 is wondering: "How does one greet one's professor, one's thesis director, whom one loves and who has had one on his old sofa, and whom one hopes may love one in return? It was a sign of my mental state that I was thinking of myself as 'one'..." (The Rebel Angels, available from Penguin.)

Paint it white

2010-01-06T12:33:00.003Z

Wrapped up securely in as many clothes as I could wear simultaneously, I ventured out last night to a belated birthday party for my sister. To be strictly honest, the white chocolate martinis were a considerable part of the leverage that eventually got me out of the house and marching through the white stuff.

This is the most snow this part of England has had in as long as I can remember. My mother assures me there was more than this 30 years ago, but I think I can claim I was too young then to be able to quantify. As a result, schools everywhere are closed, and very little else is happening that should be. Out of my window I can see a playing field where a group of children are making a giant snowball between them. At last measurement, five of them made a stretched circle round it, their fingertips just touching, like decorations on a giant bauble. My other measurement of snow this morning has come through my ever-courageous tortoiseshell. The two of us can now confirm the snow in the back garden is just over one cat deep. Next time she needs to go out we're going to have to fashion some sort of snow-snorkel.

It might possibly have been the afore-mentioned martinis, but before I collapsed back inside to dry off last night, I proved you're never too old to write your name in the snow (but balance deteriorates after the third cocktail)...

Catching the moment

2009-12-29T17:54:00.003Z

As I finally came to download the photographs from my phone this afternoon, apart from one or two "what on earth is that?" images, many of them gave me an immediate smile. They record a tiny fragment of a much bigger moment, to trigger something that only the memory can preserve in its fullest intensity of flavour, smell, movement and feeling. So this may be a bit of a random selection of images, but they're the moments that have particularly made me smile over the past couple of weeks.

Let's start with food. I don't cook much (unless forced at gunpoint, and sometimes even then I'll take my chances with the gun) but the occasional foray into the kitchen can be satisfying. Here are my filo pastry mince pies oozing port and cranberry mincemeat all over the baking tray. No, of course I didn't make the mincemeat - Mr Waitrose is so good at it, why spoil his fun?

The trayfull lasted about a mili-second before it was decimated, but they were really tasty. The house smelt of port and cinnamon, as all houses should around christmas (if you believe the old films).

Sticking with the food theme, here's my beautiful niece generously sharing her tea with Harley (that would be the labrador). She wasn't too keen on bread with bits in it, and has also just learnt what fun it is to drop things and have grown-ups run around picking them up. None of us was nearly as fast as Harley though, who was in a state of constant readiness. Or as close to constant readiness as a middle-aged golden labrador can get without exerting himself too much.

I had a brief moment of Martha-stewart-itis (made over-confident by the mince pie success) and made some salt dough christmas decorations. Sadly this one suffered from the condensation in the porch, and became a bit squidgy the other day, but I'm still proud of it!

The little hearts hanging from ribbons have fared better in the living room, as by and large it's warm and dry in there.

And finally - you can't beat a good Christmas walk. It was very icy in places but we managed to circle the lake with all ankles and hips in their proper places.

The etchings in the frozen lake water make me sigh with happiness: their scope makes me think of a giant hand drawing on the surface for sheer pleasure.

Always winter and never Christmas...?

2009-12-06T11:23:00.004Z

No, don't worry, it only feels that way because you foolishly signed up for an outdoor craft sale in December, in England, that involves setting up from 11.00 and staying until 23.00. Oh wait, you didn't sign up for that? No, you're right, it was me. Oh. My. Word. It was really quite cold. And damp. There was technically shelter, from the skyward problem anyway. But it was of limited use against the swirling winds and the sideways raindrops.

I'm making this sound worse than it was, probably. For a start, we had a collective stallholders' mutiny and in a unique moment of solidarity called a halt at 21.00. Those two more hours inside a warm house clutching a mug of tea through a duvet were all that stood between me and total gibbering insanity.

And although (strangely) customers willing to brave the elements and the city centre were a little, ahem, sparse, we did manage to part almost each and every one of them from their money. In one case I had a moment of remorse as we drained every single last penny from one girl's purse, and felt the need to check with her she still had the bus fare home again. She very nobly said she didn't mind walking as she'd bought such nice christmas presents from us. I hope that thought didn't stick in her teeth too much as she battled her way home.

Here is our rather splendid "Homespun" stall:

From left to right, those of you willing to squint - or click to enlarge - will be able to see: shoulder bags, cards, fabric doorstops (those are the pyramid shaped objects), checked drawstring bags, felt brooches, beaded and embroidered purses, felt and bead tree decorations (hanging from twigs in centre), bookmarks, and hand-made candles.

We learnt many things. Principally that there's no such thing as enough layers or enough thermos flasks, and that next time we're opting for indoors only! Still, we sold quite a bit and there might be enough for a lone christmas turkey burger to carve between us all in the Homespun house this year after all.

Bonfire of the Vanities

2009-11-15T22:56:00.004Z

I can't think why I haven't done this before, but this year I celebrated my birthday with a bonfire. I tend to spend November 5th crouched underneath the dining table, convincing the cat that the world isn't about to end, so fireworks don't exactly feature large in my life. But I have a fondness for sparklers. They were surprisingly hard to buy. The first few places I tried told me they didn't "have a licence to sell them after November 10th". Alright then.

Since this was the same shopping expedition during which a butcher asked me for ID before he would sell me pork and cider sausages "because they've got 2 gallons of strongbow in them" (presumably not PER sausage though...) I didn't have the strength to question the whole licence arrangement about the sparklers. I simply went to a party shop and bought some there. A little shorter, but apparently they can be as flammable as you like on any date if you pretend you're going to spike a cake with them. (Note: I impulse bought some "ice fountain indoor fireworks" also designed to be stuck in a cake. We lit them and leapt backwards fearing for our eyebrows; they were clearly designed for indoor use with very high ceilings only. Pretty though. And I'm sure my sister will get her normal vision back in no time...)

The bonfire was a great idea (she says modestly) for several reasons. First off, it's a fire. We love fire. Blame my parents. My father spent my childhood teaching me how to keep an even fire in a steam engine; my mother liked to use a variety of accelerants in her garden bonfires, such that one year we had a re-enactment of Fantasia running up and down the garden with saucepans of water trying to extinguish the flames consuming the apple tree. I hadn't seen baked apples still on the tree before. Or since. But hey, I'm still young, there's time.

So we've established that in my family, any fire = good. The second benefit was that I had spent my birthday afternoon wading through all the old paperwork in my study. I KNOW, so rock'n'roll. My MA is finally properly over (I passed, thank goodness) and I don't need to keep all the 31 versions of every chapter any more. So last night we burnt them, one screwed up page at a time. And oh - my - word it was so satisfying! I had a maniacal grin on my face for hours (it's creeping back again now as I write this). It was slightly obscured by molten sugar for a while, since you can't have a bonfire without toasting marshmallows, it's the law.

Just getting toasty

Can you guess what went wrong here? I know - it was a disaster. But heck, it wasn't my skewer so I got over it pretty quickly.

Seasons Weepings

2009-11-01T00:04:00.004Z

Isn't it funny how all the deadlines come at once? Can't you hear me laughing? No? Strange. Anyway, Christmas is coming, and with it Christmas fayres, and with them the need to actually populate a stall with the hand-crafted delights we've been creating diligently over the past year. Or alternatively, as my mother said when trying to be helpful, to put a really big vase of flowers on the table to take up as much of the empty space as possible. Thanks mum.

However, as could have been predicted by anyone at all who knows us, despite the marked lack of industry thus far, now that we can smell the deadline, we're just stubborn enough to forego sleep and social lives to see this idea through. The idea, for those of you happy enough to have forgotten, was to spend the year having a monthly craft day with a friend,and sell the goods for a nice christmas profit to avoid a repeat of the financial wasteland that constituted last January. So, the sewing machines are whirring (=smoking), the pins are scattering themselves gleefully over the floor, beads are bouncing off tiles or embedding themselves in carpet, spools of thread are running out at critical moments - in short, it's all going swimmingly.

But - we've booked a stall on the 5^th December, so it's all systems go. In my head at this point there's a little man inside my sewing machine bearing a striking resemblance to the engineer in Star Trek, mopping his brow and declaring "She cannae take any more Cap'n, she's gonnae blow". Warp speed ahead, that's what I say. Straight seams are for wimps. But you'd buy one of these for your loved ones this christmas, wouldn't you? Hmm?

If nothing else, I trust that this post has provided you with your first glimpse of holly this year. And if not, I suggest you stop going to the supermarket as I know their displays have been up since the Back to School displays were dismantled.

P.S. I believe this is also my blogging first birthday. If it's National Novelling Month again (and I'm afraid it is - goodbye family, goodbye friends, goodbye life) then I must have been wittering on here for a year. Aren't you all patient? Thanks! Anyway, here goes with the nano writing (50k words in a month - hundreds of thousands of people round the world driving themselves crazy). I did it in 2007. I tried but failed in 2008. I think it's t-shirt related. I didn't buy one last year. So this year I've ordered the nano t-shirt already, and I'm good to go. I'll keep you posted…

Wordplay

2009-10-31T00:24:00.005Z

Perhaps if I claim I was only playing with words this week, my singular lack of progress won't seem so bad? This evening I have been genuinely playing with words, thanks to a rather lovely website called www.wordle.net It's definitely worth checking it out to see what other people have done and to have a twiddle around with words yourself.

Essentially, you enter a wodge of your own text (yes, that's the technical term folks) and press "Go" and it creates a sort of word-art for you made from the words that occur most frequently or in significant places. Don't ask me how it works, I just know I had heaps of fun. You can change the layout/colour/font and all manner of other stuff too. And best of all, you can use your image any way you like - not least because the words "belonged" to you in the first place.

So here's what it made of a random few pages from early in my novel. I really want this as a poster for above my desk now!

The words it's picked out in fresh combinations have me thinking in all sorts of new ways, which is an excellent thing. So much so, that I'm going to leave you now and write some of them down.

Ordering Peace

2009-09-28T22:04:00.005+01:00

Now anyone who is able to spy into my kitchen, or indeed any other room you care to mention, will be able to laugh heartily at this, but I'm really coming round to the idea that you need some sort of order to existence to attain peace. Not complete order, I would go stark staring mad if I had to live in some sort of minimalist hell where all surfaces were smooth and polished and empty.

The kind of order I'm trying to describe was reflected beautifully today by a visit to Holland Park's Kyoto Garden. It was a favourite place of a very fine man indeed, sadly no longer around, but much missed. He lived nearby and visited it almost daily, and each time I go I can see why it was worth the effort. Sadly the portacabin cafe with sticky formica tables and yellowed walls that sold amazing toasted sandwiches has been "done up" and is now all pale beech and stainless steel (yuck). But it still sells toasted sandwiches, so it's not all bad. I imagine the somewhat eccentrically dressed bunch of men outside playing chess staged some sort of protest until the toasties were reinstated. The men had an air of permanence long beyond any MDF makeover of a few tables and chairs.

Now where was I? Oh yes, the garden. A few minutes meandering away from the cafe, and you reach the garden. A lady today told me she watched it being constructed by "genuine Japanese people" (insert your own joke please) and its development day by day was a work of art. It's now almost twenty years old I think, but is maintained such that only the enormous size of the carp in the pond give away that it isn't completely new. This kind of beauty is born of order, where every branch and leaf is deliberate, but that somehow increases my appreciation for natural beauty.

The view when you first walk in, take a deep breath, and look around for somewhere to leave your shoes while you begin your walking meditation round the curving path.

The waterfall, today dotted with adolescent moorhens, testing the grip of their feet against the rush of the water. They were too well camouflaged for satisfactory photography, so they are just a happy memory.

A beautiful maple. And me.

The pond from a different standpoint, with its carefully placed stones.

And I think that's what I was trying to get at when I started writing this post - it's all about placement, about where you stand to take in the air, and steal a moment to look at things. In this garden, whichever way you look there is beauty. But you can choose to hear either the play of the water, or the occasional traffic noise and siren from the high street.

Clearer Skies

2009-09-10T12:48:00.003+01:00

Slurping our eighth pots of tea in one of Oxford's cafes this week, a co-student and I realised we'd reached it - that point where you just can't worry about it any more. You don't talk about the work any more, you don't dream about it, or think about it first when you wake up. You don't stop working, you keep stomping one foot in front of the other, but there's no energy left for the drama.

I like this stage, where life feels simpler. I know almost exactly what I have to do each day. It makes me appreciate what's around me. That sounded horribly Pollyanna. What I mean is, for example, I had enough time so I made a fantastic chicken soup yesterday - sorry for the immodesty, but it was truly a joy to eat. And for the past two or three evenings, the skies have been stunning enough to send me running upstairs with a camera to try and catch their colours.

Underneath these, everything is in its proper balance and proportion.

Sink or swim

2009-09-04T22:25:00.004+01:00

It's that point before a deadline when it all seems impossible. The last time I felt this unlikely to complete something was coincidentally almost exactly a year ago. My sister and I were literally surrounded by reams of company orders covering 12 months, and we had to enter all of them into a new programme in order to create a new set of reports. Our mother was in hospital, it was her company, and the reports had to be filed within two days. There was no option but for the two of us to somehow get it done. After we finished our day-jobs, we sat in my study, taking it in turns at the keyboard or calling out information, for 2 straight nights, wrapped in quilts and half-laughing half-crying. The only way through was never to look at how much we had left to do.

A beautiful quilt displayed at the cathedral as part of the Edinburgh festival 2009.

So perhaps that's the approach I should be taking now - not looking at how much there is left to do, but simply moving forward as productively as I can. Except of course I can't help but constantly re-calculate how much I've done, how much there is left, how many days there are. And then I move around all the goalposts, like my allowances for document binding. I haven't quite reached the point where I start setting ambitious new times for physically delivering the documents, in which I somehow assume superhero speed and cover 8 miles of traffic in a single bound, but I'm sure the day is not far away.

As I'm sure you'll have gathered, the end-point of a two year Masters programme is fully in sight. All of this year's work has to be delivered in less than two weeks. A period I had blissfully imagined I would spend doing a little light copy-editing of my work, and getting some early nights. I had a dream last night that when I turned up to cat-sit for my mother's 2 burmese, she had adopted three more without telling me, and I couldn't catch any of them. So I'm dreaming about herding cats. I don't think I need an oracle to interpret that for me. I am surrounded by far too many iterations of the same couple of hundred pages, and am perilously close to being unable to get a grip on which version I actually prefer. The only thing left to do is immerse myself fully in the work and pray for the clarity of this cold loch water to revive me:

Not putting it in writing

2009-08-24T11:33:00.006+01:00

I have had five happy days almost entirely free of the written word. Other than casting my eye lazily over a concert programme, or reading the signs that might perhaps lead me out of the maze of the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, it has been very restful. On day three, an idea was demanding to be written in a notebook as a reminder, if not fleshed out into a full story, but I refused. I was on holiday. It was great. I broke the embargo on Saturday night to play consequences, because it's something of a tradition to get slurry on sloe gin and write rude things on folded pieces of paper with these particular friends, but I felt at peace with that.

So instead of writing, I just watched. And from time to time, photographed. Not always successfully, now that I look back over the snaps. But there are some that come close to capturing the happy quiet of the holiday.

This is the interior of Old St Paul's Church in Edinburgh. They are running a series of 10pm concerts with excellent hot chocolate included in the ticket. I slurped mine while listening to clarinet quintets by Mozart and Howells, then took my sugar haze off to bed.

The botanic gardens were wonderful, full of the sort of design that has planned for spaces to open up between trees and surprise you, as well as carefully placing delicate plants at the edge of borders to catch your eye.

Wherever there was water, that added to it by introducing not just reflection but sound too. We were wandering round between extremely heavy showers, so it was a relief just to be able to remove the waterproof hood and hear something other than the swish of nylon around my ears.

On our last day we tried to balance our "ought" with "want" - we ought to take in more of the bewildering options available as part of the festival, but we wanted to run away from the crowds and see some of the beauty. So we had a quick tour round the cathedral exhibition of quilting, then duty done, headed for the borders.

This was partly to allow one of our party some driving practice in a minibus before she has to take paying customers next week. Hopefully by then the mirror will be fixed so that she can glance in it before she screeches to a stop by any beech trees to peer hopefully for the presence of chantarelle mushrooms. Once they were cooked and on my plate that evening, I felt the near-death experiences on narrow lanes were well worth it.

I don't think it's possible to take a picture that would convey how wonderful the two Daniel Kitson shows I saw were, so I simply suggest you keep an eye out for when he's playing near you, or check out his free podcast on itunes recorded at Edinburgh a few years ago.

Appletastic

2009-08-13T17:18:00.003+01:00

It's that time of year when the tree is covered in apples and I wonder how I'll ever manage to use them all or re-distribute them. To be more accurate, that time began about 2 weeks ago and I've spent the usual amount of time talking about taking action, but today I finally got on with it. I woke up sticky and hot and grumpy, so frankly thought I might as well spend the day covered in apple juice wielding a peeler and wreathed in the smell of vinegar. Such a happy little camper, me.

I have already offloaded a few bags of apples through the church, and have just invited myself round to a friend's tomorrow morning so will leave a bag behind me then too. My mother and sister are begging for apple-mercy, but I am relentless. If they want me to bake for them, they have to take responsibility for some of the raw product too. This evening I plan to get the gardening gloves on and deal with all the windfalls. My childhood memories of angry emerging wasps from rotting apples in long grass mean protective clothing is required.

But this afternoon I at least made a start. Six jars of chutney and 4 jars of blackberry and apple curd later, I have had enough for the time being. Fortunately I've just been invited to "an evening of music-making", which is a good excuse to leave the heap of apple peel and skip up the road. OK, not skip. Perhaps flit with a light heart (and a couple of bags of apples).

Here's the photo-story of this afternoon's labours:

1. The raw ingredients. The blackberries are also from the garden. This is such a small proportion of the apples on the tree that I'm not quite sure what I'm going to. I'm very grateful for the bounty, and all that, but running out of imagination...

2. Even peeled, these fruits are so beautiful with pink veins running through the pale flesh.

3. The two options for the chutney, carefully divided. Every year my sister begs me to make a batch without ginger, for the paltry reason of her violent allergy. Every year I completely forget. This year I think I'm heading for a nomination for best sister in the world - 3 jars of ginger-free apple chutney, with extra chilli to avoid it tipping into "oniony-jam" territory.

4. The blackberry and apple curd. I've read this recipe every summer for a couple of years and each time decided it sounded far too much like hard work. I was right. Either I needed a considerably bigger sieve (that had to be used for the whole mixture. Twice.) or stronger arms. It also took about an hour longer than the recipe estimate. Those women from the WI are obviously made of stronger stuff than me. But I have to say, it tastes amazing. And the colours are wonderful.

Right, off to wash off the worst of the vinegar smell and try not to panic about making impromptu music with 4 people who can all sight-read and have perfect pitch and music degrees. Eek.

Matching the action to the word

2009-08-12T16:30:00.002+01:00

I seem to have spent two days moving from one thing to the next without really leaving a mark. I know what I should be doing: there's a scene re-write that has to be faced. But something in me is recoiling from the idea, and I'm allowing myself to be bounced towards cleaning, gardening, coffees, website hopping and that endless click of the send-receive button in outlook. It's amazing how much time can be consumed not receiving the message you want.

Aside from my own personal preoccupations, the scene that waits for me will not be easy. That's why it needs the work in the first place, of course. If it had been easy, one of the earlier versions would have sufficed. It's a crisis scene, where the character has to understand not just what's happening to someone else, but what's therefore inevitably waiting for him. And I somehow have to do this without writing in big letters on the wall "This Is A Subtext - Pay Attention". The perfect line between subtlety and impenetrability is one I am cautious of missing. I tend to hover in opacity, afraid of pole-vaulting straight over 'subtle' and landing in 'facile'.

Striking a match is an interesting throwaway gesture. Such a slender fragment of wood, yet still wasted in my eyes if I only use part of it. I have pale echoes on all my fingertips where I've been so attuned to letting a match burn fully down that I forget to blow it out before it touches my skin.

Some days I wonder whether all I will have to show for the past months of time at this desk will be a heap of burnt out matches and a few wax spills. Creativity is in some way connected to both light and odour for me. Both help to focus my mind when it drifts, gently draw my inner eye back towards the burning wick and the path opening in my imagination.

How not to make an american quilt

2009-07-31T10:52:00.003+01:00

Well, tomorrow is the wedding of a very dear friend. Anne brought us together. That would be Anne of Green Gables. As anyone who knows Anne is well aware, kindred spirits are hard to find and should be treasured. J is very kindred indeed, definitely "knows Joseph" and generally is one of those friends who is always there for you. Normally proffering a gin and tonic (and holding a larger one for herself, but fair's fair, she got off her arse and mixed them).

The married-couple-to-be declared they didn't want any presents, generously claiming that since all guests will be travelling west for several days by packhorse and goat to reach the wedding destination, no further declaration of our love for them was required. But obviously we've all ignored that. Instead we're operating an extension of our usual christmas gift rules, which state that the gift must cost no more than a few pounds, and either be second-hand from a charity shop or be lovingly crafted by our own hands. (The "lovingly" part is optional, as one or two of us - ahem - have something of a temper once craft is involved.)

So, my over-ambitious brain was clicking away, thinking "hand-crafted" and "Anne of Green Gables" - what wedding present comes out of that? A quilt! Fortunately even my reality-detached brain stuttered a bit at that idea, but I was able to calm it down with the compromise of a bed-runner. I bought a couple of quilting magazines, scribbled on a couple of post-its, bought 2 bolts of material, and forgot all about it because I had ages and ages... Do you see where this is going?

Two weeks ago I was so far behind I was seriously contemplating putting a back on the completed section and handing it over as a cushion cover (singular). I realised very late in the day that there was a good reason there were quilting circles in Avonlea. And not just because they didn't have Project Runway to watch of an evening. Marilla and Mrs Rachel spent their time on the porch sewing together. In the absence of a ready and waiting circle of willing sewers, I pressed my reluctant non-sewing sister into service. With much muttering about glue-guns and staples, and hammering the needle through the tough parts using the back of her mobile phone, she was a total star, working on two of the five main sections for me.

These five main panels work well I think (well, I would say that) and I like the small touch of red to lift the other colours. Actually, sewing the appliqued parts onto the main squares was probably the simplest part because they didn't have to line up with anything! It was the actual construction where my oh so detailed plan (below) may have revealed a slight lack of technical skill:

I vaguely remembered that I needed to find a way of ensuring the layer of wadding didn't all slip to the bottom inside the quilt, so I stitched little chain-hearts in the centre of the plainer panels to hold it in place. Fingers crossed anyway.

But no matter, because the final thing looked like this (or 40% of it does. 100% of it is finished, I just couldn't get it all in the picture.)

It was late, I was tired, I am making sewing motions in my sleep still. I just took the shot and went to bed. and hopefully J will love it. Or convincingly pretend she loves it. I stayed within budget on the materials, but if we cost my time, I may have gone over by the debt of a third world country. Ah well, what are friends for?

Letters in limbo

2009-07-20T11:20:00.003+01:00

Without wishing to spoil anything for future viewers of a very good show, on Saturday night I had a very thought-provoking time watching an excellent comedian. One of the elements of the show was about letter-writing, something I have always sustained. When I was at school I would swap letters all year with girls I'd met on summer holidays. When I was at university I would exchange two or three letters a week with friends spread around the country. After graduation, lost and living alone in London, letters were the main thing that kept me going. I didn't have a telephone, and in retrospect am glad. There was a phone box at the end of the street if I wanted to hear someone's voice. Otherwise there was a prosaic pad of A4 lined paper and a pen.

A couple of years ago I tried to be ruthless and discard a lot of my old letters, birthday cards, and the general vaguely sentimental detritus one attracts as the years pass. I managed to dispose of more than I had expected, but I kept the letters that were particularly significant. Maybe they won't appear so to other eyes, but some of them arrived at times that influenced big decisions in my life; some contain more overt declarations that forced re-consideration of what I wanted and how I lived. And, deeply fortunately, some were just a delight to receive, brought colour to my face and a smile to the corner of my lips for days. There is something wonderful about someone else handwriting your name at the top of a page, and dedicating it to you. Their fingers positioning a stamp, pushing the envelope into a postbox, and willing the contents towards you.

That is the ultimate act of will in giving up self-control. Once the letter is posted, it can't be edited, retracted, re-called. The words are committed to paper, and sealed by the posting. This may be why among the received letters I saved, I also saved a number of letters I had written but never sent. Some I lost my nerve about; some I took so long to post that the moment had long passed; and some even when I formed them with care and tripping heartbeats, I knew I would never send. I wrote one of those yesterday. I read it aloud after I'd finished, to try and get a sense of how someone else would hear it. A very particular someone, of course. The unsent letters are always more loaded, more unique to their recipient.

So do the unsent letters remain outside reality? They contain more meaning than perhaps anything else I write. But in that meaning is risk. And so it is allowed form but not destination. Anita Brookner claimed in an interview she was only ever "lonely for ideal company". I bet she has steamer trunks of unsent letters, sealed with wax.

Tangled

2009-07-14T11:49:00.003+01:00

I have re-discovered a wonderfully simple truth - a long walk beside the sea on a gusty day untangles my head at the same time that it knots my hair into clumps that will make my eyes water to comb out later.

There's something pure about having a smile stretched across my face by the blowing salt air. It's impossible to be anxious when I can spread my arms out and almost take off. There are quite a few concerns in my life right now, not least of which is the looming awareness that I have to submit all my MA work in just 2 months, which will represent 2 years' work up for examination. But faced with the expanse of the sea and the sky, the wet pebbles shifting under my feet, my worries fall back into their proper place in the world - small, achievable by the simple application of hard work, part of the endless ebb and flow of calm and storm. The sucking of the smallest stones by each pulling-back wave is a sound I could never tire of hearing.

When I was a child, my wonderfully elegant grandmother had a beach hut. Inside, with the faint smell of seaweed and damp wood, was a tiny gas stove, a couple of folding chairs, and a "modesty screen" to change in and out of swimsuits. I remember scurrying along behind her, banging the cool-box against my legs, full of treats for lunchtime. The beach hut was painted blue-green, the dark unknowable colour of the English sea far out towards the horizon. My grandmother would open the doors wide and bolt them safely in position, then set up the chairs outside the hut in the same position every time. In her twenties-style swimsuit, she rubbed oil into her skin, put on large sunglasses, and laid a book on her knees. From the cold water shallows, collecting shells in a yellow bucket with a broken handle, I could see her raise an elegant hand to her brow from time to time, just checking on me. Inside the cool box were the makings of a G&T for the afternoon, and home-made lemonade for me. I learned to sip the plastic 'glass' with parrots on it, slowly, slowly, and when I had finished half an hour had passed since lunch, and I was allowed back in the sea.

Works of our Hands

2009-07-08T12:17:00.005+01:00

Well, you're going to be glad you didn't rush us, for the work of our hands (myself, mother-in-law and father-in-law) is truly magnificent. There were one or two last minute hitches as we completed the assembly: one of the remaining eyes went missing, necessitating a trip into Chichester for sheep's eyes (plastic); the m-i-l found her 2 assistants were too tall and holding everything too high for her to reach with her needle. However, we prevailed. And the lucky recipient, my 15 week old niece was duly captivated (sensible child). We can only hope the newly affixed eyes remain in place (we've recommended it's not suspended directly over the crib, just in case...).

Yes, it's the long-awaited Sean the Sheep knitted mobile. The, erm, curvaceous one in the middle is apparently called Shirley. I daresay she has trouble with her glands. The knitting one is Sean. The one with the pink hat is Timmy. The one with the curlers (fashioned from a drinking straw by my dexterous f-i-l) is Timmy's mother. The one with the stripy purple and green hat suffers from "last child" syndrome when the designers had run out of names: he is called "bobble hat sheep". Poor thing. Anyway, I trust we'll all sleep soundly knowing this endeavour has been completed.

Fortunately, the baby was fast asleep later in the afternoon when we took her to West Dean gardens, so she could make no comparisons when we found ourselves surrounded by exceptional sculptures. Still, I'd like to see them make something with knitting needles. Here are some of our favourites:

These seed pod sculptures suspended high above our heads are made of slate.

This is inscribed with a poem and sits on the hilltop above the parkland walk.

I loved this acorn (and the optimistic climber on the side...).

My mother-in-law was far from the only one tempted to sit in these beautiful hands.

I'm sure you can see more professional images, and indeed find details of the sculptors, on the West Dean website.

Seemed like a good idea

2009-06-21T19:41:00.004+01:00

Until the execution. I had two examples of this kind of thing demonstrated today. Have a look at this:

I'd have to say it looks more impressive in the photograph than it does in reality, which gives you some indication of the problem. I should have made someone stand beside this so you would know the stones are barely hip-high. Tucked into the corner of a car park, they are labelled, on a plaque in the ground, "twinning stones". I assumed this meant that they had some kind of fertility power, to bestow twins upon any copulating teenagers (or others keen on outdoor nookie) using them as a prop. But no. These are a symbol of the two villages "twinned" together, so presumably one stone comes from each village. I can't imagine either village would exactly lament the loss of their particular lump. Or be able to identify it in a line-up. A rock line-up. That would be a really slow day at the police station, wouldn't it? "Tell me Mrs Jones, which one of these leapt out in front of you and caused you to trip?" If only.

I don't know if other parts of the world have these "twinning" idea. I think originally it may have been developed to encourage cross-cultural exchanges, but I suspect in reality the English members of the town council visit their twin town, demand "tea and a bun" in ringing tones, and go home complaining about the garlic.

Now for those of you with nervous stomachs, perhaps this is the moment to click away, make a cup of tea, or send that email you've been meaning to send all day. Because here comes the second thing that seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm not sure my friend "A" ever actually thought this was a great idea, but since she was face-down on a table and sprouting numerous acupuncture needles at the time, her resistance was negligible. Below is a photograph showing the day after "cupping", and I warn you, it's scary:

The words that came to mind were: alien encounter. "A" thought it something akin to being hugged by a giant squid. She was determined they weren't that painful - but apparently bad enough that a shower hurts. Hmm. I have no idea what cupping is supposed to achieve, but I think I'm considerably more comfortable not finding out. I'm off to have a power shower...

Botanicals

2009-06-21T19:24:00.003+01:00

There's not a lot that's calm and beautiful in the centre of Birmingham, in my not-so-humble opinion. However, a short bus ride takes you to the Botanical Gardens. These are lovely - green spacious lawns and arching glasshouses. The latter even have special units with de-misters for the wearers of spectacles temporarily blinded by entering the tropical domes.

It was a warm sunny day when I visited recently (yep, that was summer. It was on the 15th June. Hope you enjoyed it.) so my friends and I stayed mainly in the outdoor spaces to make the most of the warmish air. Being a very over-grown child, I'd have to say my favourite part was the swings. All the children nearby were too small to use them, so my friends and I had them unchallenged. I should really get a swing. I've got the grown-up variant, a swinging garden seat with a canopy, which I love. But it's not the same as leaning back, letting the wind blow through your hair, and urging yourself forward and back in great swoops. I must look into this. I didn't get a picture of the swings, but I was very impressed with both the Roman garden and the Knot garden:

There was also a very friendly peacock. I assume there were a number of peacocks, unless this one was kept very busy indeed popping up around every corner, but here's one of them stalking off disgusted that I failed to share even a scrap of choc ice:

Meeting old friends is always an intense combination of groaning over old jokes, pouring out fresh news with everyone talking over everyone else in a bid to make the very most of time together. I don't see these 2 friends nearly enough: P is a very busy family man, with a sideline in running a huge parish, so you have to plan ahead to get into his schedule. I believe he's now taking bookings for January 2011. J is a wonderful woman who I do see more often - we are currently trying to work out how we can both be in Edinburgh for the same week this summer. It won't be summer unless we have a Scottish holiday together, but circumstances are conspiring against us at the moment. I'm sure the Fringe Fairies will cast a spell and sort it all out for us soon...

Day in, day out

2009-06-10T10:26:00.004+01:00

It occurs to me, not for the first time, that it's been quite a while since I wrote anything about, well, writing. As in, what was supposed to be the main purpose of the blog. Some might say I've been diversifying. Others (those who know me better) will doubtless sigh and point out I've been dodging the issue.

The truth is, tip-tapping away at the keyboard isn't that interesting for other people to hear about. Whenever anyone asks me how it's going, I tend to gesture at the pub/party/coffee shop where the conversation is located and say "Swimmingly, that's why I'm here instead of doing any work", which I find deflects all but the most persistent questioners. If they are one of the "No, but really, tell me how it's going" breed, I mentally strike them from my christmas card list (a cutting blow) and mumble something about tricky moments with sub-structures. Which makes it sound like I'm having trouble re-building the Forth bridge or something. Actually, most days, that's not a million miles off how it feels.

So, for the record, I spent May in a frenzy of paperclipped pages, separating out the main plot of the novel into lots of tiny sections, and writing a whole new plot set fifteen years earlier then trying to weave the second plot seamlessly through the first one. Got a headache yet? Yep, me too. That period of sunshine and flowers was sent off for "comment" on June 1st, and I'm now left with the aftermath to try and gather together into some semblance of a working draft. Apparently I'm supposed to keep moving forward...interesting, interesting. Or as my sister and I say it at squeaking only-dogs-can-hear-us pitch, when life is making particularly outrageous demands, "ntrstng ntrsting". Also for the record, the current grand total is 52,956 words. I was so pulped from re-structuring the damn thing I couldn't even bring myself to ring someone and celebrate passing the 50k mark. Perhaps a margarita later on.

Unusually, my "gainful employment" type work also involves writing at the moment. I've been asked to write an article on a new approach to nursing that London hospitals have been using. It was quite fun tripping off to interview people, and considerably less fun when the horror of transcribing the tapes consumed my entire weekend. It's years since I did that; the experience has not improved in the interim. Anyway, all the gems of wisdom are safely down on paper - all I have to do now is condense them into something coherent and brilliant.

Which brings me to the very best thing I've done lately - go to a work-in-progress comedy show by Daniel Kitson. If you haven't seen him, do it, do it now. He started off talking about deadlines, so had me on side from the beginning, balancing that fine line between hearty empathic laughter and hysterical tears thinking of my abandoned desk. Several times during the evening I thought I might rupture an internal organ from laughing. Perhaps not the best way to make a good impression on my evening companion, who is a particularly charming and admirable soul. I can't tell you how relieved I was on the train journey home (not just to find all my internal bits intact) but when my companion stuck their tongue out at a film poster they loathed. I LOVE the moments when other people reveal they're almost as childish as me, it makes me want to squeeze them in a death-hug. (I restrained myself - no emergency services were required.)

Well, look I started off talking about writing. I sustained it for quite a while. I got distracted by the end. Didn't we all? Today's main distraction appears to be wishing I was beside the sea...

Coral Beaches, Skye, July 2008

Sitting

2009-05-29T13:50:00.006+01:00

This is how I spend a lot of my time. Some of the time I throw in some thinking as well, but that usually takes me surprise. For the past few weeks I've been doing even more sitting than usual. The kind that involves taking care of other people's things. Unfortunately, I have yet to be asked to chocolate-sit, but I guess that's because the idea is that you're returning something pristine and undamaged at the end of it.

The first session involved cat-sitting. These are two rather high maintenance burmese felines, who are about the size and mental age of kittens, despite being several years older. They are indubitably beautiful, but they are hard work.

I only have two pictures of them, both from the same blissful period when they slept. This was squeezed in between howling at the door whenever they heard footsteps and thought rescue might be on its way, surfing across the dining table on my carefully arranged pages of writing, and chasing each other round the flat at such a speed that only their puffed up tails were visible. But they are impossible to be angry with while they're sleeping in a sunbeam. (OK, so one of them is sleeping, the other is thinking of ways to kill the cat-sitter.)

For the first time in my life I've also experienced church-sitting. Fortunately, the biggest challenge I was likely to encounter was a well-informed hiker wanting to know which part of the church was the oldest. I scanned through the considerable information available on the church welcome desk, including a "you are here" type map identifying points of interest. Despite standing in the middle of the church and turning around slowly trying to work out what was what, I still spent the afternoon nervous that someone would arrive and test me. 'Now, point at the nave for me and tell me what it's used for.' Like mental arithmetic tests at school. Anyway, nothing like that happened, leaving me free to take a few snaps of the impressive stained glass windows, and the organ. I always have my back to this, so it was nice to have a good look.

As always, I'm approaching a deadline. Monday, since you ask. So the usual things have happened: the house is a mess, the grass is waving at knee-height, there's no food in the house except extra-strong coffee, my hair is sticking up in clumps, and there's a LOT of balled up pieces of paper around the place.

Normally, this is a delight for my own cat Molly, who has plenty to chase. However, she has recently resurrected her old hunting habit. I can only assume the local wildlife had been getting lazy and she could restrain herself no longer. I hope they've learnt their lesson. At 6 o'clock this morning, chasing a mouse round the bathroom after Molly had lost interest in it, I was ready to teach it to them. For the animal lovers among you, let me reassure you I managed to catch the mouse in a tampax box (classy) shove a towel over the top, and get it outside to release it in the front garden. By this time it was almost 8 o'clock, and my neighbours on both sides were out washing their cars (OCD, I tell you), and thus treated to a glimpse of a madwoman trying to clench a short nightshirt between her knees and simultaneously avoid a mouse running up her arm. I feel sure Neighbourhood Watch have been duly alerted.

After all this fun, Molly is now flat out on the sofa in the study - she likes to sleep here to make sure I'm working. But every so often she thinks I've done enough, and comes over to show me the keyboard is really just a back-scratcher.

Reflected glories

2009-05-09T18:21:00.004+01:00

I have an eclectic collection of photographs to include in this post, which will present something of a challenge to link together in any meaningful way. So I shall just meander through them with the same usual accompaniment of nonsense and not worry about it.

I think we should start with some peace and quiet. Yesterday I visited Chichester cathedral. I've been there many times and it's particularly lovely (with a very talented choir). One year I remember there was a bird nesting in the cathedral causing the kind of ruckus you'd expect from its nest and its young. I can't remember what kind of bird it was, but it was a large protected species, so untouchable, and the business of the cathedral soon learned to fit around it. I assume its young eventually fledged and navigated their way out into the wider world. It must have been a shock to the poor young birds. Even the activity of a cathedral, from music to reflection to community flower festival, somehow has its mundane sounds swallowed and perfected by the old stones.

Cloisters

Stepping outside again into West Street with the bus exhaust fumes and the tussling schoolchildren is a bit of an assault on the senses. It's gentler to come out of the cathedral and turn left, heading into the cloisters (and towards the tea shop, by happy coincidence). Inside the cool dark passages you can see the sun blasting the grassy quads.

Quad in sunlight

Well, theoretically you can see it. Or you can nap inside a very fleecy oversized sleep suit, like the lovely Sophie. It's been hard work growing to be six weeks' old; a girl needs her sleep. Especially when her Aunty talks nonstop all the way round Chichester; "I'm sure she was saying something very important, but she starts talking and I start sleeeeeeeeping".

Sophie sleeping

Ever since I've had my first garden, my parents-in-law have supplied me with cuttings and seeds and encouragement (and a few hundred hours hard labour to knock the place into shape every time I moved). Yesterday's visit was no exception - I came home with a belated Easter present of a Sunflower kit to grow. For quite a few years we had a family competition as to who could grow the tallest sunflower. Then one year Barbara gave us all christmas tree seedlings (think the length of your little finger) to see who could get them to grow. Answer: no-one. The following year we tried pumpkins, which had rather mixed results. Who'd have thought pumpkins would be so high-maintenance? In my garden right now are clouds of forget-me-nots transplanted from the Chichester garden. Cuttings from mine are growing in my sister's new garden - it's all too green for words.

Forget-me-nots

The garden is a place I often think about Paul, while I'm wandering through trailing my hands in things and planning what to do for the season ahead, and while I'm looking at the statue that reminds me of the way he liked to rest his head on my shoulder:

Peace

He had a weakness for new plants ( that seems to have transferred to me lately) and the plant stall in the foyer where he worked were rarely disappointed when he appeared. This lilac is getting better every year; he bought it as a sickly looking twig, and somehow it thrived.

Lilac

And on the days when it's too rainy or windy to actually go outside? Well, the house is blessed with a sun-porch on both the front and the back. They may be rickety and rotting (there's no "may" about it; their day will soon come) but they're a perfect spot for a bit of admiring your own reflection:

Molly

Messing about in boats (sort of)

2009-05-03T20:31:00.003+01:00

Reflections in the Oxford Canal

So, because apparently one big challenge isn’t enough for me, I've decided to take on another one at the same time. Well, actually they're connected. The ongoing attempt to get a readable novel onto paper is having much the same effect on me as Stephen Fry's description of travel: "at my age, it broadens the behind". So I have reached the very reluctant conclusion that some form of (whisper it) exercise is called for. The trouble is, when it comes to motivation to get sweaty, I think I must have missed that queue altogether and lined up for a double-helping of sloth.

For some reason, the other day I remembered a brief dalliance with gym-going that two friends and I experienced when we were undergraduates. There were 3 treadmills in a row (it was a small gym, these days I'm told there are about 300) which had the usual disadvantage of facing a wall-sized mirror. Unwilling to watch ourselves turning puce, and insufficiently co-ordinated to walk backwards on the treadmillls (we considered it, quite seriously) we decided, Anne of Green Gables style, to harness the powers of our imagination instead. We would take it in turns to imagine where we would be walking and gaspingly describe it to the other two. As far as I recall there were no constraints as to sequence or logic. One friend might have us power-walking through the countryside able to smell a distant cream tea; when it was my turn we might be pounding the uneven streets of Soho at midnight heading towards Bar Italia for a double espresso. OK, and a bacon sandwich.

Now, since I re-arranged my study (read: tossed out a load of useless tat), there is considerably more space. But not so much more that 2 extra rowing machines are going to line up in there. So it's going to be just me this time, and I like to think I haven't quite reached the stage of telling myself stories in an empty house just yet. But the visualisation thing, there had to be something I could use in that. So rather than the terminally dull approach of counting strokes or minutes or average heart-rates on the rowing machine, I'm going to take a virtual journey.

I wanted it to be somewhere I could actually visit and photograph, so I have decided to do a virtual-row of the Oxford canal. It starts to the north near Coventry and ends in Oxford, and covers 123.9 km. So pretty much 124 km? Nope, that 0.1km is going to make all the difference, trust me. I've downloaded a map of the canal from the rather wonderful waterscape.com website, and stuck it on the back of my study door. There's a teeny tiny blue mark showing the water I covered today, like the fundraising thermometers outside hospitals or community halls. Except unfortunately, I have to colour it all in blue by my own efforts. Although, now you've got me thinking along Tom Sawyer lines - I wonder who'd like to take on a km or two for me? Almost as much fun as painting a picket fence, honest.

Missing Church

2009-04-26T23:21:00.005+01:00

Well, confession time: I didn't make it to church this morning. Yesterday was a long (but happy) day celebrating a big birthday for my mum, and the celebrations continue tomorrow. It was more than I could manage to drag myself outside looking vaguely presentable by 10.00 this morning too. Had I made the effort (and yes, I feel bad) I would doubtless have seen something as pretty as this, which I snapped just before choir practice on Good Friday. The magnolia has well and truly peaked now, but was wonderful this year.

The churchyard is edged by dry stone walls, which I could look at for hours (assuming I had a flask of tea and something to sit on.) That reminds me of a wonderful interview with a playwright recently, who was asked for his one piece of advice for visitors to England. He said "bring a cushion". I hope word gets round.

From one of the gaps in the walls, the trees look as though they're forming a gateway for the spire - pretty spectactular I thought. Inside the church porch is a small shin-high piece of stone, with a note resting on it: "please feel free to sit on the top of St Mary's spire". The spire is the subject of a long restoration fundraising effort; when the original top was removed, it was re-homed into the porch and now entertains people like me who enjoy such things.

In my luxurious pyjama-clad day, I feel I did my penance, as I spent pretty much all day continuing my plough through "The Magic Mountain " (THE book for you if you suffer from insomnia, or have a burning desire to read 700 pages of amateur philosophising by fictional tuberculosis patients, I tell you). I'm normally a quick reader but this book, this is my kryptonite. I sense it pulsing from my bedside table and know I had better get back to it soon. Not only am I running out of time to finish it, but I'm supposed to have written a piece on it - by Friday. Marvellous.

Spring cuttings

2009-04-22T11:45:00.003+01:00

OK, so this is entirely antithetical to the notion of blogging, since I am going to try and catch up on a month of sloth in one big hit, but I think desperate measures are called for. By which I mean I think my phone is going to refuse to store any more pictures soon.

Not that a great number of them were worth sharing once I downloaded them today - isn't it depressing how much better things appear when viewed on a screen the approximate length of my upper thumb joint? This is in part due to my own self-consciousness while pointing a phone at something as if I'm on Star Trek and about to press "stun", so I snap things too quickly and shove the phone back into my pocket like contrabrand. English reticence, or my own personal issue? Both, probably.

Easter

Anyway, let's start with Easter, shall we? What nicer thing is there than opening a box of eggs at that time to find that one has clung onto a feather? I am choosing not to dwell too much on the "how" of this scenario, since the options are either a) glued on with chicken excrement, or b) glued on by hand in a factory somewhere to make people like me think the eggs are fresher. I choose to just enjoy the feather, OK? Good.

Easter should mean Spring, as surely as Bill Oddie and Kate Humble's arrival on our screens, peering into nesting boxes and wearing alarming knitted hats. I had my own confirmation of Spring this morning. I had to drop my car off for a service at some unspeakable hour, so as my normal chauffeur in these situations has had the gall to go on holiday to Venice, I walked the few miles from the garage back home. The most direct route is along a busy road, which was a little much for my tender sensibilities when so recently dragged from the comfort of the duvet. Instead I took the steep muddy little path to the right that led me down onto the canal. A winding extended way home, but shady and green and swollen with birdsong. I wished I'd had my friend J with me, who can tell birds by their songs, but the only thing I can reliably tell you is that a pair of robins sang their hearts out and sat conveniently in view so I could see them doing it.

Just as I reached the bridge where I had to re-join the road to turn for home, I saw a rippling in the water up ahead that made me hold my breath. I worked out the date in my head. Was it too early? No, it really was the first cluster of ducklings of the year. They were very tiny, and their mum was honkingly defensive. She kept them in the centre of the canal, well away from the tramping feet and star trek stunner being pointed at them, but here's a shot of them from far away.

Spring

My garden is telling me the seasons are changing too. This is my favourite time in my garden, when all is green - until the slugs get going. I went to the garden centre yesterday and areas of my flower beds are now peppered with blue dots. I spent two years battling slugs the organic way, and nearly lost my mind. One year there were beer traps - which are disgusting because you have to empty out the bloated yeasty drowned slugs each morning - and broken eggshells - which are supposed to be painful for the slugs to cross, but my local slugs apparently have body armour. The following year I kept going with those two approaches (despite their lack of success) but added copper tape to pots - supposed to give electric shocks to slugs, but again, ineffective to the robo-slugs living here - and violence. Yes, the evening I realised that not only was I wandering my garden at night wearing a headtorch, brandishing a spike and a bucket to make slug kebabs, but that I had been doing this every night for a week, yep, that was a worrying night. I resolved that chemicals were the way forward, and so far the local population of hedgehogs, foxes and pets seem entirely uninterested and unaffected by the blue pellets. I've kept the spike and bucket in the shed though, just in case.

Anyway, one of my most loved plants in the world is dicentra. I love the heart-shaped flowers with the tiny teardrop hanging below each one. I have a dicentra alba in bloom just now, that glows white in the sole shady corner of my sun-stricken garden:

My sister and I spent an evening this week hacking the grass back down to more humane levels, and clipping the numerous miles of box hedging I planted without due regard for the future work involved. I love the shapes it makes though, winter and summer. But the true beauty queen of the garden at the moment has to be the apple blossom. This is only a small tree, but it works hard, and always fruits heavily. So heavily that come summer, my hands will be sticky all the way up to my armpits and my kitchen will groan with jars of apple chutney and apple sauce:

By the way, small hypothetical question to end with: if, when walking along a public street past a beautiful private garden, you stopped to brush a stray branch of star jasmine out of your face which had sprung from the hedge to one side, would it be alright to snip the end off, carry it home with you, and put in a jar as a cutting?

The most wonderful thing

2009-03-29T20:06:00.003+01:00

There's a completely new person in my life. And I do mean completely new - she joined the world through proud parents Ali and Will on Wednesday morning. Sophie is just beautiful, and as an aunt I am swelled with pride (unjustified pride, as I did none of the work) and adoration.

Here she is less than one day into her life, utterly consuming my attention:

Simply the most beautiful niece in the world. She is healthy and pink and perfect. Her parents are going to do a fabulous job, and we're going to support them every way we can. There are more pictures of Sophie on her very own blog, translated by her parents, which you can find in my list of favourites on the left.

The small matter of three days of 12-hour classes have distracted me since Sophie's arrival, so I'm in need of some sleep before I can persuade one or two brain cells back into something approaching coherence. I've been on a residential writing course which was demanding, almost punishing, but very stimulating. I have a very generous and incisive supervisor who reads my work and has a habit of finding the weak point in my narrative and giving it a good shove to find out what's underneath. Painful, but necessary for improvement! The group of writers are excellent at providing the encouragement and support we all need to keep us going when everything seems empty and pointless; we all need people to just be kind to us sometimes. I must try to remember that as I move through work this week.

Now I must get back to trying to subdue my errant knitting needles - my mother-in-law and I have a combined project in production for Sophie. (Combined because I require supervision where wool is concerned.) Hopefully we're going to assemble it tomorrow night so I will take photographs and keep you posted.

Canalside Reflections

2009-03-16T17:04:00.005Z

We are having a spell of beautiful dry sunny days, that (hurray!) are not too warm. Just right to go for a walk, if you're like me and reach an internal temperature of approximately 100 degrees after about 20 seconds of exertion.

Yesterday, in an unprecedented and probably never to be repeated moment of virtue, I walked to church and back. This is a fairly brisk twenty-five minute jaunt, or in my case, a twenty minute amble nosing into other people's gardens, followed by a 5 minute panting half-run-half-skip up the lane once I hear the church bells start to chime the hour. There was no time for photography on that run, although the gardens near the church are so perfect that their time will definitely come.

However, today K and I were scheduled to walk at 2.30, and by jingo we were going to do it. We've been talking about taking up exercise together for about 6 months now. I blame the fact that K has been claiming her "no trainers" situation; she blames my inability to commit to a specific day and time. Draw your own conclusions (i.e. we are very bad influences on each other).

There were no weather-related excuses today, although we toyed briefly with wondering whether we were going to get too hot. My sister will be snorting with laughter at this point, having recently returned from Zambia and soon to depart for Senegal, she somehow fails to consider 13 degrees too warm. Strange girl.

Anyway, K and I set off towards the canal, which is about 10 minutes from my house, or 2 good gossip subjects, depending on how you're measuring it. The light through the trees around the canal was so beautiful I couldn't understand how I left it so long since I last walked this way.

This is the view as soon as you step off the road, the sound of traffic dissipating behind you, only a duck disturbing the surface of the water. I am fascinated by reflections. I think some part of me believes that if I look at the reflection of a bridge for long enough, I will identify the magical perfect centre, and through that point I could cross worlds. Yep, I spend quite a lot of time on old benches staring at bridges over water.

We walked and talked, and as always noticed things on the way back that had been invisible on the way out. (That is the only thing about short canalside walks - you have to walk an awful long way to walk a "circle" and obviously have to make use of fieldside paths to bring you back to the beginning. So this was an "out and back again" walk, but none the worse for that.)

An early example of a landscaped diving point? Alright, I KNOW it used to be a bridge, I just prefer to speculate otherwise. I tried to photograph some tiny white wild flowers I believed might be violets, but let's just say the image isn't worthy of sharing. Which means for evermore I'm claiming they were definitely violets.

Fresh air, a long chat, and a stretch for my under-used legs - an excellent use of an afternoon, which has made me much more inclined to get back down to work now. Right after the next cup of tea, naturally.

Watching from the sofa

2009-03-13T16:05:00.005Z

OK, so the Cheltenham Festival is almost over, and it will carry with it (over hurdles and open ditches) my latest procrastination activity. I had no choice - I had to watch it because I was competing with my sister-in-law's fiance as to who would pick the most winners and have the most imaginary money at the end. I hope to heck we're discounting losers or I owe my imagination another mortgage.

In a last gasp attempt to put off getting back to writing a little longer I, like most of the rest of the known world, googled procrastination. At this point I would like to make an honourable mention of my great friend J, who has been putting off buying a book someone recommended to her on procrastination for about six months now. She's world-class.

Anyway, I was slightly disconcerted to discover that etymologically speaking, procrastination doesn't mean putting things off indefinitely, only putting them off until tomorrow. I am not about to get into a discussion here about how tomorrow never comes, because in my experience, if I have a deadline tomorrow, tomorrow comes along right on time. Every time.

So apparently my dodging and whining and general displacement activity are only going to buy me a twenty-four hour stay of execution, if I call them procrastination. It hardly seems worth it, does it? However, there are fringe benefits, like deciding to bake an apricot clafoutis yesterday.

This is the "ingredients everywhere why didn't I use a bigger bowl" shot. I was just about to add a pan of very hot milk to the mixture and pour it over the chopped apricots:

And this is the "finally! I've been checking every five minutes to see if it's cooked" shot:

Once it came out of the oven, it was scattered with caster sugar and allspice which are just melting in the picture above. It tasted pretty good. Which is good, because on the rare occasions that I bake, I like the reward to be directly proportional to the effort. Namely, I like the reward to outweight the effort by at least 2:1. I took this dessert to a dinner with some friends - friends of mine, not friends of the dessert; I only baked once. One tip though: it's almost impossible to serve without total collapse. Of both dessert and server.

Sounds of Silence

2009-03-07T13:30:00.004Z

This morning I went to my first Julian meeting. That sounds as though only people called Julian can attend, doesn't it? Or perhaps "Julian" is the secret password to get through the door as in the Famous Five? Sadly, none of the above. It's a meeting following Julian of Norwich, when a group comes together for an hour of silent reflection. There's a rather wonderful explanation in the welcome leaflet, which describes a man sitting in a cathedral in silence for a long time with a smile on his face. When asked what he was doing, he said "I'm looking at Him, and He's looking at me".

There is more information here: http://www.julianmeetings.org/index.htm

For people who are perhaps in danger of either dozing off or getting dizzy by sitting in a chair for an hour with their eyes shut, there was a candle to focus on. This morning there was also a beautiful arrangement of hellebores from someone's garden. Even more impressively, it transpired later that the grower of the hellebores was cutting them back as fast as she could but the blooms were overtaking her - and she only had a garden territory of one flower bed and twelve pots, since she had recently moved into sheltered accommodation. They must be the most abundant pots in the land!

The meeting was really good, something very different where the focus was not on asking for anything but on listening and being still. It was a deeply affecting renewing experience to have an hour not really about words or trying to communicate anything, verbally or on the page. Almost all that I do is about expressing something, whether it's creative or business. This was like having the experience of a retreat, but withing my own normal life and only a few roads away from home.

Life is definitely forcing its way through the darkness and frosts, particularly in the garden. Just as I had garnered enough enthusiasm to give the grass its first cut of the year, I remembered the blade ran out on the strimmer at the end of last season. After a couple of quality hours trying to lever the old blade out of the housing, it transpired they no longer make replacements to fit that model. Apparently ten years makes a tool a pensioner these days. (Although the "slight damage" inflicted on it when removing the blade may mean that this was a happy coincidence from a safety perspective.)

So I went to the garden centre yesterday to buy a new strimmer. I was temporarily distracted by this gorgeous abundant pussy willow:

But when I remembered what I was supposed to be doing, I was disproportionately delighted to learn that now tool manufacturers have finally noticed that not everyone is under 5'5" and have therefore started to make adjustable height power tools. Once home with my shiny new orange plastic thing, I strimmed all the way round my miles of box hedges with a smile on my face and a straight back.

Here are some of the lovely colours coming through in the front garden at the moment:

Primula - the yellow ones bloom almost all year but the blue are a Spring treat. And finally, since I didn't manage to photograph them last time, here are some budding daffodils with that perfect colour of yellow and green that defies my description:

40,000 words reached (and 24 more for good measure)

2009-02-28T14:26:00.003Z

I wrote the title of this blog article about an hour before I could legitimately follow it up with the announcement that I've finally crawled past the 40,000 word mark. All downhill from here, right? It took me an entire packet of Choco-Leibniz biscuits and a lot of high volume Alison Krauss and Beth Neilsen Chapman to get to this point today. I have quite a number of friends who are either dieting or abstaining from chocolate during Lent. I politely declined their invitations to keep them company, as I suspect March will be another "anything that gets me through" type month as I try to write a whole lot more words. Banning chocolate would be naïve in the extreme.

Spring is forcing its way in all around. Daffodils are now my favourite colour of all, that bright greenish yellow the buds turn for the day or so before they open. I missed that perfect moment for this plant, but admired its triumph over the thick layer of fallen leaves:

Snowdrops in the churchyard of St Giles' Church last week were clustered together in the stiff wind:

If I had been better prepared, I would have photographs of Blenheim Palace to show you here. Mum and I went on Thursday as there was a voucher in the paper to turn a day pass into an annual pass at no additional charge. The wind was biting, so in true highbrow fashion we queued up for our passes, moved swiftly into the cafe for coffee and flapjack, undertook a brisk tour of the gift shop, and came home again. After all, as all those around us doing precisely the same thing said, we can come back any time now. Like, when it's warmer…

In theory, I do now just about have time to spend this afternoon in the library reading biographies of Thomas Mann and Henry James, but I think the lure of a bacon sandwich and a rugby match on TV might be too strong. Which reminds me, it has been a momentous week: not only hitting the big 40k, but also finally finishing the laboured reading of Wings of a Dove, which feels like its taken about a hundred years. As with the only other Henry James I've read, basically everything happened in the last 50 pages. Which made me a touch peeved with the lack of return for my effort with the preceding 500.

Perhaps I should be learning something from this, as I meander through my own creative process. Thomas Mann wrote that he thought The Magic Mountain would be a short story when he started. It's 900 pages long. I don't care what happens - my book is NOT going to be 900 pages long. Unless I include pictures...

Animal Magic

2009-02-25T11:10:00.003Z

Over the past week or so, despite super-human levels of work (ahem) there has been an animal focus to my life.First, here's Molly, who shot up a tree when the snow was deeper than anticipated, and is now considering her options, given that the tree was rather more spindly than expected:

The next creature to make its way into my life came from my own knitting needles. After an attempt on the world record of number of times a piece can be unpicked, here's my very own fat sheep. I promise this isn't for me, it's for an as-yet-unborn, but he's happy enough on my bookshelf for the time being.

But Harley's exhaustion (below) after a fairly short walk is probably cuter still. There's a whole lot of my sister-in-law's labrador stuffed into that chair...

Oh OK, this last has nothing whatsoever to do with animals, but it was my view from my study window this morning. Oddly, their radio transmitted through my PC speaker, which was disarming. I gather from the broadcast that there was a garden fire in the street behind me, involving a conifer, which was a "Charlie incident". Anyone got any idea what that means??

Speech impediments

2009-02-19T09:41:00.007Z

Well, I kind of feel obligated to get back to writing on here after Jesse is having such a noxiously productive week that I have to keep up. (Her blog is definitely worth a look for the pictures of "ducks-on-ice" alone. Although Jess - pictures of cute little duckies followed by a picture of duck salad ... straight to hell.)

Also, despite the psychologist on the radio this morning who said we're all going to get cancer and die younger because we only speak on facebook (clearly a man who doesn't have any friends on facebook and is bitter about it), online communication is my mode of choice for the moment. This is partly because it doesn't involve getting out of my PJs, and partly because I smacked myself in the face with a car door on Tuesday night and have a fat lip. Dignity, ever dignity. My maternal grandmother is sighing in heaven, shaking her head, and reaching for another Campari.

Still, I've already flexed those social skills she laboured to instil in me once this week (and it ended with the car door incident), so that's quite enough. Here we are at pre-birthday drinks for big T:

There is a vicious rumour I might leave the house again today, as it's the Oxford Farmers' Market in Gloucester Green, and the food at lunchtime is super good. Roasted piggy, giant doughnuts, all kind of bread-based joy... It's monthly brunch again at mine this weekend so hopefully I'll be able to snaffle a bunch of goodies that look home-made from the market and lap up the adulation from my guests. Although they're not really adulation type folk, more "where's the next course?" type of gals. My favourite kind.

I was out of town last week, in a real city rather than toytown - you've got to love Oxford*, but I do always think the buildings are pure fascia and there's nothing behind them but cameras and plywood. And any city you can cross on foot in less than 15 minutes is stretching the term, let's be honest.

*I don't mean that every time I'm affronted by the presence of other people in the city obviously, like 45 tourists standing still across the pavement, or students cycling without lights on the wrong side of the road at night, or any of the many other things which I rant and huff about daily.

ANYway, a week in London was a stark reminder of just how many darned people you can squeeze into one cramped place. Usually that place was my carriage on the central line. It was, however, more than worth it for a fun-filled week on "work experience" (that knocked about 17 years off my age in my head) with a publisher. I'm going to come right out and say it was Random House, because I'm only going to say they were completely lovely and I had a fantastic time.

It was also a chance to re-visit an old home.

Nope, not the tube station itself - the alcoves in there are already fully populated, which is very sad. But in my youth I lived just round the corner. I was delighted to see that none of the corner shops had changed. In fact, I went into an old favourite as a test and was able to locate the ice-cream in under five seconds in the exact rear corner of the shop where it used to nestle. I'm sure their CCTV has plenty of footage from 1998 of me zooming in like a heat-seeking-missile and whisking out again dropping coins on the counter and cracking the lid of a tub of cookies and cream. It's good to have a reputation, right? Like Oscar Wilde said, 'the only thing worse than being talked about...'

Well, time to go and peer into the mirror to see if my lip has reduced from fat to mildly obese. Before I go, it's time for a big thank you to Jesse, who has given my blog an attitude award. Here it is:

She has sneakily already passed this award to many of the blogs I would have nominated for having great attitude, so now I am passing it on to Woman of a Certain Age for her overall blog, but with a special mention for her toilet-mosaic idea.

Reward and Punishment

2009-02-05T19:12:00.005Z

OK, apparently I have a certain amount of self-discipline and now I've run out. In fact, it's been running fairly low since the tail end of 2008, but the needle is definitely on empty now. So it was time to work out a new way to get motivated.

This way is a combination of reward and punishment. It involved the help (coercion) of a number of friends and family, money, and lots and lots of small step targets.

The first target is 40,000 words and is due very soon indeed. The reward/punishment part is: my mother has an envelope containing twenty of my hard-earned pounds. If I hit the deadline, I get to spend them on a new bag. If I miss it, she gets to spend them as she pleases. I'm finding it concentrates my mind on the job in hand wonderfully.

Even when the world outside looked like this when I opened the curtains this morning:

Nonetheless I knuckled down to work. But I did have to take a short break this afternoon to drag friends outside and mould this masterpiece:

How hard can it be?

2009-01-26T21:24:00.006Z

So there we were, shortly before Christmas, "H" and I, thinking: next Christmas will be different. We'll get together all through 2009 and make beautiful amazing (unspecified) things, which we will sell for real money - or failing that give away to our unsuspecting friends and relations on Christmas morning. This will both a) be a journey of self-improvement, and b) rescue our finances. We didn't quite say it would make our fortunes, but we were both thinking it.

And on Saturday, the carefully scheduled date rolled around for our first manufacturing session. Obviously, first we needed materials. Shopping, for things that you don't need to try on, hurray! We were very businesslike, we had a little notebook to record costs, and when we got home we supped our tea and had a serious discussion about how much that would mean each item would cost us to make, and how much we might be able to sell it for. We didn't include the costs of our time, because after all, this was supposed to be about us spending fun time together as well, right?

So, our first product, the beaded tree decoration. We had wire. We had beads (hundreds of them). We had a model to copy, I mean to be inspired by. We had tools. How hard could it be? Plenty hard, is the answer. The two things we were missing turned out to be patience, and dexterity. Oh, OK then, H had plenty of dexterity. I seemed to grow additional thumbs each time I picked up the wire cutters. Every so often, as one of us threw the distorted wire shape across the table and beads pinged into our teacups, the other would say "But the main thing is we're spending fun time together, right?" So, anyway, we may have swallowed a number of beads along the way as we slugged back the tea, but here are some of the results. The total hours needed to hand-craft each one remains a state secret.

Well, we seem to have mastered that now, don't we? Definitely time to take our perfectionist skills onto the next project. H left with a list of things she would make before our next meeting, and I had a list of my own long enough to cool my ardour. I knew I would be the one in February who had to admit she hadn't done her homework, so thought I should get a headstart.

I thought perhaps the beads would be less troublesome if they were combined with a needle and thread, so boldly chose felt brooches as the next challenge. Last Christmas, I received the first felt brooch I've ever seen that I liked, so I'm a relatively new convert to the idea as a "good thing":

A whole new vista of writing procrastination activity opens itself before me...

They're words, but not as we know them

2009-01-19T16:23:00.002Z

A frustrated post about the language barrier encountered over the past two weeks when I began working with a highly specialised team of management consultants. Let me say here and now they are doubtless exceptionally good at their jobs. If only we could understand each other. The poor person I speak to most on the telephone endures half-hour calls in which I (grasping great clumps of my hair in exasperation) repeatedly ask "but what do you actually MEAN?" and watch myself becoming more and more difficult to deal with. I hope she had a really really good weekend because I think she was as exhausted as me once we had finally thrashed out some sort of shared meaning.

I don't mean to imply that their business language is purely funny, because in commerical environments it's probably the best way to get the job done (heaven help us all), but sometimes I can't read it without laughing out loud. Here are a few examples that deserve to be shared:

the importance of generating positivism
realising the benefits and disbenefits
the list has been inputted into an assessment tool
the list has been developed and socialised with Sarah (I took it out for cocktails)

So although I confess to pedantry beyond the call of duty, and an insane need to be right all the time, I don't think I'm alone in being unsure whether to laugh or cry about that lot. I get dozens of these phrases every day now. I could write a calendar, management jargon per day, with little cartoons of puzzled people.

Losing it

2009-01-15T23:11:00.003Z

As it turns out, the further I fall behind with my work, the more I lose my grip on the rest of my life. Until now, I had believed that it was the chaos in my life that made me fall behind with writing, but I am radically revising this opinion. Because even when the study looks like someone threw all the papers up into the air (OK, I did, I couldn't find an invoice) and the fridge is empty and the ironing tower has hurled itself to the floor in despair, if I ignore it all and sit down and write, then afterwards everything else seems manageable too.

So perhaps I've just been looking at everything the wrong way round, and the way to a more peaceful me who has some hope of reaching 40 without grinding her teeth down to nubs, is simply to stay centred on the task in hand. Of course many things are centred without being calm:

This, much to my amusement, was Hurricane Darby. Allegedly not my namesake, but I like to think of it as somehow connected nonetheless. Hopefully not the destructive capacity though.

New resolution for tomorrow: try not to get so distracted by the flies on the windscreen that I steer into a wall. Because that's how the past week could fairly be described: so caught up in problems at work that really weren't worth the aggravation, that everything else suffered (including the patient friends who had to listen to me whining - thanks guys, will try not to do it again).

All I have to do tomorrow apart from write/study is remember to take the car in to have a new handbrake fitted. Apparently the existing ones have been recalled as they weren't so hot at holding cars steady when parked on a slope. You'd think that was one of the core things they checked, but clearly not thoroughly enough. It's been two weeks since I learned that, and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a completely flat parking space - just in case. And now I won't need to bother any more, so another life skill becomes obsolete just when I was getting better at it. Like skipping and video recorders.

Wanderings

2009-01-07T15:13:00.007Z

Yesterday was a London day. After considerable planning, I squeezed on five layers to catch the coach at 6-something, and was just about warm enough. I had a blanket in my rucksack just in case (after the NYE coach temperatures). I think that officially makes me an OAP, to carry a blanket on public transport. Anyway, after the trauma of leaving the duvet and central heating and venturing out in -6 to start my journey, I was rewarded by the sunrise. Sorry for the smeary picture - the Oxford Tube needs to clean their windows!

After the business part of the day was over, I spent some time mooching through stationery and books in a nearby shop (as if I ever buy anything else). I was sorely tempted by some notebooks with the Ladybird Learn to Read covers on them, but somehow resisted. It was piercingly cold, but bright and gorgeous, and after all, I had my five layers, so I decided to walk for a while. I like wandering round places without a map, especially London where you know you will never be far from a bus stop or a tube station when your feet get sore. It seemed to be an afternoon of churches. I was very pleased to discover St Mary by Bow (the church with the Bow bell? Who knows?) I was even more pleased to learn it's placed opposite two streets named Milk Lane and Honey Lane, which pleased me a great deal.

I saw a sign for the Guildhall nearby, so I went to have a look at that. It was very splendid in the sun. I was too restless to check out its Art Gallery, but the window displays were marvellous - another time.

I did spot a rarity though - a police telephone box. It looked a bit small to bear any relation to the tardis, but I've never quite grasped that spatial warping thing.

I ended up by St Paul's cathedral. First of all, let me show you the perfectly lovely church squashed between two office buildings, that sits directly opposite St Paul's. I photographed it because I felt sorry for it - I'm sure it gets 1% of the photographic interest of its neighbour across the road.

And then the mighty thing itself. It is pretty imposing.

Again, I didn't feel like sitting and being quiet - and also feared if I stopped moving I would realise how cold I was really - so I contented myself with looking at the outside. And getting swiftly on a bus.

It's cold outside

2009-01-04T16:40:00.007Z

But that's why God made wheat-bags, right? And nectar cards, for scraping my windscreen while I still can't find my proper implement. It was -4 degrees yesterday when I stumbled out of the house wrapped up like the michelin man, to go and collect my sister for a fun-filled day of touring the furniture and DIY stores of Oxford. I could probably never vist one again and die happy, but I doubt I'll be that lucky.

Today though, apart from a brief foray out for church this morning, has been spent cosied up inside at the computer. I'm not sure how to describe S, who is the person with whom I swap writing work at the end of every month, and then get insightful constructive feedback during long telephone conversations while I just tell her I love everything about her own work. I feel there should be a proper noun for her, one with a capitalisation, but I can't think of it. Anyway, she's worth her weight in chocolate, and I had her latest installment a few days ago. Which has finally kicked me into writing lots more words myself so that I can return the favour. I had hoped by the end of the year to have at least 40,000 words under my belt. Unfortunately, I have to confess to failing. But I have 30,000 and very good intentions (spurred on by an uncomfortable conscience) to make up lots of the shortfall this week.

Yes, this is going to be transformed from bare plain sheets, into those miraculously covered with words. OK, maybe not all of it will be this week...

Addicted...

2009-01-02T11:44:00.004Z

... to the game our family tried this christmas - tantrix. So addicted, I ended up buying a second set yesterday so that I can play it at my house as well. This is mainly due to my traditional pathological stubborness, as I can NOT solve one of the puzzles I'm trying. There are ten tiles to use up. I have to make a pyramid with the blue line running unbroken through every tile, and all the other colours matching up. As you can see, 9/10 is the best I can manage. Grrrrrr.

I've left it downstairs to delude myself that by coming up here I will get some work done.

For the first year in a long time I have struggled to come up with any NYE resolutions. To put a positive spin on this, I have decided this is perhaps because actually, I'm pretty happy. Not complacent (heaven forfend) but I'm grateful for my life the way it is, broadly speaking. Still, I feel I should make an effort and make some pledges that will have been left to eat dust by the side of the road by the 14th January, so here goes:

1. I will make sure I see my friends more often, even if that means booking them all in the diary for the year in advance. Spontaneity? Hmm, because that worked so well last year didn't it?
2. I will, of course, finish the novel to my satisfaction and start sending it out to the eagerly awaiting world...
3. Oh, consider this one as a compendium of all the ones everyone else is making around the world: be kinder, eat less, exercise more, give more to charity, moan less, keep the bathroom cleaner, etc etc (fill in your own as applicable).

Happy 2009!

1907!

2008-12-30T11:11:00.003Z

No, not the year of my birth (although the rate of bodily deterioration over this christmas period may beg to differ). It is instead the number of words logged yesterday against THE PROJECT. Phew! I was beginning to fear I had lost the discipline forever. You take a few days (weeks) off sick, get addicted to E4 afternoon TV (damn you Lorelai Gilmore) and whoops, there you are a month behind and squeaking with panic.

Anyway, "all" I need to do is repeat yesterday's effort again today, and I'll have 30,000 words to send to my supervisor. I don't really want to do that, as I think it's all a bit fragile for intensive feedback right now. Also she's going to ask me some searching but justified questions about when on earth I'm going to get on with my research, but I know deep deep deep down it's for the best. Blah.

And the incentive to get things done and dusted today is that tomorrow is: party-time. *Whoop* ...until I remember that naturally I have nothing to wear, of course not. Just a wardrobe full of clothes that make me feel like a pig in a frock. My sister and I oink sadly at each other after our christmas food-fest. But that turkey and ham pie was worth it. Almost. If only I'd known it was going to make me look like I swallowed a turkey whole. The party was going to be fancy-dress. I could have sprayed myself yellow and gone as Homer Simpson. Sadly, it's no longer a themed-party, so no excuses. Perhaps the trick is to arrive so late that none of the other guests can see straight?

cardboard houses

2008-12-26T23:57:00.007Z

I've been longing to post about the things I've made for my little sister for christmas and birthday (she's a boxing day baby) and now I finally can without fear of ruining the surprise. We had to really scrunch up our faces (which is the outward sign that I'm thinking really really hard) before we managed to think of something to match the 2007 efforts. That year we managed a present beginning with each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, because she was born on the 26th. Q and J were particular nightmares, although there are shopkeepers in Oxford I got to know well, after they experienced me bursting in wild-eyed and begging them for something that began with X. We laugh about it now, albeit hollowly.

This year, the sister's moving into her first house of her own, which has been the usual combination of solicitors, contracts, negotiations and missing certificates of window installation (don't ask). In any case, what she really needs for christmas is, well, everything, for the house. Like something to sit on, sleep on, cook with… So as she has her own specific (but excellent) taste, we thought vouchers for the stores she talks about most would be the most sensible option. But who wants to open a couple of envelopes while everyone else has a heap of presents in front of them? No fun at all. Although arguably the better option longer term as you don't end up with 5 pairs of santa socks and some novelty flavoured tea. Whoever decided to flavour tea should be summarily shot. Where was I?

The theme was really inescapable: house. And then, like all the worst ideas, it came to me in a flash and I made the mistake of telling people about it so I couldn't back out once I'd thought it through - I would make a cardboard doll's house, and hide the vouchers inside the furnishings. The more I told people about it, the more it started to sound like an enrichment programme for captive animals, you know the kind where they make it harder for them to find their food. Moving on.

So, you don't want to start too early with these things do you? I'd been collecting cardboard boxes, egg boxes, bubble wrap, scraps of material and tin foil for weeks. I felt like an old woman who'd been through the war and kept her kitchen drawers full of things that might come in useful like empty matchboxes. Actually, an empty matchbox would have been great as a chest of drawers, damn it. Anyway, on Monday 22, construction began, and by the evening I had a roll of parcel tape hanging from my hair, and the initial shape was in place. Beautiful, isn't it? And so what if the roof doesn't quite fit? As my boss said, it makes it more realistic - my boss has just moved house.

the initial construction phase complete...

I worked away with paints, glue, foil, and double-sided tape (my new favourite thing in the whole wide world) through a double-bill of Nicholas Cage films, and by one o'clock in the morning of christmas eve, I had finished most of the furniture. I had to re-do the front door number because I thought her new place was number 2, but it turned out to be number 1.

After a sleep closely resembling coma, I had almost 12 hours left for the "finishing touches". Hmm. Like painting the roof, ensuring the vouchers were securely in place and couldn't get lost in transportation, and considering whether it was too late to wallpaper (answer: yes but didn't stop me wasting time thinking about it). Here are some room shots:

bathroom with tin foil shower - God bless that double-sided tape...

It doesn't really show up in this picture, but I "panelled" the bath in lolly sticks, which I was very proud of because her real new bath has wood panels. The sink is made from an egg carton lid.

bedroom with stripey "duvet cover"

The bed is a sleigh-style bed, my sister's long-term goal. The pillow is material wrapped round the large size bubble wrap. I was going to make a tonne of little black t-shirts to hang in the wardrobe to make it truly realistic, but time and the will to live escaped me.

kitchen-diner - just like in my own first house, it doesn't do to lean heavily on anything...

The sink is made from the base of a mince pie and some tin foil. The table has lolly stick legs, and everything else is from the ubiquitous cardboard. And a LOT of tape.

two particular triumphs - vouchers hidden in the "mirror" and under the rug

Covering the sofa took me ages, and is very patchwork, but I was better at it by the time I got to the armchair. Unfortunately it doesn't show up very well in this picture, but my real trimph was making a cross-trainer out of cotton buds, cardboard, tin foil and lolly sticks. It's my masterpiece. And I won't hear a word against it.

When I was teasing my sister on Tuesday evening about the glitter and glue and egg boxes that were going into her Christmas present, watching her face fall further and further into despair, she eventually burst out "Couldn't you just get me something I'd like? Like vouchers?" Her delight on Christmas day was heavily laced with relief, understandably.

Happy Christmas to everyone missing someone

2008-12-24T19:57:00.003Z

If ever I need a reminder whose story I'm writing, or who I'm doing pretty much anything for...

Happy christmas honey. We all miss you.

Homespun

2008-12-24T12:15:00.005Z

I went to see my brilliant friend on Monday evening "for a cup of tea". Five hours, many mince pies and a hearty meal later, I swung out of the door still talking over my shoulder at her, still not making any sense, but still making each other laugh.

Among the many involved threads of conversation that evening, we decided on our 2009 plan for world domination: monthly sessions of crafting and chat. Quite clearly, these will become monthly sessions of take-away and dvds with a ball of wool sitting pristine in the middle of the room. By the end of the year, that wool is going to stink of chips and sweet and sour sauce, and still have its paper seal. But heck, we can dream.

We dreamed of industrious hours together, perhaps dressed in gingham aprons (we're feeling a bit pre-feminist right now, I'm not sure how Doris Day crept into this fantasy but never mind), diligently stock-piling beautiful gems of skill and labour, ready to make our fortunes at christmas fairs and offload the rest as christmas presents onto luckless relatives. Any such relatives reading this need have no fear - the chances are pretty good that we're going to spend 11 months talking, 2 weeks making and re-making the same woolly off-centre item with increasing rage and panic, and then try to sell it in splendid isolation in the middle of a vast trestle table that cost more to rent than all the materials put together. All good.

our first creation

With a lot of tooth grinding and cursing as we knocked all the beads onto the wooden floor and heard them bounce happily into every corner, between the two of us we managed one "prototype" christmas tree decoration on Monday. We're calling it a prototype because it's wonky, and so we're now claiming it was always "just to give us the idea" of the sheer scope of our possibilities. Of course it was. I've still hung it from my candle holder though. It's going to drive my sister nuts - she's very absolute about the need for symmetry.

I leave you with this thought: is it perhaps a sign that one is too old to be an angel in a natitivity play when your mascara is smudged? Hmmm.

The Temptation of the Bookshelves

2008-12-21T00:23:00.005Z

OK, so here's a question that's not too difficult to answer: is it any surprise at all that, thanks to the generous array of book tokens and gifts that came my way in November, I haven't read any more of the obligatory Henry James (or Thomas Mann for that matter) when I have the below waiting for me as well?

Twinkling at me from the bookshelf are:

Hilary Mantel: Learning to Talk
Alice Munro: Heartship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage
A L Kennedy: Everything You Need
Richard Yates: A Special Providence (and) Disturbing the Peace
Kate Muir: West Coast
Tim Parks: Dreams of Rivers and Seas
Magnus Mills: The Restraint of Beasts (and) The Scheme for Full Employment
Emily Barr: The Sisterhood
Haruki Marukami: The Elephant Vanishes
Maggie O'Farrell: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

And none of these are getting a look in at the moment, since I have the incomparable John Irving on the go (in the form of 'Until I Find You').

Ho hum. It'll all catch up with me in the end. I am seriously considering trying to get hold of an audio book copy of Wings of the Dove as I've noticed that Henry James literally gives me toothache - I caught myself the other day clenching my teeth while I forced through the pages. Now that can't be good for me.

My only reportable instance of actually doing an "ought" before a "want" this week came with the christmas decorations - I at least made myself clean the house before I allowed myself to decorate it. This year I have a clipped box tree instead of a cut pine for christmas, and come January it's going to be planted in the front garden, where it will look nearly as pretty as it does now:

OK, well tomorrow is another day - one on which I will be helping my sister pack up her things ready to move into her first house of her own, and then in the evening dressing up as an angel and singing in a nativity play. It's been a while since I've done that! I'll get someone to take a picture before my halo is knocked off...

Visual Aids

2008-12-10T12:39:00.005Z

This is how I would like my words to be flowing:

And this is what it actually feels like:

The first picture is from Osney Lock, snapped on Sunday when I was walking back from church. I am too lazy to walk usually, or I'm heading on somewhere with a time limit, like some kind person is cooking me lunch, but on this occasion I had nowhere to get to except the city centre shops, and they were going to be just as heaving no matter what time I reached them. The water was even higher when I walked past again yesterday after a day of rain on Monday. I can't take my eyes off the apparently still smooth body of water that fills the space right against the edge, and then tips abruptly into the frothing energy. The surface tension must be incredible. Quite clearly, I know nothing about Physics, but it's hypnotising to watch.

Anyway, veering back towards the point: the stalled wordcount. Any second now I'm going to get an innocent email from my supervisor asking me where my submission is, and even more scarily, how my other research is coming along. I don't think I have to spell out the answers to those two questions. I need to make time. In my mind this involves test tubes and bubbling flasks of yellow toxic liquids, and safety goggles and mad hair. In reality, it perhaps involves a little less novel reading of my choice, and a considerable amount more of just getting on with it. Bother. Naturally this is also a time when employed work has become more busy, I had promised to do some extra teaching, and there's a family wedding. And that only takes me through until next Monday. But there's no such thing as a perfect time to write, I need to mutter this constantly. And perhaps one day I will convince myself it's true.

Christingles and Creativity

2008-12-04T11:16:00.003Z

Well, have I learned something since yesterday! It turns out every part of a christingle has a meaning after all. I spent yesterday afternoon squirting myself in the eye with orange juice and pricking my fingers on cocktails sticks, but the results were great:

I can now reveal that the orange symbolises the world, the red ribbon round it is for the blood of Christ, the candle is the light of God coming into the world (as we thought), and if you squint you can see there are 4 cocktail sticks poking out of the orange with little sweets on them, and these are the good things God has for us, namely the fruits of the Spirit.

We had a lovely time of community together last night, lighting the candles and trying not to get wax on Mark and Kat's nice clean floor (or white furniture, for that matter). I love these times when you know that all around the world people participate in the same ritual, and every time we do it, it draws more people in to ask questions and to find out more.

I came home and have to confess that instead of getting back down to those wordcounts, sadly neglected of late, I carried on crafting as there is much to be created before christmas if everyone's going to get a present. I could do with a few elves. I really want to post some pictures of what I'm making, but I know who reads this and it could blow the surprises.

So instead I'll show you one of my other moments of creative genius from last year, which was when I decided I wanted magnetic walls. Fortunately something (the thought of an estate agent's raised eyebrow and lowered estimate price probably) prevented me from using the special iron filled magnetic paint all over the wall as I'd wanted, so instead I made a small border of magnetic design, which is now covered with whatever I feel like sticking up there. No pins, no blue-tack, no mess:

I love my wall. And now I must stop thinking about the heap of things to do involving glue and glitter and wool and fleece and ... seriously, stop thinking about it and do some work!

Advent

2008-12-02T12:40:00.003Z

Well, here I am two days into December, and nowhere near as far on as I'd hoped when I started this whole madness in October. I don't know why I'm surprised. Or even if I am - perhaps just disappointed.

I'm having a bit of a low day after a traumatic morning at the dentist (who couldn't have been sweeter, but still wielded tools I don't like to see coming towards my face). At the moment I'm still mostly numb. Which I may use as the title of my autobiography. But I suspect that state can't last forever. The dentist made a big deal of telling me I can't have any alcohol today. I must have had that look in my eye again, the "where is my cooking brandy, I must neck it down now!" Really must try and get a handle on that...

But putting aside personal moans for a very short moment, we are now in the season of advent. A time of expectancy, and of waiting with hope. My own hopeful wait was fulfilled this morning when my parents-in-law delivered as always, and their advent-calendar-by-post service came through after all. When there was nothing on the mat yesterday, I naturally concluded they didn't love me any more. Or they were busy or something. My mum, I should point out hastily, had already supplied me with an advent calendar, and I have made my own arrangements with an advent candle. I hope the latter will shift my focus momentarily OFF the chocolate piece of the day, and ON to some time of reflection each day.

Tomorrow our house group is going to have a small christingle gathering. I heard someone else on the radio talking about these, where you have the whole place totally dark, and then you light one candle. And then you use that candle to light one for the person next to you, and it moves slowly round the room until it's filled with light. And that's the spread of the love of God for his people, in our dark world. I love that.

For some reason that utterly escapes me, the passing round of candles seems to have them stuck into oranges, which are otherwise decorated with little sticking out parts. If there is a symbolism in the oranges, I don't know about it. We plan to also give everyone in the group four small tealights, and ask them to light one each week to pray for our neighbours and our city. I have been almost totally self-absorbed recently, and I think it's high time I turned my heart outwards. That said, I also need to get back to work, candle lit before me, and the beautiful voice of Mary Maclean singing from the CD player.

Acorns and Promises

2008-11-29T10:11:00.005Z

My wonderful friend Jo and I often (but not as often as we'd like) go on retreat together to a real refuge of a place in Sussex. As soon as we arrive there, the smell of woodsmoke, the frost on the berries in the garden, the big squashy sofas round the fireplaces, the views over the lake through the mullioned bedroom windows, the sunlight reflecting off the dark wooden tables in the library - and the smell of the amazing food! - we just take a big deep breath in and whatever we've left behind seems so much less troubling. It's high time we went again.

But I'm writing today about the last time we went together. We sometimes spend part of the time in silence (a huge challenge for both of us, which descended into giggles on the day there were green beans for lunch and they squeaked on our teeth). It makes the times we get together to chat and talk through whatever's on our minds that much more concentrated and special. On one winter day the last time, we were wrapped up in jumpers and coats and sitting on a little bench that perches on a jetty out into the lake. It feels a bit rickety, but it's fine once you've got yourself settled, and you agree to both sit down and stand up at the same time to avoid tipping. There are reeds round the left hand side, and trees to the right, and in front the reflections in the water from the trees on the opposite bank.

Jo and I were quiet for a few minutes, watching the birds scud across the water and the wind move across the surface of the reeds and disturb new ripples on the lake. Jo knew the names of the birds too, because she's brilliant that way. At the time we made this retreat, we were both feeling stuck in our lives. There was nothing terrible about how things were, but nothing fabulous either, nothing that made us think "Yes, this is why I'm here, this is how I can be fully alive." And we were both more than a little scared of doing anything about it.

I can't quite remember how or why the next thing happened, but we left the jetty to scuff about in the earth and leaves under the trees. There were lots of acorn shells, and a few complete acorns. We happened to both pick one up and turn to give it to each other. These became the "acorns of promise" - promises to each other and ourselves that we would do something we found scary to take our lives out of the comfortable and into ... who knows? At the time we were half-joking, but I still have that dried up acorn in my jewellery dish.

I'm really impressed with what we've both done since then, but we're both getting a little tired and worn down, and have had our own particular personal and health trials recently. We're in need of some restoration and another retreat together, but for now Jo, beautiful Jo, here is the wreath I've hung on my front door for Christmas - it's made of acorns.

Reflections

2008-11-28T12:10:00.003Z

Today for the first time in a very long time I am fasting. My church has been supporting this idea for the past year of so, setting up regular dates to fast that include times to meet together and pray, but I've always ducked out of them. I haven't even made up excuses, I've just avoided the whole issue. So why now?

Well, as always, it takes a crisis to get my attention. And my crisis is happening in my mouth. I have an appointment for drastic tooth action on Tuesday, and I need a miracle to avoid needing the treatment. Let me say right here and now that I have seen healing before, in other people, and I have no doubt that it's possible. I can't help feel that there's a symbolic issue at work here, that in some way I'm being blocked from expressing myself in the most physical of ways.

I am deeply deeply grateful for the support of my friends, who have committed themselves to supporting me in the most surprisingly personal ways. Some are joining the fast, and many many more are praying. It only takes a whisper to reach God, and I am so thankful that so many people are murmuring with me.

I got up this morning and made myself a cup of rooibos tea (I am allowing all non-alcoholic clear liquids), and then thought, now what? So I opened the door to the garden, I lit a candle, and I sat down with my hands wrapped around my mug and looked at the flame.

I could hear the birds in the garden, singing and calling to each other even though all the branches are now bare and the soil is exposed to winter. I had thought all the birds had migrated, or hunkered down somewhere warm as there was nothing left to eat in the garden. And then it came to me:

"The life was always there, you just couldn't see it."

And that's the thought I'm going to meditate on today. It has so much to teach me, about how I look at the time I've been given here, what I choose to focus on, and how to grow.