Welcome To Your Renaissance

The sky is a creamy blue and the rooves dusted with icing sugar. And in here, in the flocked walls of home, I have been quite certain that the whole world has fled to warmer shores and forgot to tell me, so isolated do I feel. But isolation isn’t necessarily a terrible thing is it? Though we want to bind alone to lonesome, they are different and it is quite possible to regard isolation as a gift: a temporary state we might...

The lane is shut while men in yellow jackets do things at the end of it. And oh what bliss it is to have it to ourselves without the thundering lorries or, as one neighbour described it, the “whump” of tractors going about their clattery business at five in the morning. And yet, because I am a contrary cow, I miss the noise. At night I plunder through muddled dreams into startled alertness, spooked by the silence, and then lie...

Perhaps it is a sign of the times, this nostalgia for moments long gone I am experiencing. A reaction to the deep uncertainty I currently feel. Claustrophobia as a symptom of Covid. The longing to scream out loud my suppressed panic and run like Forrest Gump until I have managed to run away so completely, I am refreshed and ready to start again. 

Perhaps we are all feeling it. For I am noticing now how deep other people's pain is ...

A few weeks ago a new family moved into the old cottage across the lane. A typical family with two young girls and a happy little cockapoo, they moved in with an eyesore of a trampoline, a boat, and a boy-racer car so noisy it has become my morning alarm clock.

Over the years we have lived here more than five families have come and gone and I have never really taken much notice until recently when I couldn't help but see the oldest daughter...

I've been trying to puzzle something out. I have joined groups and scoured hashtags in my efforts to understand, and honestly, I’m still bewildered because it seems to me that the women of the internet have suddenly developed a deep-rooted need not to seek true authenticity, but instead to align themselves into tribes labelled with zeitgesty words that rapidly lose all meaning once those drawn to allegiance prove themselves to have no...

Well now, one minute you are climbing out the shower minding your own business and the next the bathmat has scarpered and you have nearly split yourself in two with one leg in the bath and the other halfway across the bathroom with only a cold sweat and a screeching pain in the knee to show for it.

Readers, I have done myself a damage and honestly damaging yourself in the age of Covid is no hobble in the park because once you are carted off to...

I got myself in the most terrible tizz this weekend. Just inside my head, you understand? I wasn’t throwing plates, trolling strangers on social media or evicting the family so I could have a hissy fit in the peace of an empty house, but I did experience a kind of muddly, outraged brain that wouldn’t let me sleep and became terribly cross and rather ludicrously outspoken about all manner of things I would do far...

It is time. I really think it maybe time. I don’t think I want it to be, but I do believe it may be time to pick up the strings of our lives. Not the life that went before, because I hope that I, at least, have learned that there were parts of the life that went before that I do not want back now, but at the very least the resuming of all that we are now allowed to do, with caution, instead of fear.

Yes. I think it may be time to...

When the house becomes the extent of your world, however temporary it may be, it is terribly easy to narrow your focus to the minutiae of domesticity. To become obsessed with perfecting the smallest of things and in the process to quite forget what really matters in this world.

At the beginning of quarantine I was heavily focused on keeping my family alive: on stuffing us full of nutritious goodness and making sure our mental...

And just like that, it feels like its over when we know deep within our bones that it is not. But there has been a shift. A shift towards the normality that right in the midst of the virus we told each other we would not welcome again. That our “new normality” suited us, suited society, suited earth. That we would no longer tolerate what went before, virus or no virus.

And yet, and yet, and yet. Here we are. Shops opening...

I keep waking up with my arms folded across my chest, like a stern, disappointed headmistress and for a moment I forget that the world is standing on its head and wonder how many more minutes I can steal in bed before I have to persuade the child into his uniform and send him out into the world all over again.

And then I remember. And it is with both grief and relief that I burrow further into cosy nest and realise that today, like...

It is possible that over the years I have become less truthful than I once was. Less willing to spill my woes on to the virtual page for fear of not fulfilling my imaginary duty as purveyor of floral, dotty dreams. As If I have now convinced myself that you want nothing more from me than inspiration, where once there was a kind of female mutilation of self that was cathartic for us all.

In pandemic, as in wartime, I have convinced...

One of the things I believe to be most true about this most peculiar and trying times of our lives, is that in the future we will look back in gratitude on the sense of community around us, the teeny joys that made up the long days at home and how we chose to use the time that stretched before us.

I want, I think, to be able to say that I contributed to that sense of community, that I filled my families day with silly, heartfelt treats...

If truth be told, this virus has rendered me a teeny bit bonkers, for though I am doing my best to appear unruffled, it is quite possible my family are experiencing me in quite a way they have never had to deal with before. At once the Mother Hen and she of the mini-meltdown.

I have become preposterously organised. Fussing and worrying out loud. Turning out meals worthy of a Michelin star from store cupboard basics and harassing my...

While it would be terribly easy to work oneself into the most terrible tizzy over a pandemic like this one, hysteria never helped anyone and so it is our role as she in charge of all things domestic, to be like swans – as calm and unruffled as can be as we float through troubled waters, even if it means our legs are going like clappers beyond the surface.

Though this may be asking a lot of us as we manage our own anxiety, it is my...

I had a thought today. Or perhaps more a joining of the dots than a thought? A kind of awakening where before there was only drowsy acceptance that sleepwalking through our own lives is the only possibility. It struck me you see that each and very day we are bargaining with the promise of tomorrow and that I for one am striking up something of a rubbish deal.

What if, I thought, we have to EARN our lives? Every smile, every joyful...