Welcome To Your Renaissance

The oddest start to the year. I rather feel as though I must offer myself another New Years Eve on January 31st. A personal ritual instead of the obligation to be fun as we all stand together singing Auld Lang Syne in an empty lane - this little village apparently not familiar with traditions so ingrained in my childhood.

I do so hate trying to be fun. I'm utterly rubbish at it. The strain paints a grimace over what must be good cheer. But fun ...

A glorious morning. We go for a walk hand in hand, kicking leaves and talking the troubles of the world over. There is a peace about us now. The kind of peace that only comes with quiet resolution and I suppose a sort of emotional revolution. A settling in that feels astonishing after the turbulence of deep-rooted anxiety about who he was and who we were destined to be.

We go home and the business of the day resumes. I follow my own daily to-do ...

Hmm now let’s see: a beautiful Indian Summer’s day? Check. An abundance of vegetables harvested from our teeny little vegetable patch? Check. Naughty nobody’s cat still invading the garden and delivering dead mousey presents? Check. Bathroom tap still being temperamental? Check. No sign of the lost garlic press? Check. Covid related anxiety through the roof now it has been announced that our area and all surrounding regions are back in some sembl...

She arrived suddenly didn’t she? Autumn. Shrugging her way into our lives with all her stylish nonchalance and turning her nose up at the very idea of letting Summer tint the last of the green tomatoes into anything remotely edible.

It is chilly in the mornings now. Although the doors on to the garden are still flung open as we swirl our Earl Grey with a cinnamon stick, even the wasps seem to have given up and bumble about slowly, banging their ...

There is something rather special about the last few weeks of August that has me lost in a kind of what I can only describe as delighted melancholy. A sadness for a Summer that wasn’t as sunny as it might have been. A tiny bit of self-berating for all that I didn’t do, the carrots that didn’t grow, the walks I didn’t take. And an underlying sense that none of it matters, because our most beloved friend, Lady Autumn is on her way.

All hail Lady A...

It has been raining. Endless deluges polka dotted by sudden, astonishing bright spells when I shove my feet into flip-flops and run out into the garden to see what delight and damage the rain has wreaked. And there they are: strawberries and so many tomato plants. Celery coming up a storm and cucumbers still a leafy mystery. A bed full of unidentified salad leaves apparently beloved of our resident wood-pigeons who cannot leave them alone, and...

Can someone press the off switch please? I swear its been raining for longer than I care to remember and frankly I’m in the mood for Spring. Oh wouldn’t Spring be lovely right now? I simply cannot wait until I can sip my first cup of the tea while I say good morning to all the little buds forcing their way through the soil. I do so like a little garden-wandering in my nightie.

But today the sky is falling down. The lawn is mushy and the rain ...

My washing machine heard a rumour, just before Christmas, that washing machines of its ilk were setting themselves on fire and so being an obedient little thing, she duly did as she was told and two days after the machines were recalled she started to smoulder, apparently in sheer worry about being left out of the fire-starting posse. #FOMO

And so I find myself knee deep in laundry because all though the powers that be are insisting that said...

On the brink of a new decade my head seems filled with the muchiness of all I want to say. To do. To encourage. And to be. Excitement balanced by the relieved melancholy so familiar to many in the days after Christmas. That it is over, thank heaven, and oh woe is me that it is over for another year!

It has been a lovely Christmas. Rich in books, and films and my boys. In the peace of the days after the day, I have followed my own instructions...