I decided quite a while ago I don’t really DO the New Year thing.   I like the fireworks, but I’m not really into crowds, kissing strangers and Aul Lang Syne.  And anyway, it’s just man made numbers, a hook on which to hang the passage of time, and get our taxes paid regularly. (Sorry, this sounds like a cue for a grumpy old woman alert!)  We decided quite a while ago to turn our year around at the Winter Solstice on the 21st of December, a more satisfactory arrangement in tune with the natural order, and with the promise of longer days ahead.  This is celebrated with close friends with much jollity, silliness, good food and wine.   So my new year has already started.

However, having said that, there is much to be said for a review of the past year when looking at the last page of the diary and seeing the unsullied fresh pages of 2010.   If I have a resolution it is to procrastinate less, and to be more creative.  (If you’ve heard this one before, don’t all shout at once, I’ll be deafened!)

The big project for the next few weeks is a humdinger – a NEW STUDIO!  I have a little shed which was great before I overflowed out of it  into every room of the house.  Now I have to find somewhere to store it’s contents (it has turned into a glorified cupboard) so it can be dismantled and transported to a new home leaving space for – the NEW STUDIO!  So much hangs on this because I have been struggling for so long with not having all my materials and equipment easily accessible.  by the time I’ve tracked down every thing I need to realise an idea, I’ve run out of time, or energy or inspiration.  I’ll also gain space in the house, and it might (might) just stay a little tidier …well I can dream…

I’m off now, to pack a box or two, but I shall leave you with a little puzzle.  This is  my Christmas present from my dear friend Kit, who is also my creative partner in crime.  What do you suppose it is?  Do leave me your guesses…

…and in the meantime I hope that 2010 brings you everything you could wish for, see you in the next decade!

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…from me and from Higgins, who has decided that snow is FUN!

We’ll be back very soon, have a wonderful Christmas….

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A couple of years ago, at the end of a fairly protracted renovation project on our house, we had a house fire. Only a little fire, but with vast amounts of smoke from all the electrical wiring involved, which permeated the entire house with thick black oily smoke. Only the week before I had been taken off to hospital in an ambulance with appendicitis so I and Henry the cat were safely recuperating at my mother’s house on the other side  the village at the time of the fire. In my rather fragile state, the state of our house and possessions was enough to cope with, I really didn’t need to hear too much detail about the actual event. Unfortunately, my mother’s gardener at the time was a retained fireman, a garrulous man who delighted in the opportunity to lean on his spade and hold forth. Thus cornered one day he regaled me with the exciting tale of how he had broken down our front door with an axe, and with non existant visibility had gone in wearing breathing apparatus, and crawled around on the bedroom floor looking for my body! These images haunted me for months, and I struggled with settling back into our home for quite some time because of them.

All this is to set the scene so that you can imagine how I felt at quarter to five this morning, with Tim in the middle of the North Sea, waking up from a deep sleep and hearing the crackling of electric wiring shorting. Having established it was coming from the main electrical feed into the house, what to do? I did NOT want a posse of firefighters with axes, even if they were potential calender material. I found the emergency electricity number, and pressed 1 for ‘Dangerous Situations’ and talked to Lee. His answer to ‘Is it likely to cause a fire was “Yes, and no”‘ Hmm, reassuring. His solution was to turn off everything at the mains, and wait for a man to call. We waited, me, Henry and Higgins, in the candlelight. I don’t know what they thought, Higgins had a dog chew so probably not a lot. I thought about all those disaster movies where someone looks at a cupboard and says ‘I wonder what’s making that funny noi…KERBOOOOM!’

Have you ever tried casting on a sock by candlelight? It’s pretty unsuccessful, but it stops you thinking about disaster movies. Eventually dawn broke and I could blow out the candles. The emergency man turned up four hours later, he would have been useful if I had gone KERBOOOM! He replaced an enormous fuse, and apologised for my trouble. I wish I could get my fuse replaced, I have completely fizzled out…

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I suppose when you’re only pocket size…

A whole herd of sheep…

…is a bit of an undertaking.  So much better to wait until they have been reduced to a managable size…

and then round them all up.

Normal service will be resumed…eventually …

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Soggy.  Dark.  Windy.  It’s the first day of November.  But I found these in the garden!  A line of poetry has been running through my head,

‘…if Winter comes can Spring be far behind?’

Thanks to the wonders of the internet I found it’s from ‘Ode to the West Wind’  by Shelley.  Thank you Percy, those words are going to keep me going for the next few months!

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I’ve been feeling a little bogged down over the past few days.  Lots to do, but no brain or motivation. Actually flitting about in Blogland makes it worse. Everybody elses little world seem full flowers and colour, homes straight out of ‘Country Living’.  Happy children in homemade clothes eat vegetable soup straight from the kitchen garden, while mum produces patchwork quilts and hand knitted socks and fairy cakes,  photographs it all AND writes about it.

Now I know that it’s the nature of beast.  No one is going to photograph those days when the washing mashine overflows, the teenager throws a tantrum, the house is filled with the smell of burning toast and the puppy has done a poo behind the sofa…(that last a  regular occurance in our house!) We create a fantasy version of our own lives for the consumpion of our readers,  just in the way any magazine editor portrays a ‘look’ for publication.  An acquaintance who’s ‘lovely country home’ was featured in a well know publication a few months ago said ‘It’s wonderful! They come in, and rearrange all your stuff, yes, but they CLEAN! Our house has never been so clean! And they do amazing things with the lighting!’  So even the house owners don’t live in houses like the ones in magazines!

So we make our own reality, and sometimes, when the north wind( heavily laced with farmyard manure) is howling across the vast field at the back of our house and darkness falls earlier and earlier, and your head is stuffed up with the first cold of the season and, Oh NO! there’s ANOTHER poo behind the sofa, it gets a bit hard.  Hard to remember that you ‘live  in the heart of the lovely Norfolk countryside, a stones throw from the Broads, a short drive from the beautiful windswept Norfolk coastline’.  That your little cottage in it’s pretty garden  is filled with books and crafts and colourful china which suitable displayed and lit, would portray a parallel existence.

I’m blaming the cold for all this…what I need is a rocket up my bum, back to Planet Penny!

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