This year’s Bidding Season has been particularly manic, and for the last two weeks I’ve been working simultaneously on two bids. Either of them could easily be a full-time job, so juggling delivering both of them in parallel, whilst maintaining a semblance of working part-time, has been somewhat challenging, and I’ve built up a fair […]
I spent today back at Eastnor Pottery, trying to bury the stresses of the ongoing Bidding Season in the clay. One of the things I particularly enjoy about throwing pots is that you have to focus very much on the here and now, and lose yourself in concentrating on hand-eye coordination. If you try to […]
I remember when Bridget Jones’s Diary first started running as a column in The Independent newspaper; it was done very straight at first, and it only gradually became apparent that it was a spoof. It was loosely based on the story of Pride and Prejudice, and came out at about the same time that the […]
The weather has changed – the mornings are cold and foggy, and I only just got the outside of the house painted before a series of rainy days. It’s clearly autumn now, and the mice have noticed that too, and moved back indoors into my loft after a summer spent living outdoors somewhere in the […]
The Potato Harvest has come round again. It’s that time of year when a succession of tractors with trailers overloaded with potatoes crawls past my house. They start at dawn, and go past about every ten minutes or so until well after sunset. They don’t seem able to do more than 20mph down the hill, […]
Like many couples, Christopher and I divided the household chores up between us. There were jobs that he did, and ones that I did. Some of those were explicitly discussed and agreed upon – e.g. he did the cooking, and I did the laundry. Others just sort of happened without either of us really thinking […]
I’m really hoping that the weather stays dry this week, because I’ve got Rob, my trusty decorator, here all week doing an emergency paint job on my soffit boards and barge boards. A few months ago, I asked the gardener to hack back at the ivy that was covering the wall outside my bedroom window. […]
I’ve still got a stinking cold, and I’m finding the current Bidding Season at work very tiring, so I could really do with a run of early nights. But there was a show on at Malvern Theatre last night that I was determined to get to see, totally regardless of how grotty I was feeling. […]
One unanticipated side-effect from my trip to Germany is that I’ve come down with an absolutely stinking cold. It started on Saturday evening, and bearing in mind the standard incubation period for such things, I’m convinced that I picked it up either at the conference or on the plane home. I was meant to be […]
