New year, new beginnings – and one of my favourite forms of fresh start is a brand new diary.
For most of my life, I have kept a diary, jotting down the most memorable events of the day. Then in 2010, I swapped to blogging about once a week as my preferred vehicle for musing about my life.
In my column for July 2024’s Hawkesbury Parish News, I’m feeling nostalgic…
After picking up a book by Joyce Grenfell called Nanny Says, I started reminiscing about the memorable things my grandmother used to say.
Decluttering features in my next novel, Death at the Little Curiosity Shop, the start of my new cosy mystery trilogy – and it’s been front of mind lately for other reasons too, as I explain in my June column for the Tetbury Advertiser.
***You’ll find a sneak preview of Death at the Little Curiosity Shop – and a link to preorder it – at the foot of this post. ***
On return from a few days in Suffolk, where I’ve been helping my 93-year-old aunt declutter her house, my cottage seems terribly crowded. Having lived here for 33 years, I’ve allowed far too much stuff to accumulate.
Conscientious about recycling things like packaging and kitchen waste, I’m not so hot at disposing of items of purely sentimental value. I hoard amusing scribbles by my toddler daughter who has just turned 21. Ornaments from my childhood home lie tucked away in a storage box. A long-empty bottle of my late grandmother’s perfume lurks in my dressing-table drawer.
A post about my eternal quest for the right work-life balance
When self-employed and working from home, it’s too easy to go to either of two extremes. You work flat out, failing to differentiate between weekdays and weekends, daytime and evening, or you drift about doing housework as a means of procrastination.
When I first started working from home, seven years before COVID made it commonplace, an old friend said to me:
How do you manage to get any work done? I’d be forever putting the laundry on or doing the ironing.
The fact that I gave up ironing around the same time – I possess neither an iron nor an ironing board – indicates which camp I belong to, as does the dust on my bookshelves.
This week, as the year reaches its halfway point, I’m taking stock of how I spend my time.
