It’s my birthday! Hurrah! I think

Children love having birthdays. I quite enjoyed them myself until I got to about 30, then I went through a period of getting a bit grumpy about the whole birthday thing. But these days I don’t mind them at all. So far today: Woke up with migraine that had been brewing up all night –Read more ⟶

So this is what happens when I sit down to write

A free evening, and it’s a couple of hours until Downton Abbey (I’ll start watching it at 9, pause it at 9.01 so it starts recording, then start watching it at 9.15 and I can fast forward thru all the ad breaks – sorted!) So I think ‘I’ll dig out some old poem and giveRead more ⟶

Summer holiday – some beautiful places we’ve been

The video of the bees going about their buzzi-ness, the manor house and the waterlilies were taken at Great Chalfield in Wiltshire, an absolutely idyllic National Trust property (hard to find and blissfully free of hordes of visitors). The pic of the large pot was taken in the Orangery at Dyrham Park. The other twoRead more ⟶

Now all roads lead to France

My book group friends aren’t really into poetry. At all. But someone suggested we read Matthew Hollis’s biography of the last years of Edward Thomas, ‘Now all roads lead to France.’ So I’ve brought the book on holiday with me to Wales and am engrossing myself in the detail of the life of a poetRead more ⟶