Home Thoughts Weekly

Undressing for bed the other night, I glanced down and was horrified to see a dark, raised mole on my right breast which had apparently sprung up during the day (the mole that is, not my breast. That’s been there for some time). Had I survived Death by Jacuzzi just to face a new challenge? Collapsing on the bed in a heap, I was taken aback when my mole fell off and landed in my lap. Closer inspection revealed it to be the last remnants of a bar of chocolate I’d been scoffing on the sofa whilst lolling around in a slovenly sort of way in front of the telly watching some old nonsense. I nearly ate it – well, it was chocolate, wasn’t it? – but then decided to leave it since I knew where it had been. *** Everything at Hotel H is done on a shoestring; that was the choice we made when we left the southeast to start a new life in the country. We’ve been here two years now and it has been the most glorious time so we feel very fortunate. But when my faithful old Siemens phone began to d...

There was so much I was going to do once I’d sent off ‘Fighting The Tide’; books and poetry to read, films to watch, some aimless pottering. Well, I’ve been good at the pottering but I’m beginning to feel quite rudderless without the project that has taken up a good part of the last eighteen months so I’m going to take Zinnia’s advice and try some short story writing whilst I plan the next book. In the meantime my half-marathon preparation has suffered due to the last lap of FTT, trips to the south and flu. I’ve kept up some cross training and some swimming, thanks to the small hotel nearby, and after my swim I like to bliss out in the Jacuzzi. Alas, last Friday, as Purple Cooers will know, my Jacuzzi experience wasn’t quite so relaxing. It was all going fine until I tried to get out and lost my footing. Seeing the world go into slow motion and a several hard edges approaching I reached out, grabbed a rail and ended up swinging into said hard surfaces with surprising force. When T...

Imagine hosting a six-day party/activity holiday and you will have some idea of how I feel today. In short, dear reader, I am absolutely EXHAUSTED. I feel the way babies do when they’re too worn out to sleep and just grizzle but, hey, the sun is shining and apart from Scary Welsh Class tonight (no, Chris, don’t think about it or you’ll start grizzling too) I have nothing to do. Oops, rewind, Tom has just told me that he has boat plans for this afternoon… that means yours truly now has boat plans for this afternoon. I thought the free time was too good to be true. Anyway, the hectic activity of the last six days has been brought about by the arrival of the Fat Boys and WAGs at Hotel H. The Fat Boys are Tom’s equivalent of my Ace Gang. They’re a bunch of his former colleagues who used to regularly roam ridiculously long stretches of the country in stupidly small amounts of time on mountain bikes. Unlike the lean, Lycra-clad cyclists who do the Tour de France, the Fat Boys are a str...