Home Thoughts Weekly

Friday: West Wales. With relatives in and out on hospital on both sides there are pressing reasons for a trip to the south. Mil and Dil are missing Tom but Mil isn’t up to travelling at the moment and Ma’s been sounding a bit wheezy on the phone so I’d like to make sure she’s all right too. A couple of phone calls later we’re collecting things together for an early start the next day. Saturday: Epsom We’re at my Auntie Joanie and Uncle Sid’s for a quick visit and it occurs to me that their modest living room is one of the constants in my life, a container of so many memories. I’ve ‘twisted’ here as a very little girl amongst a sea of adult legs at one family party, drank my first Snowball at another and spent years aching to be like my glamorous and sophisticated older cousins. It’s a merry, vibrant room with the satisfying patina of long, deeply entwined lives. There are small plastic tubs filled with dolly mixtures and liquorice allsorts and other little treats on one table, a h...

Saturday 14 June Tom and I have now recovered from the Great Wormery Evacuation. My brain has managed to wipe out the memory of the terrible smell, so I no longer have to plug my nose with Vick to erase it, and the noxious fumes from the compost have died down sufficiently for us to be able to venture out into the garden again. After all the excitement I find myself a bit fidgety. Whilst I am extremely happy not to be doing my previous job, I did used to enjoy walking through the town in my lunch break, watching all the faces, seeing what was new and absorbing different influences. It’s quite easy to settle in a groove here and sometimes you have to push yourself a bit to get out it. Tom has some paintings to collect from Art Matters in Tenby, which offers us the chance of an excursion, a gallery to view and a chance to catch up with the lovely Margaret and John who run it. Margaret shows me an autobiographical short story she has written which leads us into a discussion about the...

Thank you for your concern about the dark clouds over Hotel H, they involve people who are very dear to me and that’s all I can say but your kindness is much appreciated. As well as fears for others, we’ve been beset by general worries; slow progress on the boat engine has put Tom in the doldrums whilst I keep looking at the Great Green Monster in the garden, aka, the oil tank, wondering how much more of our budget it’s going to devour. With chores building up after our run of visitors I decided that sitting around worrying wasn’t doing me any good so I’d start tackling the backlog, beginning with the garden. Inspired by Wizzard’s composting blog,(http://wizzardsfirstrule.blogspot.com/ - why can't I get the script prompt to work?) I took the plunge and decided to get to grips with the wormery. Now a wormery is fine and dandy at the beginning; it arrives pristine and shiny with a little bag of bedding material and your very own compost worms. You simply put the lot together and ...

'In Her Element', Honno's featured book for June. May’s seen Hotel H heaving; we’ve had the Fat Boys (five days), Lily and Boyf (long weekend), Rose and New Man (Five days. Very nice, Rose. You can keep him. Yes, Lily, Rusty is lovely too) and Stepson One and Girlf (six days). It’s wonderful to see everyone but I was very glad to have the chance of an outing last week. When I received an invitation from the lovely people at Honno asking me to join them at the Hay Festival to celebrate 21 years of publishing, I was thrilled but a bit apprehensive about my credentials for mixing with the hip and happening. As a Hay novice, the event was smaller than I’d anticipated, even, at first, a tad disappointing; I wandered round in a bit of daze worrying that I wasn’t ‘getting’ it. But once I’d parked myself on a bench to absorb the atmosphere I started to see beyond the clichés, the Boden catalogue families, and designer wellies, organic chocolate and worthy ice creams. Look a ...

It was a Saturday morning and in the mid May rain, that BT Broadband left our house and didn't return again. At first we tried to shrug it off; it happens all the time. It comes back when the sun comes out, or sheep roll off the line. The junction boxes warmed and dried but Broadband came there none. 'We'll have to ring BT!' you cried, 'Good luck,' I said. 'Have fun!' We made new friends across the globe, performed all kinds of tests, until they said they'd send a man, 'Oh yes,' we cried, 'that's best.' Flaxen-haired and pierced of lip, he came with his computer, 'I fixed the outside line but now there's trouble with your router.' Our BT friends played hard to get and made us sign new contracts, 'Please connect me soon,' I begged. 'Just get me back in contact!' Five working days I waited, my brand new hub was due. The parcel company disagreed, 'We've never heard of you!' At BT it was Ground...

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...