Home Thoughts Weekly

All those months trying to sell our previous house seem like a different age now. Home, in the end, is where the heart is, but as physical places go, this feels like somewhere to settle. We make bread and bake cakes, there’s homemade marmalade in the kitchen cupboards and we’re gradually sorting out the garden. A year ago we discovered that seedlings don’t like to go in the ground too early here – the poor runner beans suffered especially in the cold, but now we’ve begun planting out in earnest. I was very excited this week (not sure what my younger self would say about that) to find trays of poor, thirsty, neglected bedding plants at B&Q for 10-50p per tray. We went a bit mad and spent three pounds on what should have been thirty-three pounds worth of plants; not all of them plants I’d normally choose, but we’ve rescued them and they’ll make a lovely splash of colour. Marigolds to zap the carrot fly. Bargain bedding plants. The hedge is busting out all ov...

Hurray! With a lot of help from the bride-to-be, I’ve managed to find the makings of an outfit for my daughter’s wedding.   Basically the secret seems to be to try everything on, something I’m not very keen to do by myself but which was much more fun with Lily to help.   Along the way we rejected The Intestine Dress (a dusky pink shade which I love but which drains me of all colour, in a tube design which was probably meant for someone seven foot tall) several Frumps R Us numbers (just because you are the mother of the bride doesn’t mean that you’re ready to look as, only Milla  could put it, like a sofa cover) and a couple of Trying Too Hard dresses (just because you can, doesn’t mean you should). In the end I bought a shift dress and jacket in a sea-green colour (which, by amazing coincidence, MiL tells me is just the colour she’s been looking at) that seems to hit the right note between mumsy at one end and mutton-dressed-as-lamb at the other....

S o much for, ‘Oh, I’m never ill!’ I studied enough Greek Lit at school to know all about hubris, the sin of pride, but lately all that boasting to myself about my robust health has come back to bite me. The latest attempt to evict the bug squatting inside my sinuses has seen me leaving the GP with seven varieties of medication and less five phials of blood. ‘This may leave a slight bruise,’ says the kindly nurse, removing the syringe.   ‘Oh no, I never bruise,’ I assure her, opening my big mouth again. Sure enough, I wake up the next morning with an arm like an old banana; all black, purple and yellow.  Tom and I go for a walk to the beach to blow the cobwebs away. On the way home, we attract lots of evil-looking flies, but it’s all right, because, as Dad and I always used to say to each other, confident that our rhesus negative blood repelled all blood-sucking insects, I never get bitten. Naturally, by the time I get in, my right thigh is sprouting a ...

Bugs and bad weather have resulted in a certain amount of cabin fever here at Hotel H, but the lovely month of May has arrived so it's time to get out and about.   We live in a secluded wooded valley that slopes down to the sea and late this afternoon when the rain had eased, we followed the path through the woods ... A purple haze of violets... ... and bluebells A waterfall cascading into the stream One bridge I'm not crossing! The path changes from mud to sand and suddenly there's the sea. A strange creature on the beach. Then it's time to watch the waves before heading home.

Many thanks to my charming and entertaining guest, Toni Sands, for visiting Home Thoughts Weekly. Actually, you had quite a long stay, Toni… I hope you managed to find the coffee and biscuits whilst you were here.  The reason I’ve been such a poor hostess is that my normally rude health took a battering from the most debilitating sinus infection and industrial-strength antibiotics, both of which have left me feeling pretty wrung out. Home Thoughts? Mainly, ‘Ooooh, I feel soooo ill.' It’s lucky, then , that new Twitter friend @voula  invited me to join in a game for writers, published and unpublished. The instructions for Lucky 7 are: Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript  Go to line 7  Post on your blog the next 7 lines, or sentences, as they are – no cheating  Tag 7 other authors to do the same  ‘Current manuscript ’, for me at the moment, could apply to the several levains fermenting on my desktop, including a novella and my t...

By way of a very refreshing change, I’m delighted to welcome as my guest this week fellow Carmarthen RNA member Toni Sands , an accomplished short story writer, whose debut e-novel Orchid Pink  has recently been published by Xcite Books… oo-er! Here’s Toni sharing her thoughts about writing romantic fiction and why you don’t necessarily need to wear six-inch stilettos and black velvet to write erotica! My mother regularly borrowed Mills and Boon romances from the library. For me, an inquisitive pre-teen, these books sparked an interest in love and relationships that still hooks me. But after my father found me engrossed in a sizzling story about a landlady and her lodger, I had to make do with the Chalet School books for a while. My own writing progressed from boarding school tales to romance and gentle supernatural stories, some of which appeared in women’s magazines. Years later, at the first writers’ group I joined, the organiser told me he recognised a sensuous quality in ...

Look at these beauties!    When my daughters were little, I used to collect odds and ends of china. Some of it was given to me and some, like a pair of very beautiful ’thirties vegetable tureens, I had to save very hard for. Then life took a difficult turn and I had to part with some of my treasures and I lost heart in my collection.  When Tom and I set up home, I was about to put what remained of my china safely in the back of a cupboard when Tom said, ‘why don’t we just use it?’ Use it? Once I’d got over the shock, I realised what an utter joy it is to use beautiful things rather than look at them. Yes, sometimes they get broken, but at least they’ve had a life rather sitting unused where no one ever sees them. It was for that reason, at the weekend, that MiL presented me with this incredibly pretty tea set that’s been stored in her loft for too long. There’s six of everything, except for a missing cup and, since I also have a bit of a tea fetish - esp...