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Blog has been gathering dust for a while but now its time to spring clean it. Spring cleaning is the old fashioned version of make over.In the days when our mothers and grandmothers  used to spring clean, our personal version would not have involved nipping and tucking our faces  in a gruesome and ultimately misguided attempt to look young, rather we would  sew a few new buttons onto our clothes. Where now people throw out all their old furniture and fill their houses with vibrating leather sofas ( a special section of the furniture world dear to my heart as you will see from a previous blog), or buy a television as big as the wall, they used to wash the curtains, move the furniture and get busy with the carpet sweeper. The carpet sweeper! I think it should be brought back and heralded as the eco tool for the future. I wonder if James Dyson has one in the offing.

I am not sure why, and I fear it is related to getting older, but  I have begun to look at churches with deepening fascination. Just before Christmas I was in St Paul's Cathedral to hear my godson sing Evensong with the Worcester College choir. This was one of my finest moments as a godmother, sitting in the candle lit evening, absorbing the monumental space that is St Paul's, listening to the silence and the singing. My godson is a probationer and looked like a tiny candle, his face vivid, above his gown, concentration profound as he sang angelically in the choir stalls.  

Walking out afterwards, craning at the dome, the glitter of gold leaf from hundreds of feet above us was astonishing and exotic, and in its utter magnificence it reminded me of Christmas a few years previously when we were in Venice and went to the Basilica in St Mark's Square for midnight mass on Christmas Eve, and also of a service I attended at Westminster Abbey for Sir John Betjeman who has a stone of  commemoration in Poet's Corner there . These occasions stand out for me as I was lucky enough to experience these vast Cathedrals as part of the congregation rather than as a shuffling tourist.

This time of year is the most demented of all and I have been full of Christmas spirit for the most ridiculous amount of time already, and have been having to fuel it with little more than the odd mince pie and a lot of sniffing of tangerines  while waiting for the actual day to dawn.

I am not sure what it is about this Christmas that has got me so excited, though there are some vital components, most central of which is the new sofa from DFS which arrived yesterday and upon which I am nestling to write. I like to think that, thanks to the sleekness of the Loft sofa, combined with glamorous  red and white striped cushions from Cabbages and Roses,  the drawing room of our small 1930s house is now a hymn to gracious living. It truly would be had the NOTORIOUS P U G  not just charged in like a miniature bull running in the streets of Pamplona and launched himself and his mud ridden paws all over the pale beauty of the Loft. 

Just winding down my brain after the Graceland quiz last night... Set by the pulchritudinous Liza Campbell, it was an opportunity for formalised humiliation unequalled since school. My only hope was that because she and I share the delectable Studio 69 at Great Western Studios, some of my mumblings would have come through and some of her questions might have been lying about in our mess as we moved studios and so I would have known a few answers. Huh.

The watershed came a week ago on Friday. Or the dam burst, or any wet analogy involving chaos but also change. Whatever. On Friday I realised I had to start my book all over again. I have been writing it since April. I did a lot of cursing, a bit of weeping, foot stamping and gnashing of terrible teeth like the Wild Things (I wonder what the movie will be like Where the wild things are) and took to my bed in the manner of Barbara Cartland. She wrote her books from a pink powder puff boudoir, or dictated them, but she was definitely in bed. I too was definitely in bed as I began to write the book again. Hey ho, the only way out of the hole is to write myself a ladder up to the top and to climb out and get back on my feet.