Categories

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. 

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.

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.

We celebrated First Story with a gala evening at Holland Park school. Four of the children who were involved in producing anthologies last year read. To my immense pride Edward, my protégé was among the four; his laid back ease on stage, and his heartfelt, honest story made me proud and also sad that his parents couldn’t be there and nor was anyone from the school present. He was among his peers, many of whom he had met and befriended on the Arvon Course which was his prize from First Story as one of the most promising voices in my writing group, but he was not witnessed by anyone from his own life, and that was a real shame.

This is a last ditch procrastination moment – Friday afternoon in the studio, the sun is shining hard, the purple Indian bedspread that is my curtain is casting dappled shade, and I have the horrible spectre of a printer at home that I haven’t connected to my computer.

Mission of the month has been buying and setting it up – and the buying was painful enough – down in the darker reaches of PC world where all the computer equipment looked like bigger or smaller toasters and it was hard to get excited about making one my own.

Drinking tea and eating chocolate biscuits on the shingle as the sun went down on the Norfolk coast last week I was hard pushed to believe the summer was all over. Now I am in my miniscule studio over looking 8 lines of train track and wedged between Paddington station and the West Way and I am so glad of the memories.

Right, this is the beginning of something new. My arms have become fuzzy with the anxiety of it, but there is no escape, I must jump in because today my website is going live.

My associations with going live are making my arms fuzzy as on some level I think I am going to get an electric shock. And I am looking round for something to hold onto, as if a seismic shift will occur and my house will tip over into a hole like the protagonist’s house in A.M Homes’s brilliant and funny novel “This book Will Save Your Life”.

But actually, all going live really means is that I have committed to writing this blog and I will update it often. Weekly seems good to me. Sometimes it will be about my work, sometimes it will not, it will be about the NOTORIOUS P.U.G.

There is a dead mole on the lawn. Or I thought it was on the lawn but it suddenly erupted on the carpet in my study, flicked there by a nifty bit of work from the NOTORIOUS P.U.G.
He was the cutest creature ever seen on earth – the pug not the mole – and could cut a swathe through Portobello Road like Moses in the red sea with people bowing, throwing palm fronts, kissing him etc. Now though he has become a teenager and things are changing.