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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.

Today it is in part a prayer to St Anthony, the patron saint of finding things – or is it of Lost Causes? Anyway, I need him to help me find my car keys which are somewhere in the garden unless the pug has made off with them. I have searched tirelessly and been stung by nettles, unearthed a tiny toad and a nest of abandoned speckled eggs but to no avail. I have experimented with seeing where lost things go by throwing tea spoons into the grass to see if I can find them. The weird thing is that I can’t unless I am standing right next to them. The grass is just long enough to hide everything that falls into it, and it’s growing longer by the day. We can’t cut it in case the keys are chewed up by the mower, so the clock is on us to find them before the garden becomes a nine foot tall jungle.

The other area of urgency is that I can’t drive anywhere. Oddly, considering I live four miles from the nearest shop, I don’t really care. In the garden we have a lot of weeds its true, but also at least three hundred potatoes, thirty onions and god knows how many carrots. Long before these run out my darling boyfriend will come bearing keys, cars and I hope a juicy fillet steak as I have eaten nothing but vegetables since he departed to the work face some days ago.

And in the mean time I plan to take the Coastal hopper bus to visit a friend. The pug and I will bicycle to the bus stop. This all seemed very idyllic and like living life according to Enid Blyton until I looked up the bus route and discovered the nearest point I can catch it is 8 miles away. Can NOTORIOUS go 8 miles in a bag? He will have to as there is no bike basket.

Isolation is splendid as long as not too much is expected of the isolatee. I have now been given another mission – to find white contact lenses for my 18 year old son to wear on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe next week. He is in Oedipus, it is going to be brilliant, (see below for link to venue and preview) but the wardrobe department at the wool merchant theatre where he is rehearsing in France is woefully lacking in white eyeball material. It is my job as a mother to provide it. Help. I think I’ll put in a double order with St Anthony.

Oedipus at the Edinburgh Festival
C the Festival

Kill your father, marry your mother. Murder and incest in Sophocles' timeless story of a tortured man, stunningly modernised by Bedales in an explosive production ending in humiliation, mutilation and the naked exposure of the human psyche. www.woolmerchanttheatre.com