Greetings from Kent where the weather can’t make its mind up and whose constant flounces are wreaking havoc on my migraines, which are very much like a piece of seaweed dangling from a string outside the Met Office in terms of their efficiency at reading weather patterns. Today the pressure is low, which is causing my brow to furrow, my teeth to ache and my mood to sulk under a cloud.

I’ve been mostly in Leicester of late. Here is the news from the shire.

My complaint to the GP surgery saw my dad getting his Covid jab at home within twelve hours of receipt, despite them telling my mum he was not on any list for home visits, they didn’t have any vaccines left and they just didn’t like the look of his face (this last reason may be fictional, who can say?). Even though they were there with the kit etc, they declined to vaccinate my mum because they are Computer says NO arseholes. They have followed this up with a letter that in summary says: ‘Sorry not Sorry,’ and which covers them in case I ever decide to sue. I took mum to get her vaccination in the end.

My dad is mostly stable at the moment although not flourishing. My mum on the other hand, is very much feeling the effects of being seventy-nine with her own health issues whilst being largely ignored by the NHS and related bodies because all the care is aimed at my dad and his welfare. I read a report that stated she was fine because the two visits a day that she pays for to give her the chance to get dressed and undressed constitute ‘a break from her caring responsibilities.’ You would think they would be slightly interested in keeping her healthy given that she is the one thing standing between my dad and a hefty care commitment, but it appears not.

She and I set forth on Monday to see a private consultant about the fact that she is prone to lurching about like a sailor on shore leave and nearly knocked herself out on the kitchen door frame last time I was home. The last time a GP got involved they diagnosed labyrinthitis. We were highly sceptical, as was the consultant when we put it to him. It is a shame that we felt compelled to pay for private care, but given the constraints we are operating under and the need for answers under time pressure it was the best situation for us.

The consultant was infinitely patient, very thorough and demonstrated a remarkable ability to do joined up thinking and to look at mum as a whole person instead of the holder of one symptom that has to be discussed in under five minutes and which will be diagnosed using the cheapest option for the NHS first. We are aware how lucky we are to be able to afford this kind of care because it isn’t cheap and there are more appointments ahead of us to reach a diagnosis, but given how hard we have been fighting the NHS recently it was a joy to put the cudgels down for half an hour.

I spent a further three days locked in negotiations with the insurance company attempting to switch the car insurance over from my dad’s name to my mum’s. I have also filled out the forms informing the DVLA that my dad will no longer be driving. I spent a morning being sold a wet room by a man with a permatan and tasselled loafers who left without a sale but nearly bought a book of Victorian road maps from my mum. He wasn’t the only one with a cutthroat instinct for a sale. Instead of paying £18000 for a wet room the size of an airing cupboard we ordered some more flannels and a bigger washing up bowl.

I spent a morning visiting a care home that offers respite care which we were hoping may be suitable for my dad but which turned out to have a distinctly Stepford Wives vibe with a terrible CQC rating and an eerie lack of old people. They had hoped that I hadn’t read the CQC report beforehand, but they were mistaken. Even if I hadn’t read it I wouldn’t be inclined to leave him in a place where they attempted to sell me the joys of their own gymnasium even after I told them that my dad was half paralysed and a wheelchair user. She still pointed at the gleaming row of exercise bikes as if she had pulled them out of a hat and expected a round of applause. I’d have been more impressed if I hadn’t just read that they had been reported for leaving distraught patients sitting in their own waste and giving them out of date medication.

Gingey attempting to flirt with Ron.

In more cheerful news, Dave the rogue cat who broke in on my dad attempting to use the commode has now learned how to use the cat flap and is a regular interloper. He has been joined by a leggy teenager called Gingey (in honour of Georgia Nicholson) who is as thick as mince, which he demonstrated by trying to jump in the lounge window while it was shut. He is desperate to become friends with Ron who eschews him with a firm paw.

Ron not being into being flirted with, scowling under my unconscious father.

My mum had taken my dad to sit in the front garden one afternoon and Ron was looking after him by sitting under the wheelchair. Gingey came along and spent about half an hour circumnavigating the garden and darting towards Ron, who was immune to all entreaties. There were a few tense moments where Gingey decided to try and get under the wheelchair with Ron. Dad was asleep and blissfully unaware above the action but I suspect he may have had a heart attack had it all kicked off under his bum, so Gingey had to be headed off at the pass.

Tilly came round one evening and we had a belated birthday tea. She had been in Venice at the biennale for the actual date but as none of us are ever entirely sure what day it is anyway, we partied like it was 1999 and had large slices of Colin the Caterpillar cake, gallons of tea and bunches of peonies and sweet William to celebrate.

She is teaching all her patients the joys of shrinky dinks which they love even more than laminating, which has been their chief pleasure to date. She is still embroiled in the perils of dating and has given the heave ho to a nice man who worked at Travis Perkins, which we all think is a shame, not because he is nice but because he had good discount at Travis Perkins. She still believes in love more than 15% off building materials, which shows a beautiful optimism.

She has also been listening to too many true crime podcasts again and has been having nightmares about people living in her attic. She believed the attic people had stolen her pillows when she got back from Venice. Thankfully it turned out she forgot she had put them on the spare bed. I also pointed out that her attic doesn’t have a ladder so if there are attic people she will definitely hear them dropping to their death from the loft hatch down the stairwell before any more pillows can be purloined.

Back at home we have had our own macabre moment as the annoying man with a fleet of barking spaniels next door but one fell out of his sun lounge and died after his head failed to bounce off the edge of his over engineered koi pond. The street has been agog and awash with rumours. Our neighbour came to tell us that another neighbour had said that he had committed suicide. Jason said that it seemed an extremely risky way to do it given that he could have just ended up damp and covered in weed. I laughed and now we are never going to be invited to the Neighbourhood Watch.

It is one of those situations which is tragic but also weirdly farcical. He was a particularly unpleasant man, which means I am leaning more towards the farcical than the tragic. The whole thing is playing out like an Alan Bennett play rather than an episode of The Wire. My family are all riveted and keep ringing for updates on the man who will now and forever be referred to as Dead Gary. RIP.

We had an early celebration for Tallulah’s birthday at the weekend. Oscar, Dani and Tallulah came but Tilly was busy being a rabbit in her friend’s performance art piece. She said: ‘It’s about grief and her obsession with working in corner shops but with a Donnie Darko vibe. The mask is very uncomfortable so it should be easy to be a bit sinister.’ True facts.

It was a quiet weekend for the non rabbit contingent. I cooked spaghetti bolognese as instructed by the soon to be birthday girl. More Colin the Caterpillar was consumed (I should buy shares). Everyone but me watched The Substance because they love horror and I love sitting in the library reading my book.

On Sunday we dug out the rusty fire pit that the previous owners had abandoned in our garden and filled it with loads of wood which they had also abandoned, then we set it on fire. Oscar and I had a magnificent few hours getting extremely sooty while everyone else went for a nap. We left a pile of wood in anticipation of next weekend when everyone is coming back to celebrate father’s day. Tilly is an enthusiastic pyromaniac and her rabbit duties will be done so she will be delighted there is more fire in the offing.

Let’s end with these excellent door handles I saw in Folkestone.

What I’m Reading:

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer which I think was recommended by and rightly so. It’s a perfect summer read and reminded me quite a bit of Elizabeth von Arnim in the best way.

Daisy’s novel All Grown Up is now out and is another perfect summer read. It’s a modern companion piece to Little Women and was one of my favourite reads of last year. It’s gorgeous and fills your heart to bursting.

What I’m Watching:

Episode six of Rivals. Oh my fucking God. Just crazy brilliant. I cannot wait to talk about it with someone, anyone. Lord. I watched it a week ago and I’ve thought about it every day since. Chapeau.

I watched the Kylie documentary. I had forgotten how hot she was in the Michael Hutchence phase. Sorry Jason Donovan but you can 100% tell that the sex with Hutchence was off the charts compared to whatever was going on in the Donovan phase.

I have been wrangling parents from afar for the last few weeks. There has been wet room shenanigans, which involved me having to call the builders of my parents’ house to find out if a particular wall is load bearing. When I got through to the lady in customer care and asked my question, she announced that she couldn’t tell me if the wall was load bearing or not because of GDPR. I asked her what she thought I was going to do with the information to which there was a small pause in which I decided to be kind and left the thoughts of David Shrigley and his steamroller in my head and not in my mouth.

I was less kind to the GP surgery where my parents and anyone else with five minutes to spare have been trying to organise getting them a Covid jab for over six weeks now. After we had run out of people to call, ask and plead with I lost my temper and complained to the practice manager. This in itself took a long time because God forbid that the surgery provide any way to contact them that doesn’t involve AI and hanging up on you if you so much as sniff another human being. Apparently my complaint is being dealt with. It had better be.

Oscar has been going through some things lately and as a result my attention at home has been fixated on sad teens rather than bereft pensioners. I have driven hundreds of miles in the last week taking him to auditions and moving him into student accommodation for his last term.

Last Friday he needed to be in Oxford for an audition. The estimated three hour journey took five. Thankfully I like to be early and plan for lunch, which meant we did get there on time, even though there was no time for lunch. The audition took four hours so I scooted off to explore my old stomping ground.

I failed my Masters at Oxford Brookes in the mid-Nineties. It was a turbulent time. Not only did I fail my masters, I broke off an engagement a week before the wedding and met the man who would eventually become my first husband and father to my girls. There are a lot of ghosts there and I bumped into a fair few of them, even though I was not in Oxford proper. The audition was about three miles outside Woodstock, near Blenheim Palace, so I slunk off to Woodstock to see what was happening.

What was happening was that it had changed very little in the thirty years since I was last there. I parked my car, rounded the corner onto the high street and came face to face with the place I spent my first wedding night. It’s a hotel called The Bear, it was and probably still is very old school and fancy. Our stay was a wedding present from my husband’s uncle. As with many things related to my first marriage not everything was as it seemed, because the next day when we checked out we were presented with the bill, which the uncle had forgotten to pay. We didn’t have the money for such a fancy establishment and six months of financial aggravation followed which dampened the mood somewhat. I know we never paid. I wonder if his uncle finally did? I didn’t go in and check in case they recognised me and whipped out an invoice.

The first of many duck harassment incidents.

Woodstock is very beautiful and well worth a visit if it isn’t haunted by your past wildness. I killed a couple of hours poking round charity shops, buying books and eating a very good cardamom bun. I was going to sit on a bench in the sunshine and read my book but gangs of feral ducks roam the streets and gather if you so much as sound like you’re opening a sandwich, so I drove back to the drama school and had a nap before driving the boy home again.

At the beginning of this week I girded my loins and set off to move him from Elephant and Castle to Camberwell. These two places are not very far away from each other but the route between them is very stressful when your car is full of stuff, you can’t see out the back window and your teenage son is not very good at defining exactly what it is you should ‘look out’ for. It is also very stressful when the building administrator has forgotten to come in to work and administer the building, leaving you with a confused cleaner doing her best to sort you out, but who then puts you in the wrong room, which you only find out the following day.

I got him into ‘a’ room, which we then promptly abandoned and wandered into Camberwell proper to find lunch. After decent Japanese food and a large ice cream each we were feeling much more the thing.

We greeted the cat ruler of Camberwell outside Lidl, where I did the mum needful by filling his cupboards. I also bought him some clothes that don’t look like a dog had chewed them and put money in his bank account before I headed home again.

He got offered a place at the last two drama schools he applied for, including Oxford, which made all the aggravation worthwhile and has meant I can dial down the worry a few notches for now.

At home we have been getting to grips with some house things. We bought two, cheap cupboards from eBay and installed them in the utility room. They’re not gorgeous and if you breathe on them too hard they will disintegrate, but they make the room workable and get rid of bigger problems elsewhere.

I have emptied my studio space of all the things that got flung in there when the garage leaked and was full of mice. I also emptied out four million woodlice and some spiders. I took down a lot of my drawings that were on the walls because they kept blowing off every time you opened a window. We have fitted a blind, which means I can work in there without cooking, which means it is usable for the first time since we moved in. I am still figuring out where everything goes so picture will follow when I’m happier with the space.

We bought some plants and tools and made a tentative start on the garden. It will be a slow process, largely because after a couple of hours my hip clicked out of place and I spent several days limping and visiting the osteopath. The universe keeps on reminding me how much I hate gardening and I will keep ignoring it.

We have also bought a stair runner and all the fixings for phase one of getting rid of the cheap grey carpet which is so thin the gripper rod pushes through and lacerates your toes. Now we are resting on our laurels because we need to figure out how to actually fit it. Despite the lack of carpet action proper, it felt good to tick a few things off the list of home improvements.

In less errand based news, I went for a delightful walk on Camber Sands one evening with my friend Claire, her husband and her two, daft dogs. We had a good dinner at The Owl pub afterwards to reward our efforts. All their seafood is provided by local fishermen. I had wild sea bass with mussels and it was great.

I also managed to sneak a day off to go and see Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National with Oscar and one of my oldest friends. Aidan Turner and Lesley Manville were exceptional and it was staged really thoughtfully. I was sad that they had decided against Eighteenth Century costume because who wouldn’t want to see Aidan Turner in knee breeches, but he still put on a good smoulder in a well fitting tux. He’s had a lot of practice recently what with Rivals season two back on Disney.

What I’m Reading:

I read Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. Perfect. No notes.

I listened to the audiobook of Ten Steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby which was perfect too.

I also read My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland which was very thought provoking on the subject of writing memoir and gave me a lot to think about.

What I’m Watching:

Rivals - nuff said.

I’ve been to see the parents since my last newsletter. No sign of Dave in recent days but I hope he’s just regrouping and packing his suitcases for the big move. There have been all kinds of medical fun and games and a bit of light furniture shifting, which is very much the vibe these days. I had only been in the house ten minutes when someone arrived to pick up a mattress and I found myself staggering down the front path with a stranger, trying to sandwich a double mattress into the back of a Toyota Yaris.

It feels very much like a war of attrition in terms of my dad’s care right now. One thing rights itself and another goes wrong. The pressure sores on his legs healed but now he has one somewhere else, so it’s back to the district nurse. His bowel was flushing everything through too fast, so now he’s on fibre which means he is back to being constipated again. His blood pressure was so low last week that we were having trouble keeping him awake. Now we have to watch him like a hawk because they have drastically reduced his blood pressure medication, so things may go the other way and cause a stroke.

He’s under so many care teams it’s impossible to keep track. Last Tuesday morning I opened the door to the person I thought was the carer who turned out to be a new physiotherapist. She was referred from months ago and had no idea that his condition had deteriorated so much, so she’s had to go away and come up with new ideas. We may never see her again. While she was there the carer actually came, shortly followed by the district nurse, the window cleaner, the chiropodist and the man who mows the lawns. It’s very difficult keeping track of everyone, and you need to because you don’t want the man who mows the lawn attempting to give your dad a bed bath, no matter how amusing it might be.

Mum and dad have been given an emergency alarm button. It goes through to a switchboard who will ring emergency contacts on your behalf and/or call for an ambulance if necessary. I had misgivings when this was fitted, because my parents are great ones for leaning on things, poking things and breaking things. They are also quite good at technology hexing. My mum only has to look at an electric sewing machine for it to start spewing out great tangles of thread. In one three week period she ruined her own sewing machine and two of my aunt’s machines and is now banned. Last year my dad managed to take his laptop back to the basic operating system whilst trying to open an email. To this day, none of us know how he did it. I was not sanguine about the emergency button.

And lo, it came to pass that on the morning of the day I arrived, my dad had been rudely awakened at 6.45 a.m. by a disembodied voice shouting: ‘Graham! Graham! Are you alright? Speak to me, Graham!’ He had no idea where it was coming from and probably thought he was having another stroke. My mum, who had only managed to put him to bed at 6.00 a.m. was woken up by the din, which she furiously thought was the television, only to find that it was the emergency button malfunctioning. It took them forty minutes to get through to the switchboard and establish that he wasn’t dead and that there was a fault with the technology and not my dad. It took till 10.30 a.m. to get it turned off. Who knows what misadventures in the world of emergency buttons await us next?

All of this is accompanied by swathes of forms which want to know your inside leg measurement, your genealogy back to Adam, and whether you have any postal orders you haven’t declared to the tax man. You fill out these forms, which take hours, and then they tell you that because you exceed the maximum savings of £3.49, you must pay for everything anyway. After tearing my hair out about this, I eventually discovered a box you can tick that says ‘I am as rich as a small, down on his luck lord and because I don’t have the time or energy to declare that I once won ten pounds on a scratch card and have some luncheon vouchers left over from 1979, I’m just going to pay for everything anyway.’ It’s what they want, of course, and if I had the energy to don the radical beret of revolution I’d fill all the forms out just to piss them off, even though the result would be the same. As it is I am brow beaten by the relentless rounds of medical and bureaucratic chicanery and have accepted that someone else will have to start the revolution while I’m on hold to the doctor’s surgery for the second time in a day.

Back in Kent things are less medical. Oscar and Tallulah came down to see us on one weekend. We had a great but blowy walk down to Rye Harbour, which I last visited when Oscar was three. He is twenty this year so it was time to go back. We also took the kids to Stubbs’ restaurant for lunch where I ate a cherry pavlova as big as my head and regretted nothing.

Last weekend Tallulah met us in Lewes, where Jason wanted to see a house. He gets itchy feet every twelve to eighteen months. I indulge his need to book viewings only if I think there is a slim to none chance of him actually putting in an offer, because although I have accepted that for us there is no such thing as a forever home, I want this home to be more than a pitstop.

The house in Lewes did me proud by being a beautiful money pit that was in a terrible location and a no brainer to reject. We spent the rest of the day eating brunch at Bill’s and combing the junk and antique shops of Lewes before dropping Tallulah back in Brighton.

I fell in love with these tiles. Sadly they were £385 each because they were by John Piper so I didn’t buy them.

I did however, pick up this woodcut/monoprint called Tiny Swimmers by Anita W. in a charity shop and I absolutely love it. I can’t find anything about the artist, sadly. It doesn’t stop me appreciating her work though.

We had very disappointing Thai food in Rye on our way home from Lewes, which put a bit of a damper on things but we have not given up our belief that it is possible to find greatness.

On the positive food front I had an excellent breakfast from the White House in Rye yesterday when I was en route to pick up some framing. I had the halloumi hash, which was perfectly grilled halloumi and a fried egg on top of a small mountain of crispy, skin on fried potatoes. I also bought a magnificent almond croissant to take home with me. I will return, mainly because they also had rhubarb waffles which looked excellent.

On the framing front I have now picked up all but one of my pieces from Clive at ArtWrite in Rye. If you’re local and you want some framing, I cannot recommend them highly enough. I had a few pieces that needed more than a standard frame and Clive invited me down to his workshop to talk through options before he started work. He also called me if things changed or when he had questions as he progressed. He had brilliant solutions and ideas but equally listened to what I wanted. It was an entirely positive, collaborative experience and I am delighted with the results.

When everything is back and we have hung them, I am minded to do a post or two about the art. Let me know if you would be interested.

This piece is by me. I made it a few years ago now, when I was still living in Leicester. It’s a collage of Prospect Cottage. It’s the first piece of my own that I have ever had framed. I nearly didn’t because it felt like an indulgence, but in the end I felt it had to hang in my house and I am so pleased with it. Clive persuaded me to have the image scanned. He said it would make a fantastic print if I ever decided I wanted to sell my work. That seems like a leap but it also seems exciting. What do you think?

What I’m Reading:

Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Augustus and Gwen John by Judith Mackrell was an interesting read. I knew a little about Augustus and a fair bit about Gwen but Mackrell does a great job of giving each sibling a fair crack of the whip and picking through all the noise and scandal of their lives to try and get to the truth of things. I enjoyed it but found myself irked by both Gwen and Augustus on numerous occasions and I was very grateful I never had to meet or live with them.

Tallulah’s book club are doing The Book Thief by Markus Zusak for their next read. I was glad initially because I’ve had a copy kicking around for years and never got around to reading it. Now I’m 3/4 of the way through and I have been perpetually irritated by it since the start. It is bad in so many ways. My first fury came when he described someone as having gangly blue eyes and things picked up from there. It’s a hard no from me.

What I’m Watching:

It’s been a good few weeks for me, television wise. I started watching Here We Go on iPlayer. I’m late to the party but I was intrigued after Katherine Parkinson won a BAFTA for it recently and I’m loving it.

In more Katherine Parkinson is excellent news, I gulped down the first three episodes of the new season of Rivals on Disney. God, I love that show so much.

Oscar and I have been spending a lot of time together in recent weeks and we are working our way through film versions of Shakespeare. We watched Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson’s 1993 version of Much Ado About Nothing. It’s such a comfort film for me. The Tuscan sunshine, the nonsense, Keanu Reeves in leather trousers. Young Denzel Washington, also in leather trousers.

We also watched Ten Things I Hate About You. It’s such a great take on Taming of the Shrew. It’s so funny and smart. Heath Ledger is such a loss.

I am currently at home, which looks like this. It makes it easier to accept that I am no longer in Spain, where the spring onions are so large you are only allowed one bunch per family and have to prove that you don’t wear wrist splints in order to lift them.

Spain was amazing. I really didn’t want to come home. I enjoy mucking around in fincas, wearing very few clothes, swimming for health but mostly joy, and eating an extraordinary quantity of anchovies. Books made everything perfect as they so often do. It is the life. Knowing that it is at least partially accessible does make it easier to go back into the life I actually find myself living rather than the one I believe I was born for.

We spent the last few days of our holiday doing nothing of merit, much like the first few days. We did go to the caves of Nerja (as mentioned in my previous epistle) so that I could see the cave art. I hate depths. I also hate heights. I am not an intrepid explorer. I am good in cities, Belgium and the Netherlands. Everywhere else is stressful to me. The caves at Nerja may become my shorthand for; ‘Help. I am having a nervous breakdown.’ That may be what Nerja actually means in Spanish.

I frequently attempt to be brave and equally frequently wonder why the fuck I actually bother. I spent over an hour practicing breathing and not screaming my lungs out in the bowels of the admittedly spectacular earth only to see zero cave paintings. Outside there were some blurry photos of them on a wall. I was unimpressed and irritated. I wasn’t expecting the Louvre but I had hoped for at least a small etching of a goat.

We had lunch in Nerja in a restaurant recommended by a local. The food was good but it was the most touristy place we went and I was as unimpressed by the sweaty man playing guitar in my face and shout singing Volare while I tried to eat my anchovies in peace as I was by the caves. He then came round with a hat. In the olden days I would have dropped some money into it out of sheer British politeness. Unfortunately I am now on the fuck it all side of old and he had interrupted my lunch, which is always a criminal offence, so he got nothing.

On the way back to our finca we stopped for petrol, I bought a Calippo because I was hot and thirsty. Five minutes later the bottom exploded due to my vigorous ice lolly mining and I spent two further hours in a hot car with a sticky, lime scented crotch. My review of Nerja on the whole? Sullen. 3/10.

I went to Malaga for an entire day and this poster of a fat man advertising sherry, which I don’t drink, is the only photo I took all day. Hire me as your tour guide. You won’t regret it, much.

On our last full day we went to Malaga city. Our hosts told us we could park out by one of the universities and get the metro into the city centre, which we did. The car park was a small, triangular shaped muddy field next to the train line which confused us terribly at first. Should we return in a year or two it will probably be a glossy, multi-storey affair because there was building work going on everywhere. In the meantime as long as your car could manage the ruts it was free.

There are only two metro lines and on the trains everything is announced in Spanish and English which made it impossible to get lost, which we were grateful for.

Malaga is a beautiful city with lots of things to do. We got there at lunch time and by the time we had eaten our fill and got our tourist on, most of the things we wanted to do were closed. The contemporary art museum, closed. The Pompidou Centre, closed. The food market, closed. The grisly yet excitingly bling churches, closed. Jesus also needs a siesta. The English cemetery, closed. Those dead won’t rest themselves.

The things we didn’t want to do - all open as anything. I could have gone and stared at Picasso for as long as I liked. He never let a siesta get in the way of painting four thousand million paintings of things I usually find as disturbing as stories of his genius. Godammit.

Despite our failure to be tourists, we had a good lunch, a fantastic wander around the city and a plan for the next time we visit, e.g. go in the morning. This is one of the other things I am not good at. Mornings, much like heights, depths and Calippos are not in my wheelhouse, but unlike the other things, much less traumatic as long as coffee and some kind of baked goods are available.

The journey home was somewhat dramatic due to us being delayed on the tarmac before take off for an hour while one of the passengers had a medical emergency which caused him to be unresponsive and then him and his luggage being hauled off the plane. The flight attendant used the word unresponsive like a vocal exercise in expressing an ascending flight of panic before a medic arrived. Poor man. I was just grateful it didn’t happen in mid air.

Also my stomach behaved itself impeccably on the way home. I give full credit to the anchovies.

Derek in the library looking smug.

We got home last Wednesday afternoon. I unpacked, repacked and ate fish and chips with my lovely friend who had done a great job of looking after queen Derek, which prepared her fully to go home and negotiate with her new foster cat, Daisy, who looks like Derek’s long lost twin and behaves worse.

Derek channelling Daisy and screaming at me for the entire twenty minutes I managed in the bath before I gave up trying to relax due to her demented meerkat method of trying to get in with me.

On Thursday I drove Keris to the station at Ashford and then hurtled off to see my parents who were, as usual, having quite a dramatic time of things. Pressure sores are a thing now which means lots of visits from district nurses. There is a further nursing cohort to deal with as dad is now also under the community heart failure nurse. This is a terrible title for a nurse because it makes her sound like she is actively helping the community in getting heart failure.

Perhaps this is a new idea to break the NHS voted in by Reform, who run my parents’ local council. I say ‘run’, what I mean is that they deliver an increasing number of environmentally disastrous newsletters with glossy photographs of all the things they are cutting to rip locals away from the dripping teat of the nanny state. Nobody needs foster care. Feral children roaming the streets will learn to pull themselves up by the bootstraps they don’t have, etc. Encouraging heart failure in the aging population to cull those who are no longer economically viable seems exactly the sort of thing they could get behind. I didn’t mention this to the nurse. She already looked harassed and she had more than enough on her plate without my helpful suggestions.

There were many forms to fill out, a lot of medication to rejig and a lot of meetings to attend. There has been new equipment to move furniture around for. There has been a lot of bed nonsense going on. This makes a change from chair nonsense, which seems to have died down slightly. This is good news because the garage looks like an abandoned function room.

In amongst all this we have had a cat incursion. Mum and I were pottering in the front garden one afternoon when a flat faced, stripy individual with a distinctive smoker’s yowl appeared. He was extremely chatty and very affectionate and decided after a brief fuss that he lived with us now.

DAVE!

He had a collar on that said ‘Dave’ and gave a phone number. After I had evicted him my mum was worried he was lost, so I phoned the number on his collar and left a very confusing message that said; ‘We have Dave unless Dave is your name, in which case we don’t. Anyway if Dave or Not Dave is lost, we have him.’ Unsurprisingly, nobody called me back.

Later that evening the carer arrived. When mum opened the front door the carer said: ‘Is this your cat?’ My mum, thinking it was Ron, who is indeed our cat, said: ‘Yes. Come in.’ Whereupon Dave strolled in as bold as brass and disappeared into the front room, which is where my dad now lives. Mum said: ‘Oh my God! That’s DAVE!’ The carer said: ‘DAVE?’ and I said: ‘Yes. DAVE is NOT our cat,’ at which point all three of us gave chase, burst into dad’s room and started running around like the Keystone Cops.

The carer finally cornered Dave behind the sofa, grabbed him and lifted him up in triumph shouting: ‘I’ve got DAVE!’ ‘Hoorah, Huzzah and Hurray!’ we all cried and then turned and realised that this whole time my dad had been sitting on the commode with his pants round his ankles trying to have a moment. The carer said: ‘Well, I’ve failed in my mission to give you some dignity there, Graham.’ and we all trooped out to eject Dave back into the night while I laughed until tears ran down my face. Bravo Dave.

As well as accidentally adopting Dave, I got to spend an evening eating dessert and failing to answer questions in quiz shows with Tilly, which was delightful. I also got to go on my first ever visit to CostCo with my friend Jenn. It was insane, and were it not for the fact that we were under time pressure I would have probably needed a bigger trolley. As it was I returned home with a huge platter of sushi, some excellent salmon pate and a tray of Portuguese custard tarts which cheered us all up. I also got a gigantic tub of Belazu sun dried tomatoes for a fiver and keep whipping them out to show people in the manner of a proud parent.

Behold the Belazu wonder.

Back in the day I would never have become so excited about sun dried tomatoes. It was all shoes and dancing on tables and hangovers for days. I don’t miss the hangovers to be fair, and I did get these excellent Camper baseball boots from T. K. Maxx so at least the shoe thing is still happening.

I have managed to be in Kent now for a whole week, in which I have been trying to cross over to the glowing side of health with various ups and downs. I am taking so many vitamins and supplements that my pee is permanently an interesting colour. I am getting reiki based osteopathy for my rigid neck and shoulders and I am continuing the march through the shadowlands of my psyche with the brilliant .

On a particularly gruelling day Jason took me out for lunch, which in itself is a bit of a gamble in these parts. We went to Stubbs Restaurant in Ashford, which is one of three dining rooms in a pub called The Cricketers, not far from our favourite farm shop. It was delicious. Thankfully it is 45 minutes away by car and quite spendy otherwise I would have been tempted to move in.

What I’m Reading:

Catching up on a Netgalley backlog I read Blood, Rust and Steel by Stuart MacBride. This forms part of the Logan McRae series of which there is a spinoff branch featuring McRae’s boss, Roberta Steel. You get the best out of this if you’ve read the others, because it’s building on the foundations of the lore that preceded it, but I enjoyed it very much. It’s less noir than a lot of his books, which I sometimes find tricky because he doesn’t shy away from horror. This is out on the 21st of May.

I’m reading Tales from the Territory by Travis Baldree. It’s a series of short stories featuring the characters from Legends and Lattes etc. It’s charming and does a good job of enriching the world Baldree is creating. Low peril and very much my kind of thing right now. It’s out on the 1st October.

I’m also reading because her arrival on Substack has given me life. Similarly, discovering and his weekly Joy Parade has indeed given me joy.

What I’m Watching:

I just finished watching the latest season of The Parisian Agency on Netflix. I am fully invested in it. It’s got great properties, good human backstories, no Selling Sunset vibes and a lot of jetting around the world with French people who I enjoy viewing impossible properties with. My favourite property of the series has been a hamlet on the coast of Mykonos which sported three houses, a small village square, and a private beach. It was £70 million, which even for the people viewing it caused a visible wince. It was lovely but think of the dusting.

The view from our house.

I am in Spain. I am very happy about this. We are renting a finca (what a great word by the way) up in the Andalusian hills about forty minutes drive from Malaga. I am writing this sitting on the terrace by the side of the pool and I’m very grateful for it all.

Back in Dungeness, Queen Derek is being cared for by my wonderful friend who cautiously opened the door to being a cat person only a few short months ago and is now surrounded by felines. The cat distribution pipeline remains robust even as the world crumbles. I find this very reassuring.

My dad has been managing to stay stable enough to remain at home, which is one of the reasons I am still in Spain. Various health related bodies now seem to realise that my parents need help and support and there are visits every day from this and that person clutching fistfuls of forms. There is quite a lot of amazement that some of this was not put in place when he was discharged from rehab. All we can say is that we did try.

Let’s get into all things Spanish.

We haven’t done very much. I am absolutely delighted about this. If I was to offer a metaphor for the current state of my health it would be a wobbly card table with a wodge of paper under one leg and a propensity to fold up if you were rash enough to put anything on it. My neck and shoulders are rigid with stress. My digestive system is on strike and very much anti-digesting many things, which caused some trauma on the flight over, when my body decided that the milk I had in my coffee was not fit for purpose and went about ejecting it . My chest still feels like a leaky concertina. There is no way I could engage full tourist mode, even if I wanted to, which I very much don’t. Also, Jason came down with a cold the day after we arrived so we have been progressing very much in the Stately as a Galleon mode.

The finca is high in the hills. Jason is compelled by some primitive instinct to pick properties to rent that inevitably involve driving round hair raising roads to impossible properties that cling to the edge of escarpments. I am very much not about this as a way of life. Views are fine but getting to views is not my favourite when it involves precipitate drops. Given how poorly I was on the plane, the last thing I needed was to be gripping onto the door handle with white knuckles attempting not to look at the road ribboning into thin air, but that’s where I found myself. Even Jason lost patience when the road to the house turned into a mile and a half of bumpy cart track criss crossed with culverts.

Having said all that, after a good night’s sleep and a breakfast that didn’t try to kill me I was much more sanguine about things. The roads here are in pretty good shape and for the most part wide enough for two vehicles. There are also barriers on most of the hair raising roads. This is definitely an improvement on Corsica, where there was a lot of crumbling and too much emptiness.

Most of the holiday has involved me sitting on the terrace reading my book, getting endlessly distracted by the wild and not so wild life that surrounds me. The owners have a cat called Stella who is both affectionate and very chatty. She likes to hunt lizards in the lavender bushes that run down one side of the pool. She has a special, lizard hunting voice which is definitely her outdoor voice and with which she keeps us updated on her progress. There is also a tabby cat called Wriggledy-Piggledy who is very private and occasionally streaks across the terrace on his way to work. He doesn’t like to talk about it. He may be a spy.

There is a whole city of beehives in the hills to one side of us and pollination is very much go. When you step out onto the terrace in the morning the drone of the bees is so loud that it sounds like the house has relocated to the side of a motorway. Once your ears adjust it just melts into the general melange of nature that consistently makes the countryside as loud as the town but in different ways. I grew up in the depths of the country and I’m always surprised when town bred people move to the countryside in search of quiet.

Talking of noise, there is a large bush on one side of the pool which is a sparrow hotel. All the sparrows live laugh love in there. There is also quite a lot of squabbling going on. Two of the sparrows have moved out into the guttering above our bedroom where they are busy raising their babies. Every time they shimmy into the nest, the entire length of guttering clangs like a bell.

Swifts skim above the pool, picking insects from the surface. Somewhere in the hills is a cuckoo, a real one and not just wood pigeons bigging themselves up. Driving up the track to the road we disturb clusters of some small bird, maybe a type of finch, with Tintin cowlicks and a propensity for dust baths. The air is alive with bird song and the clang of goat bells.

We are well and truly in goat country. It surprises me that Andalusia hasn’t used this as some kind of tourist strap line. Welcome to goat country etc. The goat herds are forever herding masses of unruly goats from place to place. We were in the middle of a town called Antequera and traffic stopped dead for ten minutes to let a herd of goats cross the road. They disappeared up some steps and into what looked like a housing estate. I like to think that they all live there, like the goat version of Shameless. I’d watch it.

One day we went to a local restaurant a five minute drive away which was recommended by our hosts (who are endlessly helpful and very nice). I had goat stew because I quite like goat meat and it’s not something that is readily available at home. It turns out that one of the things my digestive system doesn’t approve of is goat stew, no matter how local it is and how nice it tastes. I like to think that the goats got their revenge. Look but don’t eat is the motto there.

Mostly we have been supplying ourselves with delicious food from Carrefour, which is my favourite supermarket by far. I did buy a Palmier the size of my head, which was excellent, but mostly I have been eating good, deep purple tomatoes, boquerones and frittata. I also picked up some excellent local sheep’s cheese. My stomach may shun goat but it bloody loves anchovies.

When we have ventured out we have mostly been eating Thai food. Our landlady recommended a massage place in Fuengirola which is about an hour from here and as we are both quite crunchy with stress, we have been twice. It is a Thai massage place. This is largely in name only as it is run by three, charming Spanish ladies with thumbs of steel but the area it’s in is awash with Thai restaurants. We go for a massage, we eat Thai food. It’s all very satisfactory. This place has been my favourite so far. Strangely we booked this holiday after cancelling our big trip to Thailand this year and it is interesting that the universe has found ways to provide some of the things we were looking for a little closer to home.

As far as things to do go, we have been very lazy. There is no lack of things to do, and we have decided to come back to the area when we are feeling better and do a lot more exploring. We did make it to the dolmens in Antequera one afternoon. They are free to visit. There are three dolmens which are about five thousand years old, two are next door to each other and in a kind of park with a museum that tells you everything they imagine the dolmens were used for by staring hard at small pottery sherds and engaging big imaginations. We started here and it was a little underwhelming as the largest dolmen was closed for repairs. The third dolmen is about ten minutes drive out of town behind an industrial estate and this was the one we enjoyed most. You could walk inside it and there was a lovely guide who told us all kinds of interesting things.

Anyone for an upsetting souvenir?

Jesus crawling to his death was in the same window display as this, which I enjoyed hugely. Think Fun.

Antequera is a beautiful town. It is stuffed to the gills with churches, so if you like wild religious iconography and a lot of gold, it’s for you. I do love a church and I am a sucker for an over dressed saint, so I was very happy. Jason went and stared at the bull ring, which wasn’t for me. I went to a bullfight once, very much against my will and I’m just not even willing to entertain an empty bullring. I sat outside while he went inside.

That’s when I saw Tony Nails. Hard as. He’s probably running this town. Be scared.

Jason wanted to go to a beach on another day. He likes quiet so he looked for appropriately desolate beaches and Nerja seemed to be the answer. When we arrived at the beach he had chosen which said it was accessible by a dirt path, we baulked. The dirt path wound down the side of a very cliffy cliff. We started down the path but there were points where you couldn’t see the path ahead because the drop was so sheer. Other, young and well people would have been fine but I was a middle aged cliff drop refuser. Mainly because I hated it but also because experience tells me that Jason enjoys a beach for approximately twenty minutes before he is bored out of his mind and I wasn’t going to spend an hour in the boiling heat pretending to be a calm Sherpa Tenzing only to have to pack up less than half an hour after hitting the bottom and do it all in reverse.

After a couple more beaches like that we found a more accessible one, had a lovely swim and twenty minutes later we were back in the car, as predicted. There are ancient caves at Nerja which have neolithic cave paintings and we might stir our stumps to go and visit them later today. Or we may loll around in the sun instead.

We visited the Stupa of Enlightenment on Sunday evening. We were in the area and it is both surprising and huge, so we went to investigate. There were a lot of people wandering around outside it, so we went to go through a metal gate to join them when an extremely officious man told us off because it was closed. He was very rude. Jason bristled. There was nearly a dust up. Thankfully there wasn’t. The man had just come out of a weekly meditation group. Much good it did him.

Things I’ve Been Reading:

I am reading The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher. It’s a late Eighties, family saga and entirely appropriate for taking on holiday. It is highly enjoyable and reminds me a little of the Cazalet books by Elizabeth Jane Howard. The first book in the sequence is The Light Years, if you’re interested. They’re great.

I also read Tessa Bailey’s Hook, Line and Sinker for a bit of holiday silliness. It wasn’t for me. I prefer Ali Hazlewood for ludicrous romances. STEM always trumps king crab fishermen for me.

I got offered the chance to read the new Jane Casey, Everything She Didn’t Say. It’s a standalone, separate to the excellent Maeve Kerrigan novels and I loved this. It was brilliantly twisty, clever and so paced. I ate it up. It’s out in July.

Things I’ve Been Watching:

Nothing, because I am in Spain. I have been doing a huge amount of writing though. I am back in therapy with my wonderful therapist, who has a Substack here and who is an all round good egg. She is helping me to steady the ship, which I am in dire need of. We work with writing a lot because it’s how I process things. The work is hard but the gratitude is real.

The fog lifted for a nano second to give us this beauty.

Welcome back to the house of plague where the yellow flag of doom is fluttering still, although now at half mast.

Yes, that’s right. I am still not 100% and in the long, dark nights of the soul my mind flits to amorphous but always deadly health terrors. Ebola with a touch of botulism, perhaps a frisson of dementia and a soupçon of Nile fever maybe? That kind of thing. I patchwork together random symptoms and the answer is always - dead by Christmas. The funeral? I have thoughts.

During the daylight hours, where the thoughts are more preoccupied with a seemingly endless river of packing boxes, the mouse we found in the garage loft trap (rodents, AGAIN?) and perusing sink splash backs, I accept that my immune system looks like a badger that’s got into a fight with a Land Rover and come off worst, and that it will take its sweet time. My chest remains somewhat accordion like and my sinuses are defunct. I cough like a woman who has had a far more interesting life than I have. I can do things for brief periods of time and then I have to have a nice sit down. Who knew how nice I would find a sit down in my middle years? I always thought standing up was where it was at, but boy was I wrong.

Tallulah came to visit last Tuesday evening for a few days. Her new job will now start after Easter thanks to one of her previous employers being absolutely shit with her references, so she decided to come and see me. We had niceness planned but she woke up on Wednesday morning with the flu and it was all hands on deck with nursing. I made gallons of soup, supervised hot baths and cups of tea and provided snacks and boxes of tissues. We caught up on the latest season of Call the Midwife together and wept copiously. It is our great pleasure and we only watch it together. Everyone else but us cannot stand it. We are committed to catharsis. It is good for what ails you.

She was too poorly to go back on the train so I turned mum’s taxi into mum’s ambulance and drove her back to Brighton on Saturday. I decided not to stay in Brighton for the rest of the day once I had her settled. I had had to slightly park in an illegal spot because she wasn’t fit to walk very far and I wanted to scarper before I got a ticket.

On the way home I decided to take my time and find somewhere nice for lunch. The drive is quite picturesque and as long as you’re not in a hurry it’s charming. I only had packing boxes and rodents to get back to so I meandered around and plumped for a farm shop with a cafe just outside Winchelsea that by all accounts is excellent.

I must take issue with the people of East Kent and what they deem excellent. I feel that rather like Inigo Montoya, this word does not mean what they think it means. The farm ‘shop’ was thirty jars of assorted jam arranged in rustic packing crates. I’m not a great jam lover at the best of times. A lot of my childhood summers were spent picking and hulling various soft fruits to help make jam and I have trauma.

I particularly hate real strawberry jam because it’s hairy. I only like raspberry jam if it has millions of pips in it and on the whole I am much more about French confiture (all hail Bonne Maman) than anything from a British farm shop, slung into an old Branston jar with a gingham doily elastic banded to the lid. Also the prices are frankly outrageous for something that is not really a treat and definitely not a pudding of any kind.

This, which I got from the goodest farm shop is exactly the sort of thing you need instead of hairy jam.

I pushed past my jam fury to order some lunch in the cafe. The cakes looked nice but I needed something solid in my belly so I ordered a Ploughman’s lunch where I could choose two of an assortment of local cheeses to go with it. I plumped for a cheddar called Sussex Charmer and a blue cheese, imaginatively named Sussex Blue. I also ordered myself a flat white. The Ploughman’s was £14.50. I was expecting great things for a lunch roughly the price of a main meal in a mid restaurant.

The cafe is in a sort of sexed up shed, so that it looks rustic and farm like. There is no insulation, no sound proofing and no ability on the part of anyone in charge to get customers to shut the doors when they come in and out. I sat shivering in a corner surrounded by people loudly discussing sausage rolls and felt profoundly depressed.

When the meal arrived I felt worse. The flat white was excellent, which is good because it cost £4. The Ploughman’s made me want to weep. The cheese portions were generous, but they were accompanied by two hunks of ciabatta, a tablespoon of some kind of brown chutney and a tablespoon of something described as coleslaw but which looked like the remains of the veg recycling with a handful of sultanas thrown into it with half a jar of mayonnaise and something to make everything look yellow. A sort of Coronation chicken coleslaw that merely tasted sweet, as did the chutney. That was it. No butter, no salad, no finesse. The cheese was delicious but in the manner of 1970’s pate and melba toast, there was not enough of anything to go with the cheese to balance the plate and I might as well have gone to a supermarket and just bought a block of cheddar to gnaw on.

Back on the road I took a detour from Rye across country because the road to Camber was shut. En route I decided to stop at a place called Hoof Brocante which I have passed countless times and never quite got round to visiting. Turning off the main road I followed the signs into a field that looked to be part of an abandoned air strip. There was a building with a caved in roof behind which was the droning of a thousand bees that turned out to be some kind of track for racing remote controlled cars. Another bunch of buildings claimed to be an evangelical church complete with some howling dogs chained up outside. It did look like the sort of place you would go to speak in tongues and wrestle snakes. Then there was Hoof Brocante itself which has seen nary a hoof or a brocante for some time given the dilapidated nature of things. I picked my way across the grass to peer through the windows of an extremely defunct premises in which the only shoppers seem to be spiders. I left before I was lured into a shoot out with a zombie. It was that sort of place.

Breakfast in a vending machine.

About two miles up the road was a sign for another farm shop. I decided to brave it because I am nothing if not game. It turned out to be fine, which at this point was high praise, considering the sort of day I was having. I bought a few things to try and so far everything I tried has also been fine. It’s fifteen minutes from my house instead of the forty minutes it takes to get to the good farm shop and in a pinch I’d go again. I was particularly impressed by the open sided barn in the car park which has a wall sized vending machine where you can buy the ingredients for an entire fry up from 7.00 a.m. to 9.00 p.m. alongside other weirder things like expensive Easter eggs and bags of dog treats. I was tempted to buy a selection of odd things because I love a vending machine, but my appetite for novelty had been well and truly sated by this time so I sloped off home.

The big news is that the boat actually sold on Friday. Money was successfully offered, keys were proffered in return. We are no longer salty sea dogs. It is a relief for all kinds of reasons, but it hasn’t quite sunk in yet how much of a relief. I think we will get to that point soon. It’s a bit like doing your exams or your driving test. You become obsessed and stressed and you think that when it’s all over you will be luminous with joy and feasting will commence, when invariably you end up feeling a bit empty and not knowing what to do with yourself for a few days.

We have managed to pay some things off that were rather looming, sort out various other, deeply dreary fiscal things and wrangle some mortgage stuff. Now we have started making inventory of what we want to do with the rest of the house and thinking about what to do first. In the meantime I have begun sending some of the enormous pile of artwork to the framer that has been lurking in storage for several years.

Tilly made this print. It is of her two cats, Beef (real name Frodo) being the larger of the two, Tom, now training to be a GP, the smaller.

A Mark Hearld print that has been in storage far too long and now has been released into the world.

I saved up for the framing multiple times last year and because I am practicing being a sensible grown up who understands finances, I ended up spending it on garage doors and rat men and fees of every kind. Being able to finally do something this frivolous and deeply satisfying is the beginning of the luminous joy I think.

The boy is home this week. He arrived last night after having overslept and missed two trains, leaving me circling Ashford like a plane waiting for a runway. I filled some of the time at Aldi where I bought a supply of their Bunettone’s which is a hot cross bun panettone that my friend made me aware of, and which, it turns out is extremely moreish. I don’t like hot cross buns. I disapprove of any dessert that is merely bread with a fancy hat on. I do very much love anything panettone related though and this hits not just one but several spots. It’s a good job the boy arrived on the third train or I may have had to hire a trailer for the quantity of bunettones I felt compelled to buy. It would not look great if we had no money left for house improvements because I had spent it all on Italian deliciousness.

The rest of the kids are coming to spend Easter weekend with us and celebrate both chocolate eggs and my birthday which is actually the following week but I am entirely happy to bring it forward. We are all booked in to eat dinner at an Indian restaurant in Hythe on Saturday night. I am excited because Indian food is much better than roast lamb for Easter and I have also tested this restaurant and found it to be properly excellent and not East Kent excellent.

I come from Leicester where curry is excellent as standard and leaves you feeling bereft unless you are going to another great curry city like Birmingham or Whitechapel in East London, because you know whatever you eat it will probably be a pastiche of what good curry is. This place is called Taste of Kathmandu, which I can only read in James Acaster’s voice after I spent months listening to the Off Menu podcast where Ed and James were advertising beers from round the world and James has a very particular way of saying Kathmandu. I won’t share it with you because I don’t know how and also nobody else needs that ear worm for the rest of their lives.

What I’m Reading:

Country People by Daniel Mason - I read North Woods last year and loved it. This is shorter, funnier but is still clearly a part of the North Woods world. I read it via NetGalley. It’s out in July.

Also via NetGalley was The Typing Lady and Other Fictions by Ruth Ozeki - a selection of short stories that I thoroughly enjoyed. This is out in May. Ozeki’s fiction is often very strange and magical and these short stories seem more rooted, although there are clearly nods to the canon, but if you want an introduction to her work this would be a great place to start. I loved the inclusion of typewriters in every story and this felt like the book I wanted Tom Hanks’ Uncommon Type to be but wasn’t.

What I’m Watching:

The latest series of Last One Laughing on Amazon Prime is wonderful and extremely good medicine.

Me and the weather, both foggy and impenetrable. Pathetic fallacy much?

I am deep into my second week of plague. The yellow flag has been hoisted. I wave at people from afar, like the queen. As I feel mostly dead all the time, this is a fair comparison.

The UTI got sorted with some evil antibiotics from the GP. This left the ravages the antibiotics had wrought upon my feeble frame and the cold that I started alongside the UTI. My chest is tight, my voice has a timbre that only a phone sex worker could love. I am exhausted. It’s not eat, sleep, rave, repeat. It’s eat, sleep, nap, repeat. I bring shame down upon the dance generation.

I have long, complicated dreams. I drive across watery flats in a station wagon asserting that this is Detroit even though I have never been to Detroit and as far as I know it looks nothing like East Anglia. I invite people to elaborate picnics which seem to be held on rocky escarpments, miles from any convenience. I discover my sad parents eating in hipster canteens with no way to get home and miles to go before I sleep. I am doing a lot of impossible travelling whilst remaining very much stationary in real life.

I had decided I was feeling better at the end of last week. We were due to go to the boat on Sunday to help the boy start putting his life into boxes (If the boat sells he will be dividing his time between here and his girlfriend’s mum’s place). On Saturday we thought we would test my feeling better theory and went to Deal to see what was happening in the world.

What was happening was that even though we have had days and days of fog here, the world had decided it needed to go to the seaside and Deal was it. All our usual parking spaces were full, with cars circling like sharks. In the end we found a side street at the quiet end of town and parked behind a condemned caravan near a bellying wall with an oblique view of an abandoned gasometer. This is not the picture of itself that Deal likes to project so there were no resident parking only signs. Nobody wants to live in a clapped caravan by a rusting gasometer thank you very much.

By the time we had walked into town I was slightly regretting the brisk assertion that I was feeling fine. Our favourite lunch establishment was full (The Rose). Another favourite, Frog & Scott has closed down to open a wine bar which is still under construction. I was beginning to feel ill and hungry which is a hideous combination. Eventually we plumped for 81 Beach Street on the sea front. It was a good choice.

I ate pan fried sea bream with samphire (mmmm), a crab filled arancini and a tower of some kind of smashed, fried potatoes. It was delicious. The key to this deliciousness was the sure and certain fact that a lot of butter had been used to cook everything. You can do a lot of good in the world with butter, salt and a sack of potatoes.

I am not a fan of a tower of anything. It’s giving me snobbish, fancy restaurants of the early 2000’s where the food was terrible but you paid more the higher something was stacked, like the world’s most disappointing Jenga. Having said that, if there has to be a tower of anything, it should definitely be potatoes fried in butter.

With the comfort of good food in my belly I started to feel better so we went for a stroll. I picked up a top tier flat white and an extremely good almond croissant (also extremely buttery) from Pop Up Cafe, before mooching round the charity shops and coming home with three, small vases. They all have maker’s marks. I can identify none of them.

The coffee and sugar had done a great job of masking quite how poorly I was beginning to feel but by the time we got back to the picturesquely parked car I felt like death warmed up. By the time we got home I was in my death warmed down era and had to retire from the fray. Jason called Oscar to see if he was still up for our visit whereupon he mournfully announced that I had given him my cold and he felt hideous. We cancelled all plans.

Every day this week I have woken up announcing that I am better only to be struck down by the combine harvester of malaise. Yesterday was the first day I managed to go out unchaperoned. I lasted an hour, in which I did some much needed grocery shopping and was rewarded for my pains when I popped into a local charity shop and picked up this rather beautiful wood cut.

It’s number 5 of 10, dated 2001 and signed by the artist. It depicts birds on Musselburgh Ashpan. The artist is Nye Hughes. I am fairly certain that it is this Nye Hughes. The location, subject matter and style track, although I can only find paintings by him. I am going to attempt to sell it because I haven’t worked in so long I need to make a little money and one thing I am not short of is beautiful artwork. If you know anyone whose walls are crying out for a woodcut of Musselburgh Ashpan, point them in my direction.

Another good thing this week was the purchase of happiness in a tub. This Ottolenghi ice cream is bloody delicious. There is also a vanilla miso and coffee and cardamom flavour and I am going to take one for the team and try them all.

In family news:

My parents are making slow progress in the right direction. Amazingly, since stopping elephantine doses of codeine in favour of a less congesting pain reliever, there is significantly less focus on the bowels. I had threatened to commission Tilly to do a watercolour of the Bristol Stool Chart for Christmas if things didn’t improve. Dad is more mobile and word on the street is that the damnable Mo lift might be abandoned in favour of a walking frame. Sleep, sadly, is still for the weak.

My brother had to have one of his dogs put down on Monday. It was all quite sudden and very distressing. We are all rather sad.

Oscar spent all night at Newham hospital A&E on Monday due to crippling stomach pain that accompanied his version of what I have. Having the rude health of a 19 year old, he has never had to deal with the NHS unaccompanied and after a consult with NHS 111 packed him off to casualty in case his innards exploded, he was not equipped to deal with what ensued. He got there at 9.00 p.m. and was seen at 5.00 a.m. and I got no sleep between these hours due to being the emotional support at the end of the phone. He messaged me at 4.00 a.m. to say that he wished he had gone to a different hospital because this one only has one star on TripAdvisor, and it was the only thing all night that made me laugh. The hospital was virtually useless and he still had to go and see the GP yesterday morning, who has some concerns and has sent him for a raft of tests. I am hoping it is just this absolute mother fucker of a cold/virus and he will be as right as rain by next week.

Tallulah cannot start her new job this week because her references are proving elusive, which is what happens when you come of age in the gig economy. She is not in the slightest bit bothered and is enjoying a week of walking wealthy people’s pooches around Brighton, which is one of the many strings to her bow, and teaching herself to cook.

Tilly flies out to Barcelona on Friday in preparation for Sunday’s marathon. She is going there on her own, which on top of running 26 miles is incredibly brave and independent of her. Jason and I had mulled over the idea of flying out and popping up as secret support in the crowd, but as we are surrounded by a miasma of plague, we have desisted.

Monday was cursed. As well as my brother’s dog and Oscar’s reluctant visit to the hospital, the water pump on the boat stopped working. Jason was in London for work on Tuesday, so he stopped off at the boat, fixed the water situation and made sure Oscar got to the Dr. before work. He is a good egg.

The boat sale is still ongoing. If everything goes according to plan, it will be sold at the end of the month. Still keeping everything crossed.

What I’m Reading:

Whistler by Ann Patchett was a NetGalley read. This is out in early June. I love Ann Patchett’s work. So far this is my favourite of her books. It deals with the reunion of a woman with her first step-father who had a brief, troubled marriage to her mother but with whom she felt a kinship way deeper than the time she spent with him warrants. It’s funny, tender and beautifully observed.

I’m currently reading Christopher and Columbus by Elizabeth von Arnim. This is the story of German/English twins who finding themselves orphaned and rejected by their aunt and uncle, set off for America in the midst of WWI. It is an utter confection, not to be taken at all seriously and with some great comic moments. My favourite to date is the twins talking about whether you go to heaven clothed or naked. The conclusion comes down on the side of naked:

‘You see’ then went on Anna-Rose rather quickly, hurrying away from the awful vision, ‘one knows one doesn’t have clothes in heaven because they don’t have the moth there. It says so in the Bible. And you can’t have the moth without having anything for it to go into.’

What I’m Watching:

I watched a rather pointless documentary on iPlayer about Gwen John, which could have been a thousand times more interesting than it was and just made me annoyed. I watched a brilliant documentary about the artist Caroline Walker, who paints large scale images of women giving birth, giving care and working in roles which don’t usually get consigned to canvas. Her work is moving and powerful and paints the ordinary as the extraordinary.

Mainly I have been watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, UK versus the World Series three because of the most excellent drag queen Kate Butch. Kate does what she calls Bastard Drag, which is sort of cottage core fierceness with a penchant for chintz and Radio Four. One of the many things I love about her is that one of her hobbies is going to the Emma Bridgewater seconds shop in Stoke, and buying herself personalised mugs that have been personalised for other people. She sometimes does tours of these mugs on Instagram. As a woman who had a years long hyper fixation with Emma Bridgewater, this pleases me enormously.

I think Kate would love the mug that my husband and children had personalised for me many years ago. The name on this mug is from when the children were obsessed with the show Ice Road Truckers and wanted us all to have trucker names. Of course it was going to be Trumpington Fartworthy. There was at one point a whole family of us Fartworthys but the only other one I can recall now was Oglent. Sadly no mug for her.

I am unwell. Plangent moaning fills the air. My days are full of sore noses, naps and skin that feels fragile and glassy. Everything aches. I either have a cold and cystitis or cystitis/UTI that is making me feel like death. Either way I am sad. If I was a parrot I would pluck all my feathers out.

I was doing so well last week. After a day of rave recovery on Sunday I sailed through the week feeling remarkably chipper. Then on Wednesday I had one of my new, weird migraines that makes me feel like I’ve got flu and which completely wrong foots me until I realise it’s a migraine and take my meds. My meds included Migraleve, a can of full fat coke and a portion of heavily salted chips. It’s what the doctor ordered.

Even so, I was pleased with myself. Usually I get a migraine for several days after coming back from my parent’s house. Instead I had one day of feeling crappy and the rest feeling like a real boy.

On Thursday I went to London. I haven’t been, except for boat related emergencies for months and months. This time I was going for nice things. As the train pulled out of the station at Ashford, I wondered if I was still capable of doing London. I felt quite anxious.

I pulled into St Pancras and threw myself into Le Pain Quotidien, where I bought a chicken caesar salad baguette and a brioche for a frankly eye-watering price. Then, as I exited the station I realised they now have a branch of Aux Merveilleux de Fred and doubled back to buy a pain au lait filled with vanilla creme and a flat white. On the way to the boat I stopped in at my favourite charity shop, which has sadly tidied itself up, but I still snagged two books, and laden with my spoils I felt like I had come home to myself.

Thursday evening was spent eating ramen with Oscar and his girlfriend and watching The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Big Lebowski, which is always good for what ails you. I expected to wake up on Friday morning on top of the world. Instead I woke up with the simultaneous understanding that there was no coffee on the boat and that I had cystitis. A double blessing if you will.

I threw my clothes on and staggered up to Canary Wharf where I spoke to a very sympathetic lady in Boots who supplied me with some dusty sachets of cystitis stuff. I bought cranberry juice and repaired to a Paul’s because they do decent pastry and there are virtually no independent eateries in Canary Wharf where the rents are so ludicrous even the rats are priced out. Minks only.

Behold. The breakfast of champions.

After an hour I felt well enough to tackle the purchase of mother’s day presents and Oscar’s girlfriend’s birthday present before shunting off to Borough to meet my friend . I was early and spent a delightful half hour browsing the Riverside Bookshop at Hay’s Galleria. Keris and I grabbed elite toasted cheese sandwiches at Kappacasein and ate them balanced gingerly on some bollards. There was a lot of cheese wrangling going on because the toasties were extremely generous and very molten.

We spent the afternoon at Tate Modern seeing the newly opened Tracey Emin exhibition, A Second Life. It is a well curated look at her career. My highlights were the quilts and the recreation of her studio. I will attempt to go back when it is less busy and look at the written works, which were pretty hard to get access to while we were there because it was busy. I was pleased to see that they had borrowed the life mask from the National Portrait Gallery, which I always make a point of visiting. It’s so beautiful.

We regrouped at Gabu at Gabriel’s Wharf with bougie hot chocolate after which Keris went off to do some cat sitting and I met up with Dani and Tallulah in Foyles on the South Bank. It used to be my favourite branch of Foyles. They had a great section on art and theatre because of their location, but they have been tidied up and it is sadly just like any other bookshop now. I wish they wouldn’t do that. There’s no soul to it anymore.

The girls were in London for the day for meetings, which was propitious and I got to tag on to the end. We went back to the boat and ordered Wagamama’s. If only Tilly had happened to be around, I would have been able to feed all my children ramen. Sadly she was back in Leicester training for the Barcelona marathon which she is running in two weeks because she is brave and insane.

I waved the girls off and went to bed feeling grim. I woke up in the full throes of an entirely recognisable migraine on top of everything else. Luckily I didn’t have to get the train back to Kent because Jason had to come to the boat and do stuff, so he drove me home, which was much gentler on the system.

I thought I’d cracked the cystitis thing by Monday and just had a horrible cold but it was merely in abeyance and is back in such force that I have spent the morning in a futile phone queue for the GP and a less futile phone queue for NHS 111. I am now waiting for a doctor to call me to confirm that I am unwell and give me something to take. Napalm maybe?

I was supposed to go to Leicester yesterday. I am too sickly to do anything except shuffle about in my pyjamas looking sad. When I’m not napping I am reading because television is too difficult. When I’m not doing that I am eating a lot of avocado for reasons which are unclear to me, but the heart wants what the heart wants, so avocado it is.

I am fairly sure that after several months of intense stress and uncertainty my immune system has waved a white flag and will go no further until I address it with kindness and put the big, punishing stick away.

In other news:

We may or may not be paid a deposit on the boat this week. Things are progressing but we are creeping around gingerly trying not to jinx things. Thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers.

Oscar has managed to lose his glasses again. This happens roughly every six months. He is vain and puts his glasses in his pocket, whereupon they inevitably go AWOL in the marina or on the DLR or in a south London chicken shop. This time it has cost us £200 to replace them. I have suggested he makes an appointment to try contact lenses because there is significantly less chance of him losing something that is stuck to his eye. More thoughts and prayers.

My dad seems to be improving although sleep is still not really a thing. Bowels seem to be behaving as does blood pressure and we will have to be thankful for that. T&P.

Because I am too unwell to go out, the weather has been marvellous. Gah.

What I’m Reading:

Tree by Aya Koda was a NetGalley read which is out on 14 May. Koda takes us on a tour of meaningful trees. She had a deeply anthropomorphic relationship with nature and this felt a bit like looking at a family album. I loved it.

Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason was another NetGalley read. It’s out on 27 August. I loved Sorrow and Bliss. I thought it was a pretty perfect novel. I had much more complicated feelings about this one. In the first third I wasn’t sure if I liked it at all. The middle was fine. The final third was terrific. I have many thoughts and am looking forward to being able to discuss it with someone else.

The Baby on the Fire Escape; Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips was recommended to me by and was brilliant. Even though it was non-fiction I read it more like a series of short stories and gulped it down.

Deviants by Santanu Bhattacharya is the queer bookclub pick for March and I really enjoyed it. It tells the interlinked stories of a great uncle, an uncle and a nephew, all gay and their experiences growing up in India under the law against homosexuality brought in with the colonisers of the British Empire. Clear eyed but hopeful is how I would describe it.

What I’m Watching:

Nuffin. I got nuffin.

I came back to Kent on Saturday after a week at my parent’s house.

Things at my parent’s are difficult. My dad’s blood pressure, which is what caused his stroke in early December, started to climb to dizzying heights and then dropping to weird lows, which caused the physio team to halt their work with him. They advised my mum to email his figures to the GP, which she did on Monday. On Wednesday when the physio came, the numbers were still climbing erratically and the GP hadn’t been in touch, she drove to the surgery and demanded they take action.

I had gone out and when I got back my mum was in the middle of a phone call with an obstreperous GP who persisted in claiming he hadn’t received any notes or information about my dad and persisted in calling mum, ‘my love,’ in that patronising way that really meant ‘fuck you, old lady.’ When she was forced into saying ‘I can’t cope. I need help.’ He replied: ‘Well what do you want me to do about it my love?’ At which point I took over the call because she was about to, quite rightly, explode with rage and frustration.

Eventually he advised changing some of the medication and I trotted off to pick up more drugs. He said the changes to the blood pressure medication would take up to two weeks to make a difference. I thought that was too long, given how high the numbers were, but as we were getting nowhere and this was the only help we were offered, we took it.

At its highest, his blood pressure was at a spectacular 197/151, which is almost what it was when he had his stroke. Added to this were all kinds of side effects from some of the medication, the failure of the sore he came home with to heal and the fact that in the three weeks he has been home he has not slept, which means my mum has also not slept.

On Friday I called the surgery and managed to get a call with a different GP who was brilliant. She said that she was not happy to leave my dad at home given that he was at high risk of having another stroke. She called around, found him a bed at the Leicester Royal Infirmary and booked an ambulance to pick him up. By Friday afternoon he was in hospital, where he stayed overnight. Sadly, because my mum needed more rest, they sent him home on Saturday night, but they have at least addressed some of the issues facing them.

I could now write a scientific paper about how dehydration and constipation cause dangerously high blood pressure and how giving someone codeine four times a day for three months will cause that constipation, particularly when administered to a man who refuses to drink anything unless you stand over him wielding a baseball bat. Sadly, I know all about something called overflow diarrhoea and a lot more about groin wounds than any woman wants or needs.

The TL:DR of this is, should you ever be in a situation like ours, drink lots of water and ask for pain relief that doesn’t constipate you. You and everyone looking after you will thank you for it.

As my dad is still of the opinion that sleep is for the weak, and when I called yesterday my mum had had two hours sleep in twenty-four, it is clear that we are going to have to look at more significant care before looking after my dad kills my mum. The GP suggested diazepam. I think we should all take it and then we won’t care what happens to my dad.

There have been good things. Let’s talk about them.

Someone came to see the boat on Friday and offered to buy it. We are going through the paperwork at the moment and won’t know if it’s a dodgy offer until next week. I need it to be legit, because it would be really fucking great if one giant stress was lifted off my shoulders. Please pray to the gods of the waters and boating fraternity for me.

I had a particularly good haul from the charity shops this week and should I ever get five minutes to list the treasures I found, I may make some money which would be nice. I got this, 1990’s IKEA Benjamin stool for £12. It’s so elegantly simple. I love steam bent wood/ply and this is delicious. I could sell it but I’d be sad and when I got it home, prepared to do the noble thing, Jason said: ‘That’s nice. Let’s keep it.’ Hoorah!

This, gorgeous vintage enamel double boiler came home with me and it’s already sold to my friend who loves a bit of kitchenalia as much as I do. As a food writer and photographer I know he will make this look effortlessly chic in photos. It is easy to part with things to him because he often feeds me delicious things he has made in the items I find. It’s a strong relationship.

These gorgeous art books are going to clog up my library shelves.

Cyril Power linocuts are perfectly Art Deco, full of movement and the very Deco ideas of speed and technology. He worked with Sybil Andrews whose work complements his and which I prefer. I’ll have to look for a book about her next.

The Anita Klein book is signed. I adore her work. She has been depicting her day to day life for decades now and I love how affectionate it is. I always feel like I can step into one of her scenes and I would be welcome.

The Anita Mandl A-Z is charming. I had never heard of her before but she went from being a zoologist to being a sculptor and her knowledge of the animals she sculpted is clear in the forms she made. They are deceptively simple and full of life.

On Saturday night, after an afternoon nap, Jason and I went with Oscar to Alexandra Palace to see Fat Boy Slim do his thing. It was excellent. My knees hurt. I went slightly deaf. A man called me Where’s Wally because I was wearing a red and white striped t-shirt but it was great. It was also geared for the mid-life crowd. He came on at 8.30 p.m. and it finished at 10.30 p.m. This is as much raving as I can stand these days.

What I’m Reading:

I listened to Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates on my drives to and from my parents’ house. I found it hugely absorbing. At the end of the recording was a forty minute interview with Oates about how she went about deciding what to fictionalise and what facts to cleave to. It was fascinating.

I read Flick: The Story of Female Pleasure by Kate Lister, thanks to NetGalley. It’s out on 28th May. By turns fascinating and infuriating, if you weren’t keen on the patriarchy before, you’ll be less enthused afterwards.

I finally got round to reading The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry. I loved it. A great mix of folklore, science and difficult women. It was funnier than I thought it would be. It’s an excellent upgrade on the Gothic tradition.

What I’m Watching:

Virtually nothing. My dad has taken to having the television on at every waking moment and there are lots of waking moments. If I have to watch another episode of Bangers and Cash or the Yorkshire Auctioneer I will harm someone.

I have been home for just over a week. I have spent most of it feeling quite unwell, which is not really surprising. I am very lucky in that I have been able to spend most of my time sleeping, reading and occasionally weeping.

Issues with dad’s care and/or the lack thereof have continued to rear their head and I have been doing some things from here. The package to support mum with washing and dressing dad was due to come to an end on Friday and I spent an entire day attempting to find a home care company who could step in to take on the mantle.

The care co-ordinator left mum a list, which was passed on to me. It started strong when the woman from the first company announced that she didn’t even know why they were on our list because they didn’t serve the geographical area my parents live in.

The next two companies both had a 2/10 rating for care. Then there were the companies that had no CQC rating. The CQC is like the OFSTED of the NHS. You can go on their website and look up whichever company/body you are interested in and read their findings. They are supposed to visit each company every couple of years.

What I found, after cross referencing the companies with the CQC and with Companies House is that suspiciously often, a company that is due for a CQC inspection suddenly changes its name and/or directors. This means that technically it is a ‘new’ company, and they can put off the CQC inspection for another two years. This is not a sign of a healthy, well-regulated business who puts ‘person centred care’ (as opposed to what exactly?) as their mission statement, regardless of what the website says.

By the time I had done this, and then gone onto TrustPilot and other review sites that were not cherry picked by the company and filtered out all the companies that require you to sign a contract that makes gym contracts look easy to get out of, I had found one company. I called and spoke to someone there and they said they definitely could do the job. My mum needed a day to think about it and then, when she had said yes, we called back and then we called back again and we haven’t heard from them since.

After this I rang the HART team to complain that the list we had been given by our care co-ordinator was not worth the paper it was written on and we were at a loss. It turned out that our care co-ordinator could not co-ordinate her way out of a paper bag and had not in fact done her job. On Friday afternoon mum had a visit from someone who did know what they were doing and we are getting help and support with finding care going forward. Apart from the fact that we had several days of unnecessary anguish, we seem to be progressing.

There are still issues with errors in dad’s medication and the GP surgery which has now adopted an AI appointment allocation in which unless you scream down the phone you cannot speak to an actual human, but again, there seems to be progress. A lot of it is down to us asking difficult questions, seeking second opinions and making complaints, but at least it is happening.

At home, Jason hung the new bedroom curtains for me, which means that every time I open the bedroom door, instead of being faced with a wall of flocked, teal velvet which did not soothe my frazzled nervous system, I now have these William Morris, Blackthorn curtains instead. I am aware that these busy little buggers won’t be to everyone’s taste, but they are very much mine. One day, when I can start earning money again I want to get rid of the hideous, soul-sucking grey carpet in our bedroom and replace it with this, Iris Apfel for Ruggable rug instead. The way things are going this will be in approximately 2045, but it’s nice to have a dream.

The children came and celebrated Jason’s birthday with us. It was very low key because we are all knackered, but it was wonderful to see them. They are such good eggs. Tallulah got a new job, so there was extra cause for celebration. Oscar is in the throes of university auditions for drama courses and is more than a little stressed. Tilly is in training because she decided to challenge herself this year by running a marathon. She chose Barcelona as the route with as few hills as possible. This is the only sane decision in the whole marathon madness.

Jason and I don’t really go a bundle on Valentine’s Day but given the current bleakness we decided to seize every opportunity to have a nice time. We went to Tenterden and poked round all the shops on the one day we had nice weather. We had lunch at Brunch & Brew which was great and does the best coffee. I bought him a small concrete model of Forton Services and some of his favourite salt.

He bought me a print of one of my favourite paintings by an artist called Ben Fenton. Fenton grew up around Dungeness and paints landscapes and brutalist buildings. I am obsessed by this painting of Dungeness power station called The Wind Blows But One Way.

The original was hanging on the wall in Taylor Jones & Son in Deal for a long time and I used to make Jason visit it with me. I always said it was my painting but it was too big for the house so I was loaning it out to people with more wall space. Now I will have a copy of it so I won’t have to keep driving to Deal to visit it.

The gallery have more of his paintings and I love them all. You can see them here. His style reminds me of the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

I am back in Leicester tomorrow for a few days and back here at the weekend because Oscar got tickets to see Fatboy Slim at Ally Pally on Saturday and we’re going with him. I am excited for this but also quite nervous given that I am in a state of nervous exhaustion and the furthest I’ve been in recent weeks is to a coffee shop in Tenterden. I may have to go in on a stretcher let alone come out on one.

What I’m Eating:

Still obsessed with blood oranges. The season was late this year so there are some still kicking about. I have been making loads of blood orange and fennel salad. This sounds fancy. It isn’t. I’m just slicing up both, squeezing in some of the orange juice with olive oil and seasoning and whacking it into my face.

I am now moving into my rhubarb phase. There will be crumbles. I will be happy.

What I’m Reading:

I have read a lot in the last few weeks.

I loved The Wedding People by Alison Espach. My friend recommended it last year and I finally got round to it. I loved how unconventional it was and what an ensemble piece it was. It was also surprisingly funny given that it starts out quite bleakly.

World’s Apart by Julia Franck was a NetGalley read but it is now out and available in paperback. It’s a brilliant piece of auto fiction. So sharp, so well realised and so interesting about ideas of care and identity across all kinds of fractures.

Tremors in the Blood by Amit Katwala was a fascinating dive into the invention of the lie detector test and the birth of modern policing practices. It read more like a novel than a non-fiction book, which is how I like them.

Businessmen as Lovers by Rosemary Tonks was gifted me by the brilliant who should be paid for her services in diagnosing what book you need in any given situation. This is more of a novella and reads like Evelyn Waugh meets Jilly Cooper. I loved it.

What I’m Watching:

I have been watching Small Prophets, the new Mackenzie Crook show on iPlayer. It is absolutely perfect. No notes.

I have also been watching How to get to Heaven from Belfast on Netflix and it is alarmingly brilliant.

I am available for readings. Hit me up in the appointments if you want one. You can book in with me here. It may be best to message me first as I am still living between three places and my movements are uncertain. Rather like the rodents in my garage (although these seem to have finally been displaced).

It is still January. It will be January forever. I don’t understand why January lasts for an eternity when February is over in three seconds. Perhaps the relief that January is finally done for another year makes us all as giddy as kippers and before you know it, March has arrived with daffodils in her hair.

I am driving back up to Leicester again today to take up the cudgels once more.

Dad is still in rehab, although they announced in the middle of this week that he will probably be coming home in two to three weeks. You would think that this would be cause for celebration, and in some small way it is. In some large way it is quite alarming given that they have estimated that with work, they believe he will be back on his feet in three to six months.

The question of what we are to do with him while we wait for him to get back on his feet is one that is hanging heavy right now. We are scheduled to have a family meeting at the hospital next Thursday in which some of this may be answered and no doubt there will be a lot more challenges for us to meet and a lot more stuff for us to do.

My week in Kent has largely consisted of me failing to do very much because all my doing energy was already spent by the time I arrived home.

My car, Martin the Brave (Martin is not brave. He is very much like Brave Sir Robin from Monty Python), needed an MOT which we ended up getting in Tunbridge Wells last Saturday. We arrived early to explore because we had never been to Tunbridge Wells before. It’s a strange place which became stranger when we ended up having lunch in a restaurant that had a taxidermied ostrich mum and baby on a grand piano in the corner of the room. At one point, someone played the piano and gazed yearningly out through the legs of the fleeing ostrich.

Should you want to eat lunch surrounded by fleets of ostrich, boars heads on the walls and chairs that have improbable lions as arms, we had quite a nice lunch at The Warren. We shared pigeon breast followed by a rack of lamb. There is very much a feeling that the things you are eating are a fifty fifty punt between being cooked and being stuffed and mounted though.

On Sunday we did some exceedingly boring chores and rewarded ourselves with a trip to Rye to find lunch. We ended up going to a place called Fletcher’s House because it was so late quite a lot of places were closed and this had the merit of being open and having a table free. It is situated by the bell tower in Rye where Oscar as a three year old caused absolute mayhem by having hysterics on the one and only ladder that served for both up and down traffic and caused total bell tower gridlock. He had to be rescued by an off duty fireman. He doesn’t remember any of this. I remember everything in vivid and traumatic detail.

Fletcher’s House is a stunning Tudor building which was owned by John Fletcher, the poet and playwright who was a contemporary of Shakespeare. The food was also amazing. The decor was reasonably alarming. Not the full ostrich alarming. More like a rococo brothel. It had extraordinary gold bathrooms which were giving me Joan Collins in her Bitch era. We were invited to explore because of the architecture. In one of the empty dining rooms upstairs I thought I saw a dead mouse and approached with mildly hysterical caution. It turned out to be a lump of mud with grass sticking out of it and I went limp with relief because the food was so nice I want to go back and if there had been rodents, that would have been impossible. I am still mourning the time when my favourite Indian takeaway that did the best tarka dhal on the planet got closed down because of mice. I’ve never tasted dhal so good since. One does have to wonder whether it was the addition of mice that made it so tasty.

I have been taking brisk beach walks in the face of howling gales and sideways rain. We got no sniff of the Northern Lights this week due to clouds. There was a faint glow of red on the horizon that looked like France was on fire and that was about it.

We have made no progress on the house. Funds are so low as to be antipodean and the curtains we were going to hang had the wrong tops so we had to order new fitments and they have only just arrived. My sadness at our failure to progress is mitigated by the fact that even if we never did another thing to the house, it’s still a fucking great house. I’ve been in much, much worse situations with houses. There is a lot to be grateful for. I did spring clean on one day because the kids are all coming down in a couple of weeks and apart from a lick and a promise to the most well trafficked parts of the house I have done nothing since they were last here at Christmas.

What I’m Reading:

January has been exceedingly meh on the reading front, which hasn’t helped the feeling that I started January 2026 in 1984 and will continue inhabiting it until 2037.

I listened to A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch on Libby. I thought I ought to dip my toe back into Murdoch after having read The Bell about twenty years ago and really disliking it. I felt I hadn’t given her a fair crack of the whip and the fact that the audiobook was narrated by Derek Jacobi helped swing it. I love Derek Jacobi.

In my teens I was invited to go and see the play Becket by Jean Anouilh by a friend of my mum’s who was rather well off and cultured and occasionally gave me marvellous opportunities like this one. She had a friend in the cast and we were invited backstage to meet her. Derek Jacobi played Becket and Robert Lindsey played Henry II. I bumped into Derek Jacobi backstage and failed to recognise him because he was wearing jeans and sunglasses and for some reason I had only ever imagined him wearing his I Claudius toga. It shows you what a peasant I was and sometimes still am.

Back to Iris Murdoch. Jacobi reads it like a dream which is the only thing that kept me going. Otherwise I hated it and everyone who sailed in it.

I read Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer thanks to NetGalley. I thought it would be something along the Catherine Newman line and it came with glowing endorsements from all sorts of people, which is why I requested it. It was not like Catherine Newman. I hated everyone in it.

I am hoping that things pick up on the book front soon.

What I’m Watching:

Obviously watching Ambulance and will be for longer than this January and possibly next January.

I can’t quite bring myself to watch the last season of Queer Eye yet because the toxic gossip definitely sours the feel good factor, although I will undoubtedly watch it when I want to weep unrestrainedly for six hours solid.

Jason and I started watching Down Cemetery Road, which is an adaptation of Mick Herron’s debut, which I thankfully read so long ago I cannot spoil it for myself. I love Emma Thompson and have a huge crush on Ruth Wilson so I am enjoying it quite a lot.

If you would like to book a tarot reading with me, the link is here.

Let’s start with the cheering information that my house still gives great sunset action.

Now we are braced, we can get down to all things medical.

My dad is still in the rehabilitation unit. He is slowly regaining strength and movement and he is stable. He doesn’t like doing his homework, which is causing things to be slower and more frustrating than anyone but him would like. I believe it’s bad form to push your aged parent out the window, especially when it’s in a hospital, so I am learning to go and sit out in the corridor with my rage. There was a day this week when he did choose to do his homework and it was enough hope for me to feel better for a bit. I’ll take it.

I drove back to Kent yesterday but in the week I was up in Leicester we moved mountains. If dad is able to regain mobility he will be coming home in a few weeks, so we have been doing an early spring clean to try and ensure the house will be as accessible as possible. We had to fill in a form to see if the hospital could help with equipment for his return. It took a whole morning of measuring for us to formally acknowledge what we already knew, my parent’s house is a disaster in terms of accessibility and practicality. At least it has nice views.

Over the last two months I have learned many, many things which, should I ever have to do this again (no thank you), will mean that I am fully prepared for most eventualities. It has also cemented some key ideas to carry forward into my own decrepitude, which will hopefully save my children from some of the agonies we have been experiencing in recent weeks. I thought about writing a post about it, but I’m not sure anyone needs that kind of cheer in January.

My highlights are:

Teach your elders to use technology. I am training my dad to use a Kindle. It’s very helpful when he only has one working hand and can’t turn pages. After seven weeks he is also managing to use his mobile phone from time to time, usually to tell me that he has ‘lost’ his book and doesn’t know how to get back to it.

Encourage your elders to use accessible banking and not put their money into a regional building society, forty minutes drive from their house which only has one branch and doesn’t even have cheque books.

Ocado is your friend. Anyone and anything that will deliver delicious food items to your front door will do. Thank you for arriving one evening with cassoulet for weary hospital travellers.

If you’re not going to age gracefully into a bungalow (and I don’t blame you if this is not your bag), at least buy a house with wide doorways, level floors and a fully functioning downstairs bathroom. My dad is convinced a Stannah stairlift will solve all his problems. I asked him what would happen when he got upstairs? He said: ‘What do you mean?’ I replied: ‘Well, unless it’s going to whizz you down the hallway and tuck you into bed and wake you up and drive you to the bathroom in the night it just means you’ll have all the same problems but with a different view.’ We are currently experiencing impasse in relation to this thorny problem.

Added to this we have had to deal with break ups, other people we love in hospital and a friend dying. January has been spoiling us good and proper.

Let’s move away from the medical for the next bit of this newsletter.

I was quite cunning with my Christmas money this year and decided to spend it on things that would keep me going through the endless drear of January. I invested in the Frederic Malle perfume of my dreams, L’Eau D’Hiver. I have been in love with this scent for years and never been able to justify its outrageous price tag. It never goes on sale and when I asked a friend who is a perfume collector if there was a dupe, she laughed hollowly and advised me to start saving for the real thing. For years I have been taking side quests to Liberty’s perfume department for a spray of it as a promise to future me, and now I own a bottle.

When I was waiting for it to be delivered I had a crisis of faith and wondered if, when it got here I wouldn’t love it anymore. I do love it. I love it dearly. I love it so much I keep sniffing my wrists in public like the weirdo I am. I need to make it last because it’s probably the only bottle I will ever be in a position to buy, but goodness me it’s delicious. It smells a little like the head of a new baby mixed with something edible that comes out of a bakery kitchen early in the morning.

I also bought a case of Rapscallion Soda. They kept advertising on my Instagram feed and I was lured in by the promise of particularly fiery ginger beer. I bought all the flavours to try. I love fizzy things but I hate things that are too sugary and I flat out refuse to drink diet drinks of any kind. Rapscallion make small batches of fruity fizz with very little sugar and real ingredients that don’t read like some kind of binary code.

They are delicious. The ginger has chilli, pimento and cardamon in it and tastes like fire. It will surely put hairs on your chest. My other favourite is the Cranachan flavour which tastes like all the raspberries of summer. I’m eking them out and savouring every one.

While I have been away Jason has dealt with a leak in our en-suite which is in the same place but slightly higher than the last leak we had in there. He had to go and buy a special wrench from a plumbing supply shop in Ashford and that was the only joy he could take from it. We live on a marsh by the sea. It is not surprising to me that water is a constant worry to us, one way and another.

We also had plumbing problems with the boat, which has still not sold. Jason had to go and tackle the reason why the toilet wouldn’t flush, the pump wouldn’t work and the sink started leaking. I am grateful that he is (mostly) a practical man. It is all fixed now and we are crossing our fingers that we can sell it before our mooring fees come due again.

We have finally been graced with fibre broadband at the house, two months after signing up to the evil overlord that is Musk’s Starlink. This is very annoying, but given that had we not done that we would probably have been shouting down tin cans connected with string for the next five years, we have grudgingly accepted our fate. We are hoping to sever our links with the face of a haunted, melted Nazi ham that is Elon asap.

Left to his own devices, Jason spent some of his Christmas money on a full size, working traffic light. It is currently lying on its side in our hallway due to the fact that it is bloody massive and he can’t lift it on his own. Whoever sold it to him probably nicked it, because the fixing bits where it was attached to the pole look like they have been wrenched off in a hurry. So we have a stolen traffic light clogging up the hall. It is going in the garden apparently. This is something Monty Don never has to contend with, but I’ll figure something out eventually.

Just before Christmas, Jason and I went for lunch in Rye and I bought this big, cloth basket in a charity shop for a fiver. All the way home he was ragging me about it because it was too big and we didn’t need it, and then he went and bought a bloody traffic light. I don’t have the energy to be outraged, but I should be.

I am mostly keeping on top of things, despite living two, disparate lives at the moment. Things are falling through the cracks, but only small things so far. I accidentally shrank my Hussein Chalayan jumper, which was a fantastic find in a charity shop for a tenner last summer. I got my money’s worth from it but was still fairly devastated when it came out of the wash in a size that would only fit Derek.

I accidentally listed a pair of shoes on Vinted at completely the wrong size and had to accept a return, which was really annoying, but I did sell a painting and a book for enough money to fund some of the upcoming birthday carnage.

I also slightly broke my dad’s wheelchair by pulling off one of the brakes. But to be fair, my mum broke the foot rest two days previously, so I was running true to form. We are now banned from driving the wheelchair, which is another reason why dad needs to be back on his feet to come home. He made me take photos of both breakages and it’s the first genuine smile I’ve seen on his face for weeks, so that was well worth the disapprobation of the nursing staff.

What I’m Reading:

I have managed, despite intense emotional provocation, not to buy a single book on Kindle this year. I have also, largely due to existing only in hospitals, banks and supermarkets not bought a single, physical book this year. I can’t say I feel good about it. Mostly I feel as mad as hell, but I’m sure it’s doing me some kind of deep, psychic good that I will only appreciate twenty years from now. FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

Thornyhold by Mary Stewart was lovely. A ridiculous, slightly magical froth of a book that was exactly perfect for someone who needs to escape January grimness. I used to read a lot of Mary Stewart as a teen but I hadn’t come across this before and it was delicious.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett was a book I ignored for a long time, despite being a Patchett fan. I am always suspicious of books everyone else loves and have to sidle up to them over time. I did love it, so I am glad I finally gave in and read it.

I just finished The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín (thank you NetGalley). I’ve never read any of his work, so I thought I’d give him a whirl. This is a collection of short stories. I think they’re very accomplished. They seem to largely be about loneliness and identity and how memory shapes us. I didn’t love them, but they were beautifully written and easy to read.

What I’m Watching:

Mum and I persist in being strangely pulled into watching episodes of Ambulance on iPlayer. Perhaps it makes us feel better about where we are and how lucky we are despite wanting to tip dad out the window on the regular. Perhaps we are gearing up for a late career as paramedics. Who can say?

I particularly love the clip in one of the opening montages where a man who looks a bit like a sentient potato is wrapped in a blanket in the back of an ambulance with only his head poking out and says in a broad Scouse accent: ‘I wanna thank everyone before I ‘ave a nap.’ Like he’s at an award’s ceremony rather than a pensioner recovering from a heart attack. It would certainly be how I’d like to be remembered.

I have watched Banjo and Ro’s Grand Island Hotel twice now. I may well watch it again. It is deeply comforting in ways that make more sense to me than learning how to expertly staunch a head wound.

Ever since Banjo Beale won Interior Design Masters several years ago, I have loved him. I love his aesthetic. I love that he haunts salvage yards and antique shops and repurposes all kinds of old junk. Other people have swimming with dolphins on their bucket list. I’d like to go antique hunting with Banjo for the day please. He also has a fantastic dog called Grampa and two pet pigs. What’s not to like?

In this series Banjo and his husband take on a dilapidated mansion house on the Isle of Ulva that they are hoping to turn into a hotel. Ulva is only accessible by boat from the Isle of Mull. It has no roads and only sixteen inhabitants. If there are storms, the island is completely cut off. It certainly makes me feel better about my frequent flier card at the local Screwfix, which thankfully I can access by road.

If you’d like a reading you can book in with me here. If you’d like to arrange a reading for someone else, message me and we can make that work.

I did a reading recently for my friend - she wanted something to help her ritually reflect on and wrap up the year, to better prepare for the year to come. You can read a little bit about it here.

If you’d like a Spotify Wrapped style reading, or to set your house in order before the new year comes knocking, we can absolutely do this. There is a section in the booking form for writing me a note about what you want from your time with me. I’m always excited to try something a little different.

Hello loves. Let’s unpack the week that was.

Things around the house have stalled a little. The weekend we had planned to finally finish the study got overtaken by life. Jason spent most of Saturday doing a last minute showing of the boat to a guy who turned out to be a waste of space and who posted the viewing on TikTok. His MO is to prank people selling expensive things into thinking he might buy them and then ‘exposing’ their stupidity on social media. We found this out accidentally when Oscar’s friend had the video turn up in his feed as something he might be interested in and contacted Oscar to see why his dad was on TikTok.

It was upsetting in a multiplicity of ways, but in the end we decided to let the hungry algorithm bury it, rather than make a fuss which might prolong its shelf life. Nearly all the comments pointed out what a dick move it was, which somewhat restored my faith. It’s very different wasting the time of a luxury business where salesmen are paid to talk to you, to wasting the time of a bloke who just wants to sell his boat and has taken time out of his day to clean it and show you round.

On Sunday we drove across to Hove and went to see Dani and Tallulah in their new flat. The flat is beautiful and they are happily engaged in dragging various bits of furniture from Facebook Marketplace up multiple flights of stairs to furnish their nest. It’s so nice that they’re finally in. The buying process was hugely traumatic and there were a few moments, right up to the end, when it looked like it would all fall apart. At one point they lived in a tent on the South Downs for three weeks. That’s how bad things got. The relief is palpable.

We also finally met Mazi, one of their favourite dog sitting clients who was with them for the weekend. He has excellent teef. I love him.

Some quite significant bits of my past happened in Brighton and I always find it odd to be wandering around with the girls and bump into old memories and past versions of me. It always leaves me feeling slightly haunted.

We had lunch at The Permit Room, which is a sort of mini Dishoom set in a sprawling bar. Sadly it is too mini to do their gunpowder potatoes, which I love, but their mattar paneer is banging so I allowed myself to be consoled. We wandered through the Lanes on our way home. Tallulah wanted to show me a gallery she loves. It turns out that it’s a gallery I know very well. It’s those ghosts again.

Bousham Gallery is the sort of place I would like to own. It’s a mixture of vintage finds and new things made by artists and craftspeople. It’s where I first came across the work of Robin Neild whose work I am obsessed with and who I am lucky enough to own a piece by.

They also have a gorgeous collection of kokeshi dolls, all of which I covet madly. I restrained myself and bought a small, stripy Christmas decoration instead of everything in the shop.

Back at home:

The garage doors are still AWOL. Hopefully next week. In the meantime I spend half my life gingerly creeping into the garage on my way to my studio, daring myself to look at the new and improved selection of rodent traps gifted to us by Del the rat man.

Apparently rats and mice breed constantly and have a 21 day gestation period, so you will know in three weeks if your dastardly plan to cut them off in their prime has worked or not. We are heading into week three and the culmination of our reign of terror. I am quite depressed by how many things I now know about rodents, which I wish I didn't.

The only creature I will happily accept in my garage now is a pine marten. I saw one on the Highland police programme my mum got me hooked on. A man had rescued it as a kit and was keeping it in his house. He had named it Derek, which as we all know is one of my favourite and best names.

It is illegal to keep pine martens as pets so the police had to go and charm Derek away. Apparently the trick to attracting recalcitrant pine martens is jam, which they will do anything for. The man who found him was very sad and cried, and I get that, but also, if he wanted to keep him he should really have thought twice about advertising, ‘have your photo taken with Derek the pine marten,’ on the local Facebook page. Word gets about.

I would 100% want my photograph taken with Derek the pine marten. I grew up in the Seventies where you could go to Twycross Zoo on a Sunday and watch the PG Tips chimps dressed as humans having afternoon tea. And we did.

I desperately wanted my photo taken at the seaside where men with accordions and hurdy gurdies would perambulate the piers offering for you to have your photo taken with tiny spider monkeys dressed in waistcoats and fez’s they happened to have about their person. My mum said this was cruel (true, but also FEZ!), so I wasn’t allowed, but I wanted it with the heat of a thousand suns.

As a child I was obsessed with wanting a pet spider monkey. I was going to call it Jemima. I also wanted a mouse which I decided I would keep in a Dairylea Cheese Triangle box on the side of the bath. None of these things came to pass. Nor was I allowed to cuddle the baby tiger they were glad handing about, the one and only time we went to the circus. I was less impressed by the parrots that were trained to ride tiny bicycles. We had a rogue rescue canary called Twee who used to try and make nests in my mum’s hair, but also freely shat on my dad who he had no respect for. Birds were an everyday thing and had fully lost their allure, but I’d still really like a pet monkey called Jemima. The mouse in the cheese triangle box has finally lost its appeal thanks to Del.

In less animal based news, I have been attempting to get to grips with Christmas shopping this week. Over the years our Christmases have become more basic and as a result, considerably less stressful, which is devoutly to be wished. Having said that, I never entirely relax until I have at least one small something to give everyone. This week’s goal was to find those somethings.

I am lucky that all my children are grown up and they no longer need me to provide acres of stuff. In fact, now that they are all in possession of their own space, they actively dislike quantities of random stuff, which is a blessing. We have boiled gifting down to books, food and possibly some small item of wonderment. If these things (not the food) are second hand, so much the better.

I do the wonderment, Jason gives out cash which is less exciting but often more needful. I have been scouring my treasure haunts for weeks now on the look out for magical things, with some great successes and other dismal disappointments. This week I ratcheted things up a notch and took myself off to Rye and an afternoon of forensic attention to its various glories.

Rye is somewhere that is very near to where I live and which I rarely go to because it is too needful. In the summer it’s easy to avoid it because it’s wall to wall tourists and I have less and less patience for crowds. The soaring levels of rage nullify any satisfaction to be gained from fossicking about. In winter it is harder to resist its siren call across the marsh.

I am much better these days at not buying all the things, but at Christmas, where I need to spend money I find it very difficult to resist the lure of two for them, one for me, so I only indulge myself in a visit there when my bank balance is on the pinker side of health.

Yesterday afternoon there was a giant wall of mist sweeping in from the sea and hours of that fine rain that wets you through, which meant that Rye would be empty and I could happily go about my business. I was just leaving the car park when Vic Reeves and his wife Nancy Sorrell bustled past me. I resisted the temptation to fangirl and decided to take their presence as a good omen. And I did get everything I went for, so it worked.

I was lucky in that my favourite shop, Soap and Salvation was closed. It saved me from temptation. I had to step away from the newly kitted out Merchant and Mills shop, because it was too riskily beautiful. The other places I like to haunt are so far out of my budget it’s actually not that difficult to come away without a purchase. Puckhaber antiques is wonderful but for the terminally deep of pocket. I did drift into Rye Art Gallery, which is always gorgeous and which also has stunning views from the back of the gallery out over the marshes. I didn’t buy anything because everything I liked started at about two grand and went from there.

I came away with treasure for everyone else and only spent £4 on a framed picture of Samuel Whiskers attempting to put Tom Kitten in pastry for myself, which I think we can all agree would have been a crime not to get.

We’ve had a couple of gloriously sunny but biting cold days in which I bundled up and took myself out on beach walks. On one of the days I parked up by the power station, cut across the beach and walked along the shore by the sea side of it. It felt like walking off the end of the world.

I’ve been attempting to find decent local farm shops. We have an absolutely brilliant one called Perry Court Farm Shop but it is forty minutes drive from me and my goal is to find somewhere nearer for farm shop emergencies. e.g. me not being able to stop thinking about eating delicious cheese etc. This week I tried one on the other side of Dymchurch which is part of something called Haguelands, which promises to be an idyllic play park for children.

In reality it is more like the site of a series of war crimes, as its name harks back to. As far as I could see it consists of a field full of haunted play equipment that looks like it comes from all the closed down Happy Eaters in the world, and a sign promising alpacas that never materialised. I risked life and limb navigating pot holes the size of Dorset to wash up at a row of industrial units that housed a tattoo parlour and a commercial laundry with nary a farm or a vegetable in sight. 0/10.

Yesterday I visited a farm shop en route to Rye that we used to frequent when we were on holiday in the area when the kids were small. Back in the day it was solid. Now it evokes something of the Cold War. Flickering strip lighting and racks of garage shelving which promised local produce, as long as local produce comprises of Scotland’s finest export, the Tunnocks Tea Cake at £4 a box and a row of ‘authentic African curry mixes.’ The vegetables looked like I’d got there after the last arm wrestle for cabbages was long over. I could have bought a wizened green pepper for £1.50 but decided against it for reasons best known to myself and my spiralling farm shop rage. The hunt for a good one continues.

I got exciting post this week. My friend sent me a package of delicious stickers, a permission slip pad and her creative Advent box. Anna’s work is so beautiful, as is Anna who is a most excellent person. She’s funny, smart and wise and I feel honoured to be in her gang. Her website is here if you’d like to buy her work.

My friend also sent me a parcel with a lucky horse shoe patch because I have been talking about resetting my habits to being a person who is lucky. It is surprising how often I have been lucky since I decided to do this. It all stemmed from an interview I did with my friend for her newsletter, The Ladybird Purse. I realised that I talk to myself all the time about how unlucky I am and I got curious about what would happen if I changed that voice in my head. Good things, it turns out.

What I’m Reading:

I read Like A Cat Loves A Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark by James Bailey. This is out in April 2026 and I absolutely loved it. Prior to last year I had only ever read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and didn’t care for it. Then I read The Ballad of Peckham Rye and fell for Spark big time. A Far Cry from Kensington cemented my love and I am determined to continue discovering her strange, spiteful, funny and dark oeuvre. The biography is written in a similar vein to Spark’s own writing and has moments where I found myself laughing out loud. Unsettlingly brilliant. This gives you a flavour:

‘Having completed a first draft of her 1963 novel, The Girls of Slender Means, she told her editor that the book ‘reads like something written by an octopus in a space-ship with a pen in every hand, being serenaded by Siamese twins.’ It would turn out to be one of her more conventional offerings.’

I wanted pure escapism and frisked my library shelves to find Still Life by Louise Penny, the first of the Inspector Gamache novels. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It sort of gave Midsummer Murders in French Canadian forests and I am up for it.

What I’m Watching:

I finished the Highland Cops and am back to Strictly. I enjoyed the sheer camp extravaganza of Blackpool week. I was very sorry to see La Voix exit, but it was an excellent exit, which was slightly cheering.

What I’m Listening to:

Lily Allen - still 100% obsessed.

I listened to an audiobook version of the Epic of Gilgamesh because it is a myth that crops up time after time in all sorts of things I read and am interested in. My verdict? If Gilgamesh were around today he’d be giving Elon Musk a run for his money. Gilgamesh - what an unspeakable dick.