anxiety – La Vue du Maine

A Stroke of Luck

The dogs are obsessed with rabbits and mice in the garden, and our resident frog, Ferdinand, is singing his head off in our little pond. I love how living in the countryside brings the passing seasons closer, and I was acutely aware of missing my favourite time of year, the autumn, last year, because I spent just about all of it in hospital.

A Journey in my Head

But by the end of last week, everything had more or less fallen into place. All the hotels, crossings and appointments are booked, everything that can be done in advance has been. Excellent. Then I realised that I didn’t feel better. Well, not substantially.

Summer rain

The other reason I haven’t been writing posts recently is that I have been trying to focus on another project. I’ve had an idea for a new novel, and I got quite excited about it, because it’s the first time I’ve had anything like inspiration for fiction writing in – literally – years. It’s still very much just a WIP: I have a main character and the barest of outlines of a story arc. But it is definitely progress of a sort.

I have been absent in the Spring

I’ve had a bad couple of weeks, mental health-wise. The weather’s been changeable, I’ve had migraines (which may or may not be connected to the meteorological conditions, after 50 years I’ve given up trying to work out the causes), upsetting events in the news, I had my first COVID-19 vaccination which gave me a fewContinue reading “I have been absent in the Spring”

Eat, love, remember

My dear friend Chantal over in Chicago recently posted a picture of one of her mother’s recipes and that reminded me that I have none of Mum’s. I regret that bitterly, because she was a wonderful cook, was Constance Ernestine Sally East-Goodwin, and I would love to try to reproduce some of her dishes, andContinue reading “Eat, love, remember”

The L-word

Or should that be the ‘c’-word…? Or the ‘v’-word…? Many infinitely more qualified writers than me have shared their experiences of the strange and unfamiliar ‘new normal’ we have all had to adjust to in the last twelve months, but I am going to throw in my two-pennyworth anyway. For me, it is a goodContinue reading “The L-word”