Today it is grey and humid with a strong wind and a feeling that it is waiting for me to go out so that it can dump loads of rain on me. The cats are home and the juvenile seagulls have dropped in on mum and dad to snuggle into the nest and hope for lunch.
I’ve been waiting for an engineer to fix our landline. (He came, he was lovely, and he fixed the fault. How’s that for ideal hero material?)
That's meant that it's a perfect day to fill a couple of charity bags to be collected tomorrow with the clothes that fitted when I packed them away in April but are now too big for me. What lovely, lovely words!! Academically I knew I was losing weight but it doesn’t feel as if I’ve been dieting because I’m eating sensibly, walking loads and doing some core strengthening exercises each day. Most of all, I’m eating mindfully, which means food has to be on a plate and it’s not eaten when I’m doing something else. (Or am I the only one who can scoff a packet of biscuits without remembering what I’ve done?)
I’ve dieted on and off for years, but not dieting is working infinitely better because nothing is forbidden. I simply say ‘is this good enough?’ Or ‘Am I hungry or am I bored and/or fed up? Or thirsty?’ As I looked at my eating pattern I realised how often I pushed myself on with the promise of a sweet treat as a reward. Sometimes, only chocolate will do, but now I reward myself with special treats more often than not. I got the idea of doing this from books by Fiona Ferris and Jennifer Melville and I make a point of re-reading them regularly to make me question whether I am doing everything as well as I can and making the life I want and deserve to have.
Fiona Ferris suggests making yourself your own heroine, which appeals to me given what I write. She also suggested imagining your house as a hotel and asking would you stay there. If not, then why are you putting up with it? And it isn’t about things being new or fancy or redecorating from top to toe. It’s about using the nice stuff today rather than saving it for visitors. It’s about airing the house. It’s about creating your own quiet gentle spot. It's about having a place for things and putting them there and passing on what you're not using so someone else can enjoy it.
So I’ve cleared and tidied and wondered where it all came from and started charging batteries for my LED candles which double as emergency lighting and replacement light on grey days. I’ve cleaned out my essential oil diffusers. I’ve washed the rugs and curtains and the oilskin tablecloth. I’ve damp dusted everything that couldn’t move out of the way and the windows are wide open to air the house so it smells nicely of late summer.
All in all, I’ve had a flurry of domesticity Tomorrow if the weather is better, then I will get out and make the most of it. If not, then I've got the kitchen in my sights and I will look at cookbooks and recipes and my favourite cafes and chains and see what they serve and work out what I want to cook to recreate my favourites at home. Today it’s Subway hearty Italian bread and the house smells gently of it in a promise of winter feasts to come as the house begins to snuggle round me as summer moves into autumn.
And when I get a summer day I shall be out there enjoying it, and maybe you could do that with a good book? Because it just so happens that I’ve got some on special offer at 99p in the UK and 99c in the US.
There are the first 3 Amy Hammonds cosy mysteries, which are Wasted on the Young, Up the Garden Path and A stitch in Time which would be a nice way to meet her before the next book in the series comes out in September. Like me, she’s an avid sewer, with a tendency to promiser herself that tomorrow she’ll be organised. She’s also trying to get out of a rut after her parents death, but she doesn’t expect what she gets!
If you’re not in the mood for dead bodies then there are two Oldcastle cosy romances. Gentle, sweet, family orientated, happy endings guaranteed. Ideal with a cold drink in the sunshine or a hot drink indoors in the rain… They’re The Wrong Twin and Kings of the Castle.
Last but not least there are two from my Shadows series which I write as Eleanor Neville. They’re a little bit sharper, a little bit more violent and feature MI27, the department of the British Secret Service who deal with the really weird cases and judge their successes by what doesn’t happen. Teams of agents are made up of a man and a woman and they go to enormous trouble to make sure they’re compatible. In theory, they never, ever get involved with each other of the people they’re protecting or working with. In practice people get good at not noticing things. Those two are Guardian Angel and Daymare.
And to end with, here is a beautiful day when all was well with my world and I let the housework wait for days like these. Here's hoping for good weather for all of us. And by 'good' I mean the right weather to do something I can enjoy, whether it is indoors or outdoors.
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