I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. It seems rather bizarre to me to suppose that my will and determination would be significantly stronger on any given date over any other. Neither do I see the point in waiting until the New Year to begin something – if one has already decided to do it, why wait?

The closest I came to a New Year resolution was to have a dry January, for economic and detox reasons to recover slightly from the excesses of the Christmas holidays. I admit I have fallen off the wagon to the tune of two pints thus far, (I made it six days, including New Year’s Day) I will not go in to the reasons, but I’m fine with them and still broadly sticking to the alcohol-free plan, despite continuing to be sorely tried by ongoing and, as yet, unresolved plumbing issues.

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I was at my school reunion at the weekend. It was…well, hard to describe unless you were there, in which case, you won’t need my inadequate attempts to explain the gamut of emotions. If, as is more likely, you weren’t there, I hope this may give you an inkling: it was amazing and comfortable, funny and sad, euphoric and exhausting, novel and familiar…I could go on with the contrasts, but I’m sure you get the idea.

Meh! you might think, it was just a bunch of people you probably lost touch with for a reason and won’t want to see again, but you’d be wrong. When we were there, it was a convent and private boarding school*. (Yes, that’s right, I’m a convent girl and I’m not a nun, make of that what you will).

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The weather this summer has, for the most part, been beyond a joke, even by this country’s motley standard. Three of my events this season have been cancelled due to heavy rain making the site a bog/river/lake.  Night time rain has traumatised myself and other survivors of Kelmarsh into lying fretfully awake in our tents, fearful of waking up to similar scenes of flooding.

We made it to Herstmonceux on the Bank Holiday Friday in good time and had the tent up and the trailer emptied before the rain started (to fill it up). We watched with growing trepidation as the ground assumed sponge-like qualities: water visibly squelching up as you trod down, and this was inside the tent. As it turned out, the rain did not linger and although it was most definitely welly weather on Saturday, the ground dried out nicely and Sunday was glorious, ending with a breathtaking view of the very starry, starry sky.*  Of course, just as we were packing up on Monday evening, it started to rain again, against all probability and just to be annoying. Naturally, now that I am not camping out and have started to write about the rain, we have wall-to-wall sunshine. It’s enough to make an atheist wonder if there is a god, who not only plays dice but loses heavily.

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So, here we are again, with Mercury causing trouble. The planet going Retrograde is being blamed for all kinds of breakdowns and communications, meanwhile, our thermometers have been rising too with a small heatwave last week. It makes a change from floods, I suppose, at least if you don’t count the personal ones I have been experiencing in my own little sweatshop (or the conservatory and my workroom, as it is known.) Either way, it is exploding head time.

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No, really, this is not a badly drawn butterfly, it’s real.

Found this little fellow in the garden yesterday, well, at least two of them actually. When they are in flight, all you see is a flash of shocking pink. I’ve never seen anything like it before and I’m almost certain it’s Life imitating Art, in this case, a child’s painting of a butterfly. The grey is precisely the shade that the white paint goes in a child’s paintbox after repeatedly being used with a none-too-clean paintbrush, and the pink has clearly been daubed on with a highlighter pen after all else has failed.

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It’s no good. I’ve searched and pored over the small print on the tin, but nowhere can I find a disclaimer regarding the colour of this Ronseal Fence Life that they have entertainingly labelled “Medium Oak”. I have taken the colour swatch from their website for your amusement –>

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Watts Chapel

I have been a little slow in sharing this find. You know how it is when life, the universe and an inability to pull your finger out and download your photos from the camera get in the way, but better late than never, I say and perhaps the timing is apt.

A couple of months ago, I finally got around to an excursion with a friend (deferred several times over a few months for one reason or another) to Watts Gallery and more specifically, Watts Chapel and Cemetery. OMG!  Awesome is not a word I use casually, but it was completely and utterly an awesome place, an awesome experience and a jaw-droppingly awesome sight. In all…awesome.

As you may be aware from recent posts, we have been migrating from using the old Windoze-based kit to Macs. One unfortunate side effect of this is that there is now not a single functioning printer in the house…out of four.

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So what did I get for Christmas?

I got lucky, that’s what 😀  See? It says so here –>

The card is from the rather lovely Vintage Erotica Tarot, just one of my many Christmas presents and the source of many of the previously mentioned giggles 🙂 In case you can’t see it properly, the card is The Wheel and is subtitled “You Are Lucky”, which pretty much sums up how I feel about life at the moment.

This deck is a collection of, as you might reasonably expect, vintage erotica – lovely original sepia toned pictures of un-airbrushed ladies with naturally shaped bodies and plush, luxuriant lady beards (no Brazilians here, or if there are, it’s due to nationality rather than nether region hairstyling).

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Was this how your Christmas went? Or is that just the stuff of soap operas where everyone on the street/square/close has the kind of issues that make your toes curl?

Did your spouse have you fingering the carving knife longingly? Did your children turn you into a shrieking harpy? Was your head in danger of exploding like an overfilled balloon? Did the relatives have you reaching for the gin? Were you desperate for it all to be over for another year?

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