I did a big lunch today at work. It was for a colleague’s retirement so I made a special effort to make it nice and I really enjoyed it but boy I’m slumped now. If I look at another morsel of food today I shan’t want to eat again. Ok so that isn’t quite true but one big advantage of preparing loads of food is that it leaves me disinclined to pick and snack.

I had been approaching March 2007 with a certain amount of trepidation because I had this sense of foreboding – for over two years this has been niggling away and I’ve never known why. But the month is practically out and there has been nothing out of the ordinary, nothing remarkable and nothing scary. Perhaps it was just a marking post of some kind and its significance, or lack thereof, will only become apparent later – or not. Who knows?

Anyway after tomorrow we are into April. A new month, and Easter is a time of rebirth isn’t it……

Sorry just having a philosophical moment there. Normal service will be resumed imminently.

I took some of my sand to work today in little plastic lidded tubes. I popped a few poppy seeds in the top from a poppy I had in the garden a couple of years back so at least if they get tipped into a garden they might grow something. When I told the girlie what I was going to do she said that I would probably be sectioned but oddly enough very few people actually queried it. I guess they are just used to my eccentric little ways now.

Today I have learnt that we might as well be living in Russia and that prices are generally cheaper in Germany. Snippets overheard in passing. Other people’s conversations are tantalising when you only hear a sentence or two. Why the lady in Sainsbury’s car park was bad-temperedly telling her husband ‘we might as well be living in Russia’ is something I shall never know but perhaps like me she couldn’t hold of the bread she wanted. Four places I went to and still couldn’t get any. Yes they all had bread and a large array of bread at that but not precisely the kind I wanted. I’m being fussy again. I am doing a big lunch tomorrow and I want what I want and I don’t want to have to compromise. In fact I really should be making a start on some cooking but a coffee and a Danish pastry first seemed like a good idea. I haven’t had a naughty snack like that in months so it’s a huge treat. I don’t get out much.

The only good thing to be said about the weather today is that it isn’t tempting me to venture out into the garden to play with the sand. We have had a half ton of sand on the patio covering a twelve foot square, on top of which we had our pool while we had it. Pool gone and now in need of the patio to erect a large gazebo I have been moving the sand. It is a slow process and I am all out of ideas now on where to discreetly stow large quantities of sand, having filled two dustbins, three large garden bags and seven smaller rubble bags - in addition to using it to bed a path and several isolated slabs around the garden, mixing it with compost to create a nice crumbly mix for pots and adding it as a weight to a few hollow garden ornaments. But I am still left with a large pile, a huge haemorrhoid of sand remains like a beached beach. I have it in mind for sandwich filling for tomorrow and hubby suggested taking some to work so people could drop it out of the legs of their trousers, à la Great Escape but I shall be haunted by this sand for a while I suspect.

I just had a groovy idea……..must go and find those empty vials I had…….

I need some new shoes.

I’m not asking much. I just want a pair of open sandals, with a strap at the back, at least an inch of wedge heel and a washable (or at least wipe-able) inner. Can I find such a thing - no of course not. I spend half my shopping life hunting for things that have not been made, or at least not made in this particular era.

The trouble with shoe fashion is that it is assumed that all women either want highly impractical footwear that just looks pretty as they swing their pampered little piggies out of the car or they want flat, lumpy, serious looking and expensive all terrain wear. I realise that fashion caters for the masses but I’m not simply talking about fashion fashion but basic style. There are not so many of us ladies with such specific requirements I guess, for instance I need a shoe that is a) robust enough to walk the 2+ miles to work, b) open enough to allow the air to circulate to avoid foot odour, c) has a sufficient amount of heel to avoid leg strain and d) smart enough to wear all day at work. I don’t want to have to lug several different pairs of shoes with me everyday.

And of course I have ugly feet, as a male friend once told me, so finding something to beautify them would be worse than impossible. There won’t be no man sucking my toes - although I can remember a time when I could suck my own.

Just been round the house scrubbing the carpets where the cats have been leaving little deposits. It’s one of the reasons I like bare boards and washable floors. When the boy was still living at home it was one his major grumbles, our preference for stripped and varnished boards over plush carpets, but then he wasn’t the one who had to clear up sicky spots. And I don’t just mean the cats of course; when the babes were little they were often messy on the carpets. Give me something I can wipe a cloth over any day. I know it feels nice underfoot having soft pile carpets, or at least it should do if you don’t have dry cracked skin that catches on the fibres. I’ve barefooted through most of my life on almost every surface imaginable and I have skin like leather on my soles so of course they aren’t necessarily as sensitive to and appreciative of the wonders of soft carpeting. My favourite underfoot experience is soft cool summer grass - can’t be beat - although I do also like warm fine sand, rippling little waves on the seashore and warmed smooth stone. I prefer nature-made to man-made.

They are curled up on the sofa now like two black and white angels, the cats I mean not my feet, looking like butter wouldn’t melt.

It has been a good gardening weekend this weekend. The girlie set out to overhaul one little area of the garden and spent the best part of the whole weekend clearing weeding, sweeping and beautifying it. When she decides to do something she does it and she does it thoroughly, it’s just a shame she only gets the gardening bug once a year. But help is help and I appreciated it, and the quiet company. At least she is artistic and constructive in her help unlike hubby who only wants to know how much he can cut down. He appears in the garden brandishing the shears with a disturbing gleam in his eye and I shudder at the thought of how many treasures will disappear forever.

There was a slightly embarrassing moment in Tesco yesterday when the girlie dared me to do a ‘sweep’. I was building all the toilet rolls into a pyramid – as you do – and another shopper dipped into the pile. I mean, if I thought anyone was around I wouldn’t have been doing it quite so flamboyantly. This is the kind of thing that gets me labelled as eccentric and as you see it isn’t always my idea!

I am not sure now which of the clocks are right in the house so it might be best if I go to bed soon in case it’s later than I think. It’s always later than you think.

The weather is unnecessarily cold I feel. Once again I have felt unable to put my toes outside the back door for fear they will fall off and there is so much to do out there. I did however manage to do a fair bit of seed sowing and seedling transplanting. I had to keep to the vicinity of the house today because I was waiting for a gazebo. Obviously I don’t mean in the same way as one waits for a bus, I wasn’t waiting by the front door in the hope that someone would be passing by and toss a gazebo onto the front path, this was an arranged delivery. It duly arrived. It arrived with an erroneous pole ( the girlie being a diligent sort counted all the pieces to make sure all was correct and just as well!). They are unable to change a pole. The whole lot must go back and be replaced by a whole new gazebo. So that was a bit of an irritation really.

After that the computer packed up and has died an ugly death. It has had to be removed (we haven’t gone so far as to destroy it – it isn’t a horse with a broken leg after all). I have my laptop but it doesn’t have everything on it that I am working on at the moment. So that was another irritation.

I felt hacked off by then.

So it was good to get away from the house and spend an evening dancing myself tired. It was a good session. I still find it the best way to empty my head of everything else. All the irritations of the day must just fall out when I’m moving. I am re-mellowed.

It may well have been the first day of Spring today but it was a bit nippy.

I found a reason today to use my Access training and popped a rather fabulous looking report into an envelope for the boss-man. I hope he is suitably impressed with it when it arrives. Probably won’t even notice – hey ho!

The girlie is feeling poorly – has a cold – so I called in at various retail outlets on my way home and bought her loads of comfort food, mostly chocolate. Katie brought in her version of comfort food in the form of a mouse. We decided to stick with tuna for dinner though as her offering was too small for three.

I have a tray of pumpkin seeds developing into pumpkin plants. They are to be white pumpkins apparently, if the packet is to be believed. Nearly all the seeds have performed as you would expect seeds to perform i.e. they have emerged from the compost leaves uppermost and seed down below the surface. But there is always one isn’t there, one joker that has to be different, I’ve called it Katie because it’s so dumb. Poking its little stalk down into the compost and waggling its little seedy bottom up into the sunlight, I don’t think it is going to be a successful plant somehow.

I have to do a lot of serious seed business tomorrow if I am going to have plenty of plants ready by the time the Open Garden gets into action but it really is quite difficult to plunge my little blue fingers into cold compost. I can’t escape it though and as I have to wait in all afternoon tomorrow for a marquee to arrive it should mean I don’t suddenly dash out to do a spot of shopping and forget what I am supposed to be doing.

Focus. I need to focus.

I have been on a course today learning about Access databases. It was the only Office programme I never quite got into the swing of using and now it is safely tucked under my belt and I can build a real swanky database. I just don’t have a good enough use to put it to at the moment but learning is never wasted. If there is some kind of emergency situation that requires an immediate building of a database I would be your woman. If for some reason I was stranded on a desert island I’m quite sure a database would come in terribly handy (but there would probably be slightly less use to be made of the address label wizard).

It was hard to be sitting at a computer for so long. Even though I spend most of my working day with a computer I can get up and walk away from it as and when I want, and I often wander. But in a classroom situation you can’t just suddenly rise up and wander off round the corridors at the drop of a cat. I know that should be hat but I’m not a great wearer of hats. I never feel comfortable being tied – be that to a timetable, a desk or a way of life. I need an open door, whether real or metaphorical, and even if I don’t use it I need to know it’s there.

Still the course today does mean I am out of the office for a couple of days and I can almost enjoy the thought but for the knowledge that I will go back to a pile of emails. This part of March is always a bit heeeeeeeaaaaaaaavy. It’s great to be so popular but I would prefer it to be because they like me and not because they want me to fix a problem, answer a question, or do some dreary little job that everyone else has snubbed. It’s the “Mother” thing really.

The flakes were falling thick and fast this morning - I wish they had been chocolate ones.

I’m starting to wonder if I should just turn in for the night.

Not only is it Monday, it’s a very cold one with snow, and shivering in the corridors, and not being able to regulate my own temperature.

Not only did I manage to not win the marquee on Ebay which I had been watching for two days, I also got an email to say my design I uploaded for my shop, for dark shirts, can’t be used because of…..some reason I couldn’t take in this evening.

Not only did I not feel overwhelmingly sociable today I even felt slightly unsociable to the few people I did communicate with.

Added to which the weather is bad so the internet keeps going off and this is the only evening I am in until Friday and I want to catch up with all my bits and pieces.

So you see there would be some justification in turning in early and hope that tomorrow is better.

I did get a nice text message today. It was from the girlie, it said ‘fantastic pasty’. (Yesterday she wanted me to make some cheese and onion pasties for her lunches this week which I duly did because I am a good mom. I also made hubby some biscuits for him to nibble on throughout the week. Little gestures!)

What is this life if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare……….sod that, I have to go dancing tonight. I’ll leave the standing around wistfully, dreamily and romantically staring into space for a day when I don’t have so many other things to do. Anyway, surely dancing is more of the care-free than the care-full.

It has been absolument gorgeous today. It’s that funny time of year when you need a scarf first thing in the morning when there’s a frost on the grass and by midday you can stand barefoot in the garden in a t-shirt. There is a nagging feeling in the muscle in the back of my leg which I generally get at this time of year. Something to do with a spade I think, and an inability to stop once I’ve started.

I spent the morning spending shed-loads of cash on plants. That’s my fix for a while. I can justify it! I haven’t spent any money on clothes this month. In fact I don’t have any desire to buy clothes at present as with the drop in weight I have now regained access to the vast arena of my wardrobe that I have been avoiding while porky, and there are the tantalising possibilities of the girlie’s wardrobe opening up again if I can lose another ½ stone so what on earth do I need new duds for. Anyway I love buying plants.

With the Open Garden thing looming I need to plug a few unsightly gaps and I found some delicious ferns for a quiet shady corner.

We have been doing a lot of thinking about the girlie’s event – we have got until the end of June - and have got quite a few ideas rattling around now. I have my eye on a marquee on Ebay, some fabric for a spot of tenting and a cool thing to do for lanterns along the drive. If anyone else has any suggestions…………

I woke up in the middle of the night having just dreamt about kissing Alan Rickman. It’s what woke me up. I thought, why? I don’t find him remotely attractive. Then I went back to sleep and dreamt about kissing Toadie from Neighbours. Why? I don’t him attractive either. If I am going to dream about kissing people can’t I at least dream about kissing those I even half fancy. I’m afraid to go to sleep tonight!

I finished early today and got home in time to spend a couple of hours messing about in the garden. When I was wee I didn’t like being dirty but these days I can’t wait to drag on my dusty garden trousers and slop around in the mud. I always feel so much more justified in being tired at the end of the day if I have spent time labouring in the fresh air.

Katie rarely deigns to take up comfy residence in my lap. This maybe because if and when she does settle comfortably something invariably makes me laugh and if that happens….

Well whatever the small funny that triggered the laugh in the first place it isn’t nearly as funny as the sight of Katie bouncing up and down on my belly as I laugh. The more I laugh the more she bounces and the more she bounces the more I laugh.

I have a stitch this evening.

It has been one of ‘those’ days today. With stuff happening. Great wadges of stuff. I probably would have been better able to stride through the silly day if I hadn’t been awake half the night. And why was I awake at 3am? I suddenly woke up and remembered that I hadn’t put pepper in the chicken and coriander mayonnaise and that the meeting room doesn’t currently have a working computer to link the projector up to for the power-point presentations. How sad am I!

However, these little hurdles were overcome, as somehow they always are. Along with all the other bizarre stuff that flocks to my desk-side on a Monday morning.

Then I had to come home and break the news to the girlie that the venue she had wanted for her 18th, and that we had assumed booked, cannot now be hired as they don’t do birthdays for anyone under 35 and thought we had said 80th. She can be scowly at times and a bit glum sometimes but she has never really been a highly charged emotional type. Even-tempered and equable for the most part. She rarely cries. Which makes it all the more heart breaking to see her face cloud over and the little spots of rain appear. She didn’t rage and storm or anything, she was just sad and quietly made my shoulder wet. She has always asked for so little and is so undemanding; it would have been so nice to give her what she had set her heart on.

Still, being a sunny little soul on the whole she will take what comes along and make the best of it.

1. Can you cook?
Yes, but it isn’t something I do amazingly well

2. What was your dream growing up?
I always thought it would be great to be Borrower-sized, and fly

3. What talent do you wish you had?
Any real talent would be good

4. Favourite place?
Cornwall

5. Favourite vegetable?
At the present time, butternut squash or sweet potato

6. What was the last book you read
Last one I finished was Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

7. What zodiac sign are you?
Virgo. Of course

8. Any Tattoos and/or Piercings?
Nope, but I have some very interesting birthmarks

9. Worst Habit?
Fretting

10. Do you personally know anybody on Blog?
I haven’t met anyone from Blog but I have a couple of times been in the same place as CJ but we didn’t realise at the time!

11. What is your favourite sport?
Sport is really not my thing as I am so lacking in competitiveness but I like sport/exercise that challenges me personally

12. Negative or Optimistic attitude?
Depends on the time of the month but I will say I am not cynical enough for my own good

13. What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator lift with someone of the opposite sex?
Depends which one…

14. Worst thing to ever happen to you?
I’m not sure anything really bad has ever happened to me, I have had a blessed life, mostly.

15. Tell me one weird fact about you:
I can’t bear to touch sandpaper, makes me feel peculiar.

16. Do you have any pets?
Two pussies

17. Do you know how to do the Macarena?
No, I’m more Morris than Macarena

18. Is the sun shining where you are now?
Yes, it’s beautiful, a glad-to-be-alive day

19. Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
Distinctly unfunny and rather menacing

20. If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
My apron

21. Would you be my good angel or bad angel?
Good as gold………so I’ve been told

22. What colour eyes do you have?
Blue, not a bright blue but rather darker with flecks of green - and very easy to read.

23. Ever been arrested?
Oooo no no no, I told you I’m good

24. Bottle or Draft?
I don’t really have a great capacity for drink to be honest

25. If you won £10,000 today, what would you do with it?
Do some stuff

26. What kind of bubble gum do you prefer to chew?
Don’t like gum really, the first few chews are ok then the flavour goes and you might as well be chewing your own tongue

27. What's your favourite bar to hang at?
Me? Bar? Der….

28. Do you believe in ghosts?
I could be convinced

29. Favourite thing to do in your spare time?
Gardening, reading, Morris dancing, acting, singing, painting, writing, shopping…………. Do stop me someone!

30. Do you swear a lot?
The colleague I share a cell with has me do the f-word for her when she is crossed-up

31. Biggest pet peeve?
Most recent – ‘Pavements for Peds’ (in a previous post)

32. In one word, how would you describe yourself?
Fluffilicious

p.s. don’t forget to look in my shop - http://www.spreadshirt.net/shop.php?sid=220637

http://www.spreadshirt.net/shop.php?sid=220637

I felt quite buzzy and fine and energetic and positive today. But then the sun went in, I got a pain in my chest, and my mother rang me with news of a death. Now I feel tired and a bit glum really. My one remaining uncle died last year and his widow never recovered from his passing and has now followed him to wherever he has gone to. It still happens you see - people can still belong so much to one person that they simply can’t go on living without them.

I’m sure my mother told me it would be raining today but it has actually been fine and sunny and mild. In the morning I discovered I had hit the one stone weight loss target I set myself which was very satisfying so I celebrated by allowing myself a small extra treat, which I then worked off with a five mile walk and a half-hour swim so I might just as well not have bothered. I’d have another one now but I’m just not hungry – big vegetable cobbler for dinner so I feel pretty stuffed.

The review of the play in the local paper was very complimentary and I shan’t show off by repeating the comments here but it did a lot to restore my crumbling confidence. I do wish confidence, or at least self-assurance, was a commodity you could buy in bags – like flour – from the supermarket. Every week I would push my trolley to the checkout stuffed with fruit, vegetables and chocolate, plus a couple of bags of self-assurance, several sticks of confidence and a few jars of poise.

I live my live in pockets. There are separate sections and areas for different activities and each one has its own set of people, some I know well and some less well and some I really hit it off with and some less so. The only thing that links these different fields is me. There is dancing, where I have been tonight. There is acting, where I haven’t been tonight. There is the art group. Then there is work. And obviously there is home and the family. But all these things are very separate from each other really although the other members of my family are involved in the acting stuff (not necessarily at the same time). And there are peripherals as well. People I know through hubby’s church, people I know through his work, people I know from the boy’s activities and the girlie’s as well. In addition to the sundry friends one makes along the way somehow or other. All these different people are precisely that – different, widely different. There is such a huge assortment of people from hippies to vicars, from the ultra-normal and conservative with a small c to the almost surreally bizarre. I can’t imagine ever being able to mesh the groups together but somehow I manage to fit into them all. In each setting I have a persona suited to where I am, who I’m with and how well I choose to be known. In one place I am painfully quiet and shy, in another I am a bit rowdy and bubbly and in another I am some of both. I try sometimes to find who I really am, I sit in a chair and start peeling back the layers of my lives to see if there is anyone inside but I usually find that she has just popped out. And of all these masses of people I know there are very few that ever get close to seeing who I really am and none at all see me ‘naked’. It is scary sometimes; it is like never being free to be.

I do apologise, you probably didn’t really want to wade through such guff, but for the last few years I have felt that March 2007 was going to be significant in some way. It could be the time I finally leave behind the weight I carry around with me, or the time I find something I am looking for, or…………

Perhaps I just need to chill out but I feel this sense of impending – something.

You know when you get a really beautiful fruit. Flawless and perfect. And then you bite into it and the inside is all rotten and maggoty.

Reminds me of this quote from Dirty Dancing “You know how you feel when you see a patient and you think he's all right...then you look at the X rays and it's nothing like you thought?”

A couple of times in the last week I have been saddened by the reality of the lives of people that I thought were ok and reasonably happy. A nice family I know have been turned upside down in turmoil because their youngest child has been inveigled into shop-lifting by a manipulative ‘friend’. The other scenario involves another friend and the destructive power of a damaging relationship. It hurts to see people hurting. It hurts to see people hurting each other. It has left a nasty taste in my mouth and I feel so inadequate and impotent. To all my friends that hurt xxx.

I have just realised that I have escaped another night from the impending telephone call from The Hungarian. I have been tortured for months by the prospect of her call. A couple of times (the other night included) I managed to fob her off but I know she will return to haunt me. I made the ridiculous mistake last year of saying to the nice Hungarian lady who was doing a Pampered Chef party that I might like to host one myself some time. I meant ‘might’ as in ‘not really but too polite to say so’. I am totally opposed to these kinds of things. Where you invite people you call friends to come to your house to look at a lot of over-priced kit and expect them to spend money they may not be able to afford on stuff they probably don’t really want but feel obligated to buy because you invited them round and gave them a glass of wine and called it a party and all with idea of earning yourself some freebies (or at least half-pricebies). Actually when I was talking about it to a friend at work she said if I did go through with it she would definitely come along so maybe…..and maybe if there was a charitable outcome it would not upset my principles as much.

Went swimming today but it was less enjoyable as there were too many other people, in fact I don’t really like there being any other people. On a few rare occasions I have had the supreme pleasure of being entirely alone in the pool. The stillness is amazing with just me rippling the water. But today was frustrating as I was in a lane behind a woman who was swimming just that little bit slower. I’d set off when she was half way and would catch her up by the end, so I’d have to wait for her to get half way again or run the risk of her toes up my nose. I don’t like a break between lengths and would she let me go ahead of her – no of course not.

Then I had an enjoyable few hours at work. On Tuesdays I do my little add-on job. I work as many hours as is needed, could be one or it could be six, start when I like and finish when I finish and work entirely on my own on the first floor. I wouldn’t want to do that all my working days but it is very pleasant for one day a week. It suits the me that likes to be flexible and hates too much structure. The me that doesn’t want to be part of a group and likes to work to my own timetable. The me that doesn’t basically like being told what to do and when to do it. The rest of my working life conforms to the other me, the more Virgo me. Mind you I still struggle with that whole obedience thing. At first glance I appear to be quite biddable but my colleagues know better than to tell me what to do. Ask is fine – tell is bad.

This evening saw the return to dancing, I did miss it last week. It was a fantastic feeling to jerk me hankies around again. We had some new people come along and it was a novel to be an ‘old hand’ – up until then I still felt like a beginner myself. We are doing some really nice dances at the moment so it’s great.

I rounded the day off with a long walk home from dancing. It rained towards the end so I got soaked, literally to the skin, but even that didn’t bother me. I think today was quite satisfactory.

One improvement would have been a bit more chocolate…

In retrospect I don’t think I was the most bright and cheerful little button in the button box today. I had such an exhausting week last week with the play and everything that I feel a bit like I’ve been switched to fast color instead of enhanced. I was definitely a bit lacklustre in the work zone, not less productive but just not with the side salad of my usual sparkling wit.

I suddenly really fancy a panna cotta with a nice raspberry coulis. However, there isn’t any in the fridge….There’s never a panna cotta in the fridge when you want one.

I am fighting the falling eyelids at the moment but going to bed before 11pm is so often a mistake as it makes it 99% more likely that I will wake in the wee hours. That has been happening far too often lately. So I am keeping myself propped up with the aid of the laptop. If it wasn’t there I would quite probably fall off the sofa onto one of the cats.

Yesterday the girlie and I had to catch up with last week’s Corrie in the omnibus edition. I used to swoon over Pal Aron when he was in The Bill so it was treat to find him turning up in the street even though he plays a character that doesn’t know which side to sleep on, which way is facing forward so to speak. However that gay kiss was about the least believable bit of acting I have seen on the soap in a long while. Although it’s not quite as repellent as the prospect of Tracey Barlow and David Platt interlocking horns in the act of demon lurve. I like Corrie, the script is so tight and funny. Steve and Lloyd could get their own show. Great stuff.

We were discussing those buggy things the other day. The ones that elderly and disabled people use to terrorise pedestrians. I was walking to work one day – with iPod as per which by the way I need to help me cope with the hour long walk first thing in the morning – and I was overtaken by an elderly lady driving her invalid buggy. She slowed down alongside me and indicated that I should take out my ear piece. ‘You shouldn’t be listening to those’ she said ‘you can’t hear what’s coming up behind you’. I refrained from telling her to k’off and mind her own bees and I just smiled my sweetest smile – which by the way is very sweet like the butter wouldn’t melt type. She then put her foot down and whizzed off. That really pisses me off. The footpath is for foot patrons, pedestrians, those members of society that still know how to put one foot in front of t’other. And don’t try to tell me that all invalid buggies are used by people unable to walk because that is a crock. In any case my objection is not that invalid buggies are allowed on the pavement but that they go at more than normal walking speed. I am quite happy to share my path with other people moving at normal walking pace but it never ceases to irritate me that these buggies can whip along, clearing all in their path by fair means or foul, at the speed of a small car. There is an outcry if a rowdy teenager tears along the footpath on a bike, outrage if a surly youth scoots by on a skateboard but somehow it’s ok for a cantankerous old crone to race along at twice the speed of either, laying out anyone stupid enough to be using the pavement for its intended purpose.

Well that’s me done for the day.

For the best part of the week I have been portraying the alcoholic wife of a vicar – on stage that is. Which is a struggle for someone who takes very little in the way of alcohol. Tonight however, I am a little bit pissed and a lottle bit woozy and it is always dangerous to post when piste or pissed or whatever.

In the morning I felt somewhat dreary as I still hadn’t managed to do complete my monologue using all the right lines in all the right order but it’s all over with now anyway and I did another two performances and still didn’t get it totally right so I have downed a few large glasses of wine in an effort to obliterate the ignominy.

It has led to my Ides of March Decisions…..

1. Don’t do another play for a long while – until the after effects of this one have long faded – so not before next week basically.

2. Stop thinking about – whatever I am thinking about – as it isn’t worth it and is less use to me really than a fart in a Jacuzzi

3. Don’t attempt to deal with this by getting yet another fecking hobby

4. Start to value my real worth

Yeah, like I will remember that tomorrow.

With it being such a small cast in such a small play, small setting and that, I didn’t expect the after show party to be anything other than small and it was. Small that is but I have always felt small is not necessarily bad and tonight was no exception to that particular rule. Small is king. Tonight.

It is the drink talking. And the relief.

Man that was a hard four months. I think I need to lie down before I start to remember how many times in the last hour I have slurred my sentences. S’funny but when I close my eyes everything is moving about…………….

Apologies for absence. Though not for absence of sense. I try to steer clear of making too much sense. I lose my mystique if people start making sense of my ramblings.

I have been a little busy with the play this week and now that the first night is over and done with and under the belt I can relax a teeny. I’m not entirely sure whose belt it is btw since I don’t wear a belt. I always believed that was what spare tyres are for, holding up one’s trousers.

Last night was our first night – as I said – and we didn’t expect a huge turnout as we are just doing a studio production, in a church hall. Intimate and cosy venue for a select and discerning audience. They were few but they were, as far as we could tell, enjoying the evening. A friend who came said she did and I will take her at her word! Another friend - so-called but not sure why sometimes – might possibly have gone along last night had he known of her presence in the audience. Even though in the ten years I have known him he would never come to watch a play I’m in because he can’t a) watch amateur productions, b) find time in his busy life, c) sit still for more than five minutes, and d) be bothered. Ach, it doesn’t bother me really, my son is the same! Fortunately I do a have some mature, cultured friends as well.

I really want to spend some time in the garden today but there is so much standing water around I’m not sure. I could walk across the lawn and sink to my knees. The pond is full of copulating frogs at the moment and the noise is such a happy sound, and there are primroses and daffodils and hellebores………….

Dash it all, a cup of coffee and I’m out there………I’ll just get into thigh high waders first.