“Winter is the time for comfort..."

" for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”

Edith Sitwell by Roger Fry

Of course, the one day I decide not to ride, the sun's out!

I have enjoyed the rotten weather though, because it's meant that I could lie on the settee with impunity in the afternoons. (Impunity is such a good settee companion, nearly as snuggly as Roly the yellow labrador) and read and read and read...

So far in three days I've read Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Jeanette Winterson) and My Animals and Other Family (Clare Balding) and am winging my way through Mal Peet's Life: An Exploded Diagram which is wonderful. (It shouldn't amaze me, but it does, that novels described as Young Adult are very often THE BEST)

I think I'm going to have to lie on the settee without impunity this afternoon to read some more!

If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin' at all.

Always did love Thumper.

I'm not bad at that - saying nothing when I can't think of something nice to say.

EXCEPT TO MYSELF.

That principle should surely apply when you’re talking to yourself, even inside your head?

I don't know if it's the British in me but somehow self-love seems so arrogant...

Yesterday, I read the whole of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and Jeanette Winterson explained the dichotomy better than I ever could - so here it is:

"...as I try to understand how life works - and why some people cope better than others with adversity - I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream..."

Yeah, Jeanette!

“Do it from the heart or not at all.”

Jeanette Winterson

Sometimes I believe in synchronicity. No, correct that statement - I ALWAYS believe in synchronicity, and sometimes it proves itself to me beyond doubt.

For the past few days I've loved, loved, loved being a writer.

(Okay, I realise it won't last...writing can be a struggle too)

I have always, always put my own writing into second place - last place, even. Regarded it as a sort of guilty pleasure that I can only allow myself to do IF I DESERVE IT when I've done lots of other (money-earning) work first.

I've felt the need to accumulate a load of credit in my own personal Bank of Self-Punishment...

A growing realisation has come upon me that this is not the road to happiness and fulfilment.

(Yes, it has taken me all this time...and me university-educated as well.)

Then I watched Imagine: Jeanette Winterson - My Monster and Me  (Sorry people outside the UK who won't be able see this and Brits too, once the allotted time on iPlayer has elapsed)

I couldn't describe the effect it had on me better than Lucy Mangan from The Guardian

"By the end of it you felt as refreshed and exhilarated as if you had been bathing in a rough sea. And if, afterwards, a melancholy descended as you realised how rare, how profoundly, depressingly, vanishingly rare it is to hear anyone at all, but – I'm afraid – especially a woman, speak so passionately, eloquently and above all fearlessly about her life, loves and work – well, maybe we can start the demand for more here."

SO...enough of this fannying about, Caroline Coxon. Just follow your heart.

I love to talk about nothing it's the only thing I know anything about

...said Oscar Wilde. I'm going to have to develop that facility pretty smartish because my mind's a blank this morning.

Jeanette Winterson came to my rescue. This from Gut Symmetries

"He: What’s the matter with you?

Me: Nothing.

Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say, surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her.”

Why do we DO that? Why do I  do that? Actually, for me, the conversation goes more like:

He: How are you?

Me: Fine!

Sometimes, I'm NOT fine. Sometimes there IS something wrong.

I don't think I'm afraid to admit weakness. It's just that I don't want to be a bother or a bore!

And mostly, when people ask those things, I wonder if they REALLY want to know.