New Year's Resolutions

Every year my family and I try to write down three ways we want to grow in the coming year--in mind, body, and spirit. I usually write some form of exercise, a plan to pray and read the Bible, and then a wild card mind one--last year I wrote I wanted to learn to play piano. Sadly, I rarely keep these resolutions going past January. I admit I didn't touch the piano!

So this year I decided to be more realistic and reasonable. My goal this year is actually to do LESS. That is, to write less. I love writing books, and I tend to get grumpy when I don't write for a few days, but the last few years have been manic writing-wise. I've finished a book and started a new book the next day. I've written through holidays, in the evenings, even in the car (not while driving, though!). Deadlines have hounded me constantly.

I did it because of a good thing--so many opportunities! So many publishers! And best of all, so many stories to tell. But as I kept writing frantically I found I was losing my joy. That heart skip of excitement when you start a story. It all felt like plodding.

And even more alarmingly, I was distracted at home. Always trying to carve a minute here, an hour there to write. And my family suffered as a result. I suffered too, because even going for a coffee with a friend felt like it was taking away from my writing time. And that is definitely not how I want to live my life!

So my goal for 2016 is to write less and live more. I still have deadlines, and for the next four months they're quite tight, so I can't actually enact this resolution for a little while, but it is in my mindset. Don't go crazy trying to meet those deadlines! Ask for extensions. Enjoy the moment. Treasure your children, because with one about to fly the nest, I know they don't stay little or even around forever. And enjoy the stories I choose to tell, because joy was the reason I got into this business.

What about you? What are your new year's resolutions, if any?

Holiday to the Highlands

This last week was school half-term and so the eight of us (my mum included) and our dog headed off to the Scottish Highlands. It was a trip down memory lane as well as up north,  as my mother organized a three week trip to the Highlands when I was thirteen. I have loads of great memories from that trip, and I wanted to recreate a bit of it for my mum, especially after my dad's death last year.

So we packed up and drove to Benderloch, a tiny hamlet outside of Oban, where we had a self-catering cottage.

We climbed the gentle but beautiful Ben Lora, took walks around the loch,

and then headed to Ardnamurchan, the westernmost point in the United Kingdom, to visit Mingary Castle, my family's home about two hundred years ago.

View on the way to Ardnamurchan

Sunlight gilding the mountains

Loch on the way to Benderloch

The trip to Ardnamurchan was gorgeous but slightly harrowing--thirty miles of single track road winding through barren mountains. I felt as if we were traveling to the end of the earth!

The next day we went to Glencoe and learned all about the massacre and then the next day went to Fort William and enjoyed several hours at the West Highlands Museum before taking a gondola up the Nevis Range (the youngest and oldest in our party were not up to a hike--well, in all honesty, none of us were!)

It was a lovely trip, and one I'm really glad we were able to take with my mum.

It's been awhile...

So if you've followed this blog at all, you'll see it's been quite awhile since I've last written, and that's because life started avalanching, for want of a better word!

In November my father became very ill with leukemia (he'd been diagnosed in April and then gone into a wonderful but brief remission) and he died on December 23rd--something that still feels surreal to write. The six months after his death have been a bit of a blur of keeping life going with five children, writing deadlines, and helping my mother to sort out her life in the aftermath.

Things got even trickier in March, and a variety of difficult events led my husband to resigning his job, finding another one, and us upping sticks in a few weeks to move to Monmouth, Wales. So our village life will become our market town life, after only one year of experiencing the ritzy version of village life in the Cotswolds! For a year I exchanged the wild coast of Cumbria for the gentle, rolling hills of Oxfordshire--and charity shops and chintzy tea rooms for organic farm shops and lots of Barbour! In our short time here I've met loads of friendly people, and after 11 months have just reached the point of feeling settled--no matter what anyone says, it always seems to take a year. But now we're off again to the wilds of Wales (although only a mile from the English border!)



In the meantime, life soldiers on, as it must. The dog must be walked, dishes must be washed, and books must be written. Now and Then Friends, my second book in the Hartley-by-the-Sea series, is out next week. You can learn about it here 

And meanwhile I will try to update this blog more often, and let you know about our progress in Wales!

Fire at the Vicarage

Please forgive my absence from this blog; Christmas and all its attending brouhaha (a word I love to use) overwhelmed me. And then of course there was the fire.

On December 27th my husband put on a fire in the guest room to air the room out in preparation for our au pair coming back. Unfortunately, while he was out of the room, a spark leapt out (we think) and possibly lit the kindling stacked near the fireplace, or some other highly flammable substance, because a few minutes later the smoke alarm (thankfully!) went off and when he went upstairs the whole room was ablaze.

I am very grateful for my husband's clear, cool thinking, because I have to admit I am a panicker. Worse, I am a wring-my-hands-and-do-nothing kind of panicker. I've managed to improve slightly since having children--when my son, who was two at the time, choked on a plum pit, I possessed enough sangfroid to first give him the Heimlich and then when that didn't work, to fish the pit out with my finger while he sank his teeth deep into my knuckle. But back to the fire.

My husband told our two oldest daughters, who were oblivious to the fire in the room adjacent to them, to go downstairs and he put the contents of not one but two fire extinguishers on the blaze while we waited outside, shivering. At that point I thought maybe the mat in front of the fireplace would be a bit damaged, the room a bit smoky.

Ha.

The fire reignited and my husband called the fire brigade--all volunteers, who were superb. They put out the fire and pried up the floorboards, using cameras to make sure there was no fire underneath. They also threw all the smoke and fire damaged furniture out the window.

So the room was a little more damaged than I thought. In fact, it was a burned out shell, and my daughter's room next door was covered in soot and grime.

But the good news is we have insurance. And the reason this relates to my village life? Within five minutes of the whole thing happening, people were calling, leaving messages on Facebook, offering to have us sleep at their house or borrow anything we needed. We hadn't even told anyone, but people could see the fire brigade (not to mention the smoke) at our house and so they called. They came to help fill a skip (or Dumpster, in American) with all the rubbish (trash). They offered to help clean and paint, and the girls slept in the living room for a week on a pile of a friend's duvets. I know things like this would happen even if I didn't live in a village. Friends would call round, offering help once they'd heard. I suppose the difference is how quickly the help came. How many people reached out, because they could actually *see* the smoke billowing up in the middle of the village! And despite the fire's damage, I'm grateful for how it made me count my blessings. The children had been bickering all week but the fire sobered them up a bit, drew us all together. Made us see how many friends we had, people who were willing and eager to help us. And of course we are very thankful that it wasn't any worse--if the smoke alarm hadn't gone off, if the fire had moved into the hallway and blocked the stairs... the whole house could have burned down. Children could have been hurt or worse. So yes, I am thankful.

A Cumbrian Christmas

It's that time of year again. Christmas! Or rather, Advent. I love the build-up to Christmas; I love the decorating, the baking, the buying of presents, and all the events that we have for school and church. Christmas concerts and nativity plays (this year at the primary school it is 'Christmas with the Aliens') and mince pies and mulled wine.

Here at the Vicarage we have a few of our own special events. The Thursday before Christmas we host the village's weekly 'pop-in' at our house; basically, it is a morning with coffee, cake, and chatting, finished off with some Christmas carols. I enjoy having people over and it also helps me get the house clean for Christmas, the kind of kick in the pants this reluctant housekeeper needs. We also have the Youth Group Christmas party next week, which involves a Yankee Swap (also known, I think, as a white elephant??) and lots of iced sugar cookies.

Next week there is a carol service at the Lifeboat Station down at the beach, and on Saturday my daughter is playing Christmas carols with the school band at the local castle (can castles be considered local? Well, we have one and it's twenty minutes away.)

So much busy-ness and fun, but amidst all that I try to find a moment or at least a second or two to be quiet. This December I am reading The Greatest Gift  by Anna Voskamp, who is the author of the bestselling book 1,000 Gifts. I'm enjoying a chance to reflect on the meaning of Advent and Christmas amidst the chaos of our household--the latest concerns/arguments being who gets to put the star on top of the tree (every year we put a note in the box of decorations saying whose turn it is, and every year the note mysteriously disappears) and who gets to eat the first chocolate in the Advent calendar. It's December 3rd and no chocolates have been eaten because this issue has not yet been resolved.

Do you look forward to the Christmas season? What do you like in particular? To celebrate I will give away one copy of my novella A Yorkshire Christmas (Kindle only, I'm afraid!) to someone who comments or sends me an email telling me something they like (or don't like!) about Christmas.

The Beauty of The Bath

I once wrote a short story about the different bathrooms, and mainly bathtubs, that a couple had through their married life, and how each bathroom/tub represented a different stage of life. I was inspired by my own life, because in some ways I can track our marriage (and family life) through our bathtubs.

Take the first bathtub we had, in a flat in Cambridge, England. We lived in the top floor of a nineteenth-century vicarage near Newnham College, and the bathtub was a lovely, long, claw-footed masterpiece that invited deep, long, bubbly soaks. Unfortunately, there was only enough hot water to fill it to about two inches. My husband was a theology student, we were ridiculously poor, and this tub pretty much summed up our life. When I became pregnant that year, my husband very kindly would boil kettles of water and pour them into the tub so I could have a bath--one of the only things that helped with my morning sickness. I have memories of sitting in the tub, naked and shivering, in two inches of hot water while my husband hurried to boil kettle after kettle, dear man.

We moved to a college flat the next year, in the top of a bell tower, and this time we had a deep tub and unlimited hot water. Bliss! Plus the bathroom was on a floor above our flat, having to go up eleven twisting, turret stairs, and you couldn't hear a baby crying from it, which was also bliss. My husband would take our squally newborn for an hour while I would lie in the tub and wonder just what we'd taken on. Sometimes I still wonder that.

Next tub was the house of my husband's first curacy. Tiny, olive-green, in a semidetached house in Hull. We had two children and very few baths.

Moving on to America: a decent tub but not extraordinary by any means. Three children, and the bathtub usually saw them all squeezed in there together, water slopping over the sides.

And then New York: no bathtub, but two marble showers. Which sounds far more luxurious than the 1950s box-like apartment was, but at least the kids liked it and one of the showers was a two-person one which meant you could bung them all in there together for a quick evening bath, or rather, shower time.

And finally here, the bathtub in a two hundred year old vicarage. Six feet long, nice and deep, and an immersion heater to make sure you have all the hot water you could ever need. And, quite importantly, a fan in the bathroom that keeps you from hearing the often-incessant knocking on the door, the requests to play a game, mediate an argument, find hockey kit, and/or free up the bathroom for the other six people in the house.

I've been taking a lot of baths here. In winter, I take one almost every night. And no, I don't have a compulsion to be clean. You could say I have a compulsion to sink into deep, hot, bubbly water, sip a glass of wine, and read my book. After a long day working, writing, cooking, cleaning, and managing the lives of five children, a half-hour or so in the bath brings me back to a good and peaceful place. And, as a bonus, it keeps me warm! Even with new windows our house can be a bit draughty (but that's a whole other post) and I love going to bed with my skin still lightly steaming.

You could say my bath is my guilty pleasure, but I don't feel remotely guilty about it.

The Truth About Cozy Autumn Suppers

Last night it was cold and wet and windy--what a surprise--but after our glorious summer that stretched right into September, it did feel like a change. And so I decided to make something cozy and warm and autumnal for dinner; I relished the thought of tucking into nourishing warm food made by my loving hands, my family seated around the tables, smiles on their faces...

I settled on pork medallions with maple glaze, butternut squash risotto, green beans and apple sauce. And while it felt very cheering and nurturing to stir the risotto on top of the stove, the wind battering everything to pieces outside, the lovely, fragrant smell of the risotto wafting through the air,

(This is not my kitchen, by the way--if only I had an Aga!!) the truth is none of my children actually like risotto. I keep insisting they try the different kinds I make, and each time they take a forkful and make a face. So for all my nurturing attempts at a cheering, autumnal supper on a cold, wet night, my five children ate platefuls of green beans and apple sauce (which were made with Bramleys a neighbour gave me from the tree in his garden, so that's something at least). Maybe I'll try again next week, or pick a different cozy, autumnal dish. Suggestions, please...

Reflections on the School Run

When we lived in New York, our school run looked like this:

(This is actually a photo of our moving truck outside our apartment, the day we left). While in New York we had to wake the children by 6:30 am, and they had to be out of the house by 7:20 to make the school bus three long avenue blocks away. No matter how much I prepared: making their lunches the night before, setting out bowls and cups and cereal boxes, having their uniforms all laid out... we were always late! The morning would start out slow and sleepy and then by 7:22 we were all rushing [ie panicking], shouting, children begging to take a cab to school, us saying absolutely not [although sometimes we caved and spent $20 on a cab--oh, New York life!) before my husband hustled everyone out the door on his way to work and they sprinted from Madison Avenue and 91st Street to Third Avenue and 90th. (Which doesn't sound that far, but trust me, it is.)

Now my school run looks like this:

It's a seven minute walk down the high street of my village, past sheep fields and a little post office shop, and then up a little lane to the school. I'ts very pleasant, and my children don't have to be at school until the luxuriously late hour of 9 am.

And yet. You know what's coming, don't you? We're still late. We still rush, panic, shout, scream. Children don't demand a cab, but rather the car--which I always say no to, because parking is horrendous. But every day as I chivvy them up the street, huffing and puffing as I push the stroller, realising my five-year-old has not brushed her hair and my ten-year-old has not brushed his teeth, and I forgot to sign a note/bring gym uniform/pack a snack/all of the above, I think: how can this be? How can the school run be an hour and a half later than in New York, and much shorter, and yet I am still rushing?

I've come to this rather obvious conclusion: It's either the nature of school runs or the nature of me.

Crab Fair

In my upcoming book, Rainy Day Sisters, one of the main character goes to the Egremont Crab Fair. That's crab apples, not crustaceans, but I must confess when I wrote about the Crab Fair, I hadn't actually been to one. My children had, and I asked my friend who goes every year for details, but when the Crab Fair rolled around this year and my son asked (begged) if we could go, I said yes. I wanted to experience this for myself!

Sadly, we missed the Parade of the Apple Cart and the Queen of the Crab Fair, but we did see some races (and took part in the wheelbarrow race, which is racing someone in an actual wheelbarrow rather than having to walk on your hands while someone holds your legs!)

and had some delightful Crab Fair food (i.e., hot, sugary donuts--who doesn't love those?!) And my son got separated from me, which is par for the course at these events. Fortunately I found him again.
Overall, it was a fun afternoon and definitely something I'd do again, if just to enjoy the beautiful view (and sugary donuts).

Beach Life

I've never actually been much of a beach person. I don't like all the sand and salt in my hair and on my skin, and the closest beach to where I grew up, the one everyone went to, was the Jersey Shore. Enough said.

So living close to the beach wasn't actually a huge draw for me when we moved to the Cumbrian coast. But in the three years I've lived here, I've come to appreciate the many and sometimes subtle delights of the English northern seaside. Here, a hundred miles north of Blackpool, there are no boardwalks or fun fairs.

The beach where we live is its own attraction--at low tide, a quarter mile of smooth, wet sand and another quarter mile of water that doesn't go past your knees. There are tide pools that warm up in the sun and provide some good wading for small children (and crabbing opportunities for older children)

And most importantly, there is a café that sells some very good ice cream.

Something I love about British beaches--and British beachgoers--is that the weather is not a consideration. Of course, everyone flocks to the beach when it is a sunny, warm day like today, but I've seen children building sandcastles in February, or taking an early spring dip on a chilly day in May. My own children have done it, although not always willingly!

I love our beach on a sunny, still day, but in the rain and wind it still has its own admittedly chilly beauty. Living here has certainly taught me the importance of dressing appropriately for the weather.

So, yes, we are far from ferris wheels and boardwalks, but in living here I have become a bit more of a beach person.