There is an irony the fact that a couple of days after my last post I had the worst fibro flare up I’ve had in ages! Plans cancelled! Catastrophe!

Hey ho and never mind, we had fun anyway. As you can see we put our tree up and everything is coming up Christmassy! I’m starting to get excited about Christmas now and really looking forward to the break. Our office closes on Christmas Eve and doesn’t open again until 2010 (which is ages in the future, right?) and we’ve elected for very simple celebrations this year. On Christmas day itself we are going to the seaside (yes, I know, in England, in December, we’re insane), then I think we’re seeing family members the day after Boxing Day, going to a dinner party on New Year’s Eve at a friend-from-work’s house and who knows what in between. We’re definitely hoping for a trip to London (I want one of those Top Shop style advisor appointments before I’m too old for Top Shop) and bowling. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without bowling.

How about you, dear reader, what are you up to for Christmas this year?

This week I am also thankful for:-

• The writing/editing course my parents have bought for me.
• Pain medication for flare ups.
• V+ (the recording device on cable TV) which is very handy when Dave Grohl and Rhys Darby are on at the same time on different channels.
• My lovely life with Himself and the kitties (only one kitty present in the photo though!)

(a work in progress – for some reason everything I write at the moment is 16 lines long. It used to be 20. Soon I will just be writing a line at a time)

First frost,
Icing sugar motes dancing,
Like fairies skating
On blades of grass

Buckets,
Filled with salt and grit.
Swirling ice patterns
Spiralled on windscreens.

Bright colours
Of scarf, hat and glove
As commuters pass,
Snuggled against the biting cold.

First frost,
Winter’s leveller.
Repainting the everyday
With the fashion of a new season.

It’s been a rollercoaster of a week and on this Sunday afternoon in November I feel somewhat drained by it all. But the rollercoaster has brought with it some amazing things. The two most important are somewhat interconnected and need some backstory.

Learning to Love London Again and the Return of my Writing Mojo

It only took two and a half months of living elsewhere. On Wednesday night, for a moment, I missed London. Don’t get me wrong, moving out of London was the best thing I’ve done in a long time, but I guess it’s natural I will miss it occassionally – I lived there for ten years after all.

On examination however it wasn’t London per se that I missed – it was a specific part of London. A part I haven’t visited for a long long time. A part, I’m sorry to say, I have never visited with Himself.

When I first moved to London as a wide-eyed 25-year-old the Ex and I lived in a gorgeous flat in a beautiful Georgian house conversion in Highgate. It was like my dream of what London should be. We had parks, we had Coleridge’s house, we had a cemetery (where EVERYONE is buried), we had Hampstead Heath just across from us in which we had Keats House. My writing muse had never been stronger than it was there. I wrote all the time. I wrote for the Ham and High paper. I wrote for the local magazine Buzz. I wrote my first (unpublished and will undoubtedly remain so) novel. Looking back it was wonderful (I look back with rose coloured spectacles here of course, it wasn’t that wonderful as my health was diabolical – but isn’t nostalgia and hindsight all about forgetting the bad stuff?).

We were there for just under a year – then we moved and everything started fucking me off and my hate-hate affair with London began.

Over the last week or so my writing muse has returned for the first time in ages. To put this in perspective I have written two mediocre poems in the last twelve months and that’s it. No magazine articles, no short stories and the only thing I’ve added to my in progress novel is a comma, which, like Oscar Wilde, I later removed. (Please note the only resemblance I have to the genius of Wilde is my constant input and output of commas, nothing else. I would never assume such arrogance!) This week I have written the first draft of a poem and a short story which just may amount to something and have sent off a little something to a magazine.

And so I remember Highgate. And I want to go back and take Himself. I want to show him my past. It feels important and necessary. We’re going before Christmas and I’m excited.

Other things to be thankful for this week
* Being given two weeks’ worth of cover teaching for a yoga teacher I hold in very high regard.
* The latest nephew being born without a hitch and absolutely perfect apparently!
* Doing a presentation at a sixth form open evening for work and making lots of good networking connections. This also made me feel nostalgic for my years at sixth form and especially the Latin stall at open evenings. I ran the A Level Latin stall two years in a row. Hardly anyone ever came
* Solo Acoustic Everlong.
* My new Foo tshirt.
* A day off with Himself, drinking Christmas flavoured soy latte in Starbucks and discussing the future.
* Yoga with my mum.
* Walking with my face against a November storm.