Category Archives: Miscellaneous

So Here It Is…

2 Replies

Having just decorated the cake, it now feels like Christmas! It’s been the same over the last few years…my cakes used to be standard, just rough iced, but after watching Kirsty Allsopp a couple of years ago I became more adventurous!

The first year I put polar bears on my cake and I haven’t looked back since…this year I attempted penguins. Not all plain sailing…couldn’t buy black fondant icing anywhere, so had to make it with food colouring. Advice is to use gel paste colourings, but couldn’t find a black one, so it was liquid colours…and that didn’t help. You need a lot to make white fondant black, though I made it a day before and it darkened from steel-grey to black overnight. The icing became softer and stickier with each drop of black…which added to my frustration as I tried to mould penguins. It turned out to be easier to keep the icing in the fridge and only bring it out each time I moulded or added something (eyes, feet etc), was a long drawn out operation and several penguins were violently sacrificed during this process!

The iced-over pond was made by melting four glace mints in a tiny cake tin on grease-proof paper (at a low temperature for about 15 mins) then cooling in the fridge. The bubbles made as the mint heats makes the ‘ice’ you’re left with look pretty authentic! The pond sits on top of very stiff royal icing (I add as little water as I can get away with when making my royal icing, I like the peaks!) and I lightly coloured the icing below the pond with the palest blue (food colouring). Finished with a few snow-covered rocks of white fondant and the penguins surrounded by ‘snowballs’ (sugar decorations) and silver balls.

The rest of my cake is a standard rich fruit Christmas cake and traditional marzipan. My husband makes the cake with the children, I marzipan it…then make decisions about decorating it myself in secret and we all enjoy the big reveal when it’s finishSo, yes, now it’s Christmas!

I’ve had my face painted, cute snowflake on my cheek.

Along with the cake we’ve made our Christmas pudding, lovely recipe, which makes our main pudding and several mini ones too! Takes ten hours in the oven, but oh boy, the house smells good that day!

Since Caitlin moved to High School, I’ve missed the infants/junior school concerts and nativities…what’s not to love about little boys with gold cardboard crowns, tea-towel shepherds, grumpy inn-keepers who forget to open the door, reindeer with runny noses and angels with wonky halos..? I miss the innocence and enthusias

So what’s left? I must finish the present wrapping (before school’s out!), Santa’s done all his! We’ve got our Santa hats, the holly and the ivy…what more?

‘Variety alone gives joy…’

1 Reply
Looking at the themes of my own book made me wonder about books for children these days…It begins with the line ‘Freya was seven-years-old when she got hit by the car. It was a 4×4 with a bull bar.’ It deals with death from the outset, and continues with themes of grief and guilt. However it is balanced by the inclusion of Freya’s heaven…as seen from a seven-year-old’s point of view and purposely laden with rainbows and flowers and sparkly things…Hope and insight is gained from death, grief and terminal illness, dreams are wished for and ultimately our dreams are the things that give us hope. When we strive for the things we dream of…we triumph.
But these strong themes of death and grief made me wonder…Should we protect children and teens from specific themes in books?
These days any subject matter under the sun is up for grabs and writers contend with them in many different ways.
I enjoy books of all varieties and genres, and it made me think back to my own days of reading, curled up on a sofa or turning pages by torchlight beneath the covers, well past my bedtime…
My childhood was spent reading. I was a frequent customer of a tiny local bookstore in the backstreets of Brighton with a shelf in the back room full of second hand children’s books, where I spent a good hour or more choosing books while the little, white-haired, old lady who owned the shop sat reading novels or sorting stock. She kept a pile of ‘Famous Five’ books aside for my visits and it didn’t matter how ragged they were, I still wanted to buy them!
So what did I read when I was small?
Everything I could lay my hands on…when I graduated from picture books, I discovered Enid Blyton, ‘The Castle of Adventure’ had me hiding inside the gorse bushes with Philip, Dinah, Jack and Lucy-Ann as they out-foxed thieves and smugglers! Then came the aforementioned ‘Famous Five’, I wasn’t a ‘Secret Seven’ fan, I wanted to be tomboy George!  I also devoured ‘Malory Towers’ and ‘St Clares’ and longed to attend boarding school with Darrell Rivers and her friends… and can you believe it there’s actually a tongue-in-cheek website here informing you of Darrell and her cohorts whereabouts now…weird!
I spent the last of my preteen years reading horsey stories…I adored ‘The Silver Brumby’ series by Elyne Mitchell, I read them over and over and over again…Patricia Leitch’s ‘Jinny’ series, all the ‘Jill’ books by Ruby Ferguson, and anything by the Pullien-Thompsons.
Horse books were interspersed with ‘Watership Down’, ‘Duncton Wood’, ‘The Tuesday Dog’ any animal stories and anything by Malcolm Saville, especially ‘The Lone Pine Five’.
Then I will be forever grateful to my middle school teacher Mr Lawrence who introduced us to fantasy, he read Susan Cooper’s ‘Over sea, Under Stone’ with such enthusiasm and verve that I fell in love with the genre. I spent a whole summer immersed in ‘The Dark is Rising’ Sequence…

That was it…then followed Tolkien…’The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’…my life was complete and I would be life-long fantasy fan!
My teenage reading collection grew and grew and was eclectic. I loved Judy Blume, beginning with ‘Blubber’, getting my English teacher to let us read ‘Tiger Eyes’ as a class when we were fourteen, and my embarrassment with ‘Forever’ as a very naive fifteen-year-old! This is where the diversity in my collection began, reading about love, jealousy ‘Jacob Have I Loved’ Katherine Paterson, anorexia ‘Second Star to the Right’ Deborah Hautzig, parental desertion and adventure in ‘Homecoming’ Cynthia Voigt, Concentration Camps and escape ‘I am David’ Anne Holm,  pregancy ‘Dear Nobody’ Berlie Doherty,  and much more, death, guilt, murder, abuse, relationships, classics like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Harper Lee, ‘Little Women’ Louise May Alcott and (forgive me) a stage of ‘Sweet Valley High’…
Thus you can see that my reading was vast in themes and ideas!
I’ve even kept most of my books, but sadly many are boxed up in the attic after, I’m ashamed to say, my own children prefer the X-Box… sacrilegious! My youngest is my most prolific reader and loves to write herself, so at least I have one chip-off-the-old-block!
So, no I don’t think children or young adults should be protected from certain themes, obviously I don’t want young children reading about sex or being exposed to true adult themes at an early age, but most themes are relevant to teens and important in their lives.
It was my own book that made me ask the question…and ultimately I believe that books are what encourages us to dream…to capture experiences that we may never find ourselves. We find ourselves in the books we read, whether it be acceptance or rebellion, adventure or peace, love or hate…it’s all there…and books were how I learned to express myself. A love of vastly different books taught me to embrace this weird and wonderful culture in which we live!

As my character old Thomas says as he is told to let go of ‘his silly dreams’, “…it’s those silly dreams that keep us alive.”

Variety is the spice of life!

(Title quote by Matthew Prior-The Turtle and the Sparrow)

The Stars and Our Earth…

Leave a reply

I’ve always loved the stars, staring up at the multitude of constellations filling the night sky…

Globular Cluster M15 taken by Hubble Credit Hubble, ESA, NASA

I love standing up at my parent’s house, at the top of the valley overlooking Carmarthen (On a clear day you can see Llanstephan Castle fifteen miles away…) and staring up at the stars. There is so little light pollution up there that you can see a whole arm of the Milky Way sweeping across the sky, millions of twinkling stars…

Yuriearth International Space Station 2003 (Source Wikimedia Commons)

A few years ago we got the children out of bed at midnight and bundled them outside to watch the International Space Station soar overhead… The children were young and it was an out-of-the-ordinary experience for them. Dan, who was about ten-years-old waved, hoping the astronauts would be able to see him!

So this link on Twitter made me smile…
Somehow I don’t think the inhabitants of the ISS saw our wave! 

Have a look at this video of time lapse photographs taken by the crew of expeditions 28 & 29 aboard the International Space Station from August to October 2011… and marvel at the Aurora’s Borealis and Australis… the amazing night view of earth… the lights from our cities that look as if the earth is on fire…and the sheer beauty of the creation that we live on…

Earth at night (Source Wikimedia Commons)

Sensing my Signature Scents…

4 Replies

I thought I’d try something new on my blog…and write about some of my favourites, and decided to begin with fragrances…

I’m not a heavy perfume wearer, never have been, I can’t stand people who drown themselves in cologne or body spray then wander around in a cloud of it that gets right up peoples’ noses…but I do have my favourite scents, and who doesn’t like to smell good when they dress up?

So I browsed my collection…and it’s very obvious that I’m a Body Shop fan. I remember the little black-topped plastic 15ml bottles of Perfume Oil from Body Shop when I was a teenager, that only cost a few pounds. I think the first one I bought was ‘Strawberry’ then ‘Coconut’ always made me think of summer beaches, I had ‘Apple Blossom’, ‘White Musk’, ‘Mango’, and several others, the names of which escape me…the only one I ever kept was ‘Japanese Musk’ which I would never wear now because the fragrance is too heavy with jasmine, cedar and musk.

The only other throwback to my teens that I have now and still love is ‘Dewberry’, in its redesigned 15ml round glass bottles. I wear Dewberry and every time I open it I am taken back to my bedroom as a fifteen-year-old girl… It’s a delicious late summer berry fragrance, its top notes are blackcurrant, grapefruit, red apple and pear, middle are freesia, lily-of-the-valley, rose and jasmine and a base of peach, apricot, cedar and musk. I inhale the berries, rose and jasmine and adore it!
I used to own ‘Dewberry’ body lotion too and was pretty upset when Body Shop axed it some years later. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I saw the perfume oil back on sale in the Body Shop and bought it again! Right now it’s not available online in the Body Shop and hit and miss if your local has it. You can, however still buy ‘Dewberry’ Body Lotion, Bath and Shower gel.

I have a love of jasmine…I can’t think of a scent I like more than standing outside catching the late night heavy fragrance of jasmine growing across your wall and in my twenties I searched everywhere for The Body Shop’s discontinued ‘Jasmin’ Perfume Oil…I finally found one on ebay and bought it for almost £30. Sadly, it was a much heavier fragrance than I remembered and I really don’t wear it, but it does still evoke strong memories when ever I open it and take a sniff.

To move on, as I ‘grew up’ I moved to the more romantic scents and discovered another Body Shop Body Mist and Perfume Oil ‘The Spirit of Moonflower’. Fruity floral…when I wear it I think of a fresh, flowery watermelon day…hinting greatly at its notes of melon, coriander and gardenia at the top, cyclamen, lily-of-the-valley and lime blossom in the middle and base notes of jasmine and rose. It really is what it says it is…a spiritual, fruity floral…though unfortunately another that appears to be discontinued…


I got a bit miffed at The Body Shop always retiring my favourite perfumes, so searched elsewhere…but I never really found anything I loved. Perhaps the closest I found was a tester of ‘Adorably’ by Mango…a fruity, oriental flowery scent. Holding top notes of red berries and citruses, middle notes of pink pepper (no, never heard of pink peppers…), freesia and lily-of-the-valley and a base of amber, petchouli, musk and vanilla.
Not bad and certainly a perfume I liked, but I wasn’t used to buying branded perfumes or paying the price for them! My Mum had a penchant for Chanel No5…yes, the same one linked to Marilyn Monroe…and Mum had a nice 5ml bottle. So guess which of her cute, 5 or 6-year-old daughters decided to wear the whole lot at once? Yes, the whole bottle…um, that would be me…and I remember buying her a replacement bottle for about £55 when I was about 17, and thinking that was astronomical for a teeny, tiny bottle of perfume! So my perfume choices were thus constrained!

And then…yes, and then…I found my perfect fragrance! And yes, you guessed it…from The Body Shop.

I’d given up on finding anything lovely with Jasmine…and there it was…Neroli Jasmin. No, I didn’t know what Neroli was either… ‘a brown oil distilled from the flowers of various orange trees, esp the Seville orange: used in perfumery’ So now we all know!

Once I knew that, I thought jasmine and orange blossom…yes, I’m onto a winner!
One spray and sniff in the shop and I was hooked. I bought the 100ml Body Mist first for £7, and within a week or two had picked up the  30ml Perfume Oil for a couple of pounds more.
I love the spritz of body mist, nice to walk through and mist my hair, to spray before dressing and a general top up when I want a fragrance…and the Perfume Oil for when I want a longer, more intense scent.
Neroli Jasmin’s top notes are neroli, freesia and violet leaf, middle notes of orange blossom, jasmine and peony and base notes of sandlewood, vanilla, amber and musk.
I feel feminine, sexy and altogether great whilst wearing it!
Definitely my signature scent, and one that I’ve stocked up on! If Body Shop ever want to retire this one they’ll have a fight on their hands!

I think my favourite scents are becoming pretty evident now…a few years back I was searching for Christmas presents, (I have ten nieces…) and came across ‘Impulse Body Spray – New York’…as I read the back I thought, I’ll give this a try too…Only £1.99 (I may have only spent £1 at the time) and containing apple, red berries, jasmine and sandlewood, worked for me! Though I do prefer pump action body sprays rather than aerosols. The Body Shop Body Mists are heavier, more liquid when applied than ‘Impulse’ which is so much more lighter and airy.

Just this year Bekah got a couple of Body Shop vouchers from a magazine, (yes, she bought more than one to get more than one voucher…and I bought one too) and we browsed the shop trying to decide what to buy for £5…Make up? Body lotion? Lip balms? Home Fragrance Oil (yes, I like them too)? In the end we checked out the ‘Love Etc’ perfume and discovered the little heart-shaped tin of solid perfume…not something we’d come across before. £5…perfect and it smelled good! So we both bought one, and she went back a day or two later with another voucher and bought the £5 trial spray. I’ve never used a solid perfume before, so this was interesting, but fascinating. A brilliant idea to keep in your purse for a top up, or to just rub onto your pulse points when needed. It lasts well and guess what the notes are? A fusion of neroli, pear and bergamot at the top, jasmine, heliotrope and lily-of-the-valley in the middle and base notes of vanilla, sandlewood and musk. Ring any bells? To me it’s a soft summer fruit fragrance with sweet shop tones…marshmallow and candyfloss ( that would be the vanilla!).

So, now you know my favourite scents… 
which would be something like Jasmine, Neroli, Red Berries,
and a base of Sandlewood or Vanilla…
What do you like?

‘Dewberry’, ‘The Spirit of Moonflower’, ‘Neroli Jasmin’, ‘Love Etc’… all found at The Body Shop (though ‘Spirit of Moonflower’ is probably no longer available)


‘Impulse Body Spray – New York’ was a limited edition spray, so may also be unavailable, but I bought mine at Superdrug. You can find it at Boots.

‘Mango Adorably’ Needs to be Googled, it’s available at Amazon and many other sites from £1 up to £30

A Childhood Dream…

Leave a reply

Caitlin asked me the other day when I first dreamed of being an author… I’ve been drawing and writing ever since I could pick up a pencil, and I used to staple ‘book’ pages together when I was a little girl. I even have a little notebook containing a long story and my own illustrations written at 12 and treasured, though I cringe when I read it now!
Writing has been my life…my escape and my fantasy…I adore words and love exploring my imagination.
Eleven years ago, when Cait was a baby I began reading ‘Harry Potter’ and thought I could do this…so I began putting pen to paper. Within a year I had written my first novel, a dragon filled children’s adventure, my own children listened intently and loved it, four years later and two sequels had been completed.
Then I spent several years getting rejected from publishers and agents. I even paid for a highly recommended critique service to help hone the novel. We worked well and the changes I made were well received, but ultimately they told me most publishers had closed lists and weren’t taking on any new authors, (despite their advertising) and that book reading was taking a downturn…Agents told me the same thing, they loved the book, but couldn’t take anyone on.
It is a completely demoralising process…where the only way to succeed is if the book is sent at the right time, to the right person…and how do you know when that is or who that is?
I’m not blowing my own trumpet…the books may just not be good enough, but I can only rely on the feedback I’ve personally had, and the old adage…don’t give up!

So a couple of years ago I put away my fantasy adventures, (for now) and worked on a new idea…out of it came ‘Beneath the Rainbow’:


‘Death is an inevitable fact of life, indifferent to whether you are seven-years-old, or an old age pensioner who has lived a long fulfilled life. This is the heart-breaking and uplifting tale of Freya. Freya has to come to terms with her own untimely death and the impending death of terminally ill Old Thomas, who has but one dream left to achieve… Freya’s story of grief, hope, ultimate fulfilment and joy.’

The first line of the book invaded my head and I had to go with it… ‘Freya was seven-year-old when she got hit by the car. It was a 4×4 with a bull bar.’ The book goes on to deal with grief and bereavement on both sides of the veil. Freya has to adjust to death and the life she finds after it and her family have to accept and learn how to deal with the loss of their oldest daughter. 
When Freya and members of her family discover Thomas, dying of cancer, they learn that dreams are important, they learn that we must live life to the full and dreams help us do just that…
‘Beneath the Rainbow’ came from my heart and spilled into my life and it was suggested that I try Amazon’s Kindle publishing. 
And remember you don’t need a Kindle to buy and download it…on the right of the Amazon page you can download a free Kindle program to your PC…
So here we are in ebook form…
It is, technically, a dream come true to see the book available to purchase…but my greatest wish is for people to enjoy the story, to escape into Freya’s world and share time with her…
I am both elated and terrified to see it in print…I love the book, my husband cried when he read it to the children, but the true test is how it is received by the general public…
So I would love to know what you think of it…and maybe, just maybe, one day it will end up in paper print on a bookshop shelf…
That is my dream…


Another Time, Another Place…Rayn’s Art

2 Replies

Today we saw Bekah’s Art Exhibition at school…some of the work there was very impressive, and I am obviously biased that my daughter’s was pretty good too!

The first theme she worked on was Mental Health. She took photos depicting six areas of mental health: Depression, ADD, Anxiety, Tourettes, OCD and Insomnia. She then made a strait jacket, tea-dyed it and attached the photos. This became her installation in a black curtained room with an abstract video playing alongside:

Her second theme was ‘ Explore Another Time, Another Place’ and she began with retracing iconic ‘looks’ of the past century: She recreated their make up and portraits:

She then moved on to recreating the character theatrical looks for Tim Burton’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’:

Cait, Dan and I allowed Bekah to make us up as Alice, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts, she made herself up as the Knave.

She designed a pair of shoes to indicate ‘stepping into another time and place’, and decorated them with period jewellery, keys and watches to match the theme. The keys also showed being locked in another place…and this took her to nightmares and the ordeal Cait endured being made up as a Zombie:

There’s a funny story attached to the zombie look…Bekah completed the make up and she and Cait ran down the front garden steps to take photos on the road outside the house. They took the pictures and Cait overacted as a zombie would. It was only moments later when they noticed a bemused family sitting in a car behind ours watching the scene with astonished expressions! They were next door’s family visiting…didn’t expect a zombie invasion when they arrived! When they saw Cait, un-made-up the following day they commented with a smile that “she looked alot better, much more healthy!”

All images and content by Bekah Shambrook (& Lisa Shambrook) (Please do not reproduce without permission)

Her installation and display is to be photographed by the school and sent off to the examining board, as requested, as an example of A* work… so there we are.

I love art, I love painting, scrapbooking, sketching, photography and any other art, so I have loved watching Bekah’s talent develop and look forward to seeing so much more!

‘Sometimes I drive so fast, just to feel the danger…’

Leave a reply

I want to drive fast today. I want to sit behind the wheel and let the gears slip fluidly through my fingers as I charge down the road. I want to find myself speeding round the Nurburgring race track in Germany – think I’d need a better car though!

I’ve always been a bit of a speed freak, a bit of a boy racer.

‘Sometimes I drive so fast, just to feel the danger…’ Avril Lavigne – Anything, but Ordinary. Maybe that’s why I like the motorbike so much too!

The bike gives me freedom, the elements feel so close and you feel at one with the bike as you move with it, love it!

Cars are different. As a child I loved being a passenger, I liked going for drives and just sitting staring out of the window as the world goes by.

Then I went out with John, who professed to be a rally driver… not sure about that, but he did race through the country lanes with disregard, and I loved it! Foolish, yes, but fun, and with rock music blasting out of the speakers we had lots of it!

Then I passed my test and bought my first car. A black (Inverness midnight blue, actually, black with a sparkle!) Honda Prelude. I didn’t even care when Mum frowned and asked whether it was too powerful for a new driver…From that first test drive, I loved it, the purr of the engine and the thrust of the accelerator.

Okay, I crashed it the second day I drove it, and put myself into debt getting it back on the road, but I loved that car sooooo much!

I was lucky, can you imagine an 18 year old trying to get insurance on a 1600 engine these days? What was under £300 twenty years ago would probably be ten times that or uninsurable today! Mind you, considering I wrote off two cars (the Honda was a financial write off too) with it the second day, that’s probably not a bad thing…

I’ve had a few cars over the last twenty years, none new, what’s the fun in that? Besides, I’ve never sold one of my cars either. My husband points out that I drive my cars into the ground before they get scrapped!

Anyway, I’d like to note, that I’m not a bad driver, maybe a bit impatient, and I’ve got way more careful since having kids, and a speeding ticket!

I love driving. I loved my Prelude, until it died. Our Maestro was a mistake, very boring, but I was eight months pregnant when we bought it, seemed like a good idea at the time. I soon learned that cars below 1400cc were just not for me. I loved our Cavalier 1800turbo, until it died (not my fault!). The Rover was a nice family car, until it died, and I enjoy driving my Vectra, which is slowly dying… I don’t know what I’ll have next.

Roxy in the back of the Vectra, loking concerned… not my driving!

My oldest is learning to drive. Will I have to relax my driving methods and drive a small engine car and share it with my offspring? I might kill it before they do!

So, soon I’ll have to watch my child step into a car and disappear into the distance…on their own… Am I ready for that? Recalling my own early driving history, I’m not sure… 

Brighton Rocks…

1 Reply

After a weekend away in my hometown, I see how much I really miss Brighton!

I miss the sea so much. I used to live one mile from the ocean, and now I’m so much further from the sea in Wales.

That’s not to say I’m not happy with the welsh beaches I live close to, I adore the sandy shores of Pendine, Pembrey and Llansteffan…miles and miles of broad sandy beaches, perfect for walking the dog, splashing through the waves and soaking up the sun. They don’t get as busy as Brighton beaches and they’re still my favourite places to be.

But, and it’s a big but, I miss my childhood beaches of Brighton and Hove. I don’t understand why, but I even have fond memories of climbing up from the sea, across the pebbles ‘ouch’, hopping and stepping carefully to find your towel, placed strategically far up the beach… I remember wandering, again stepping carefully, across the beach trying to find the patch of sand that you know is there…but where? Then you find it… A metre square patch of golden sand…what a find, a real treasure! And sitting on the pebbles, throwing stones at drinks cans lodged ten feet away! And I love the ‘plop’ of stones as they arc and plunge into the sea as they escape your hands.

I love the big stone groynes placed between the beaches, I can remember spending warm evenings sitting on the end of these watching the sun go down and enjoying friendships and romances! I loved late evenings watching the sunset with the ocean stretching out in front of me…

I remember the magic of walking on the Palace Pier as a young girl, and staring down through the weathered wooden boards at the green ocean twinkling and sparkling in the sunlight below. The salty smell of the ocean and the wind rippling through my hair…I relived all these last week!

 So, I miss Brighton…I think there’ll always be a magic in your place of birth that you won’t find anywhere else!

…Must be talking to an angel…

1 Reply

So let’s be open-minded…do you believe in angels?

I do, but only in the ‘those who have lived and those who are yet to live’ sense…I don’t hold with old fashioned, Valentine style, cherubic babies with wings who adorn our Christmas cards, or the huge-winged, haloed, grave-yard dwelling divas, no matter how much I like the latest ‘Lynx-Fallen Angels’ advert!

I believe in beings who are just beyond our sight, who have either died or are waiting to be born…

I think these are our celestial angels.
Given my beliefs, I had an interesting experience just the other day…
I was scoffing a little at a phone-in on a morning magazine show about guardian angels. I listened with half an ear as I worked, as I don’t believe we have a specific personal guardian angel, (though I do believe we are perhaps surrounded by ancestors and others who watch us,).
Anyway the conversation turned to white feathers…apparently when you see or find a white feather it means that your guardian angel is watching over you…I grinned as I listened and spoke out loud to anyone in any realm who might be listening…
“Hey, angels, here’s one for you then! You need to show me a white feather, come on, it’s all yours..!”
Thus, I threw down the proverbial gauntlet!
I chuckled to myself and carried on with my task, sure that there were no white feathers anywhere close by (the only ones in the house were packed up in my scrapbooking box).
So imagine my surprise when moments later a teeny weeny white feather dropped and landed by my side!

It was truly tiny, just over 1cm, as you can see from the photo… but it fell as if from heaven itself!
I picked it up and my mouth broke into an amused smile. As I examined it I laughed and laughed, I knew exactly where the feather had come from, and I leaned back and picked up a lilac cushion. This cushion is filled with these tiny feathers, I shook it violently and attempted to shake out a feather, but no, nothing left the cushion! I shook my head and gazed about the room. I was impressed, and I told my ghostly visitors so!
Guardian angel? Ancestors with a big sense of humour?
Whichever, they couldn’t have picked a smaller feather to prove a point, or let it waft so delicately to my sceptical side…
Someone in the hereafter (or the herebefore) heard my challenge and thought, “No probs…let’s have a giggle!”
Next time I think I’ll ask them for something bigger!
‘Make yourself familiar with the angels and behold them frequently in spirit;
for without being seen, they are present with you.’
St Francis De Sales

Mighty oaks from little acorns grow…

Leave a reply

I need to wake up from this long sleep…I feel like I’m hibernating!


I know it’s the right time of year for hibernation…but I’m not a grizzly bear, well not that bad, yet…
It’s time to take myself in hand and try to get out of this funk. I need to realise that instead of waiting for the clouds to clear I need to get up and blow them away myself!
I need to start small and do it, instead of staring at the big picture and procrastinating. As we all know ‘Mighty oaks from little acorns grow’.
Start small…


My plan will be to do one thing each day in addition to the basics that have to be done. Just one thing, it might be to do a scrapbook page, or update albums, or I could edit my writing…and regain the courage to print out my book again to send away…maybe commit to a list of agents or publishers, I might paint a wall, or sort a drawer, or shelf, or clear the table so we can eat or work on it again! I could swim, or take Roxy to the beach…both things I’ve neglected lately. I might even brave the cold and get back out in the garden again, or write a poem…maybe I’ll paint or sign up for an art course.


That’s just for starters…now I just have to do it.
One foot in front of the other, little by little and maybe, just maybe, I’ll recover my inspiration and motivation…