hummus* and oatcakes**

* ok – seem to be a variety of spellings on this – Sainsbury and Waitrose have it as houmous….thoughts please
** the north Staffordshire type – basically oat crepes, the oats off setting the cholesterol of the bacon most people put inside them

This is the most delicious combination. More so perhaps because it proceeds a refreshing, revitalising evening run.

That’s all I have to say tonight.

Roaring on.

As long as you …

As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it.

Mahatma Gandhi

Or as Angela said to me, “if you don’t love it, don’t buy it”…..

Living along these lines has been intriguing, over the past 14 months. To hold out for something that is beautiful, stunning, quirky, perfect over something ugly, disposable, close enough. It requires a discipline and a determination that can be developed and honed and isn’t one that settled on me naturally.

“Soft furnishings”, interior design, furniture generally had little place in our larger family. We rattled around in our massive Colorado house, three times the size of our previous London one, and we talked about furnishing it and meandered halfheartedly into the right type of stores….and meandered out, either with nothing or with random items that didn’t do what we needed nor were generally sympathetic to what else we had.

And then when JD died, being in that vast empty house only exacerbated the torment. My body was empty, my heart was lost, the house was a cavern. The Santa Monica crew flew across and helped me feather the nest, creating a place of solace and softness and muted fabrics in the house that had been sharp and ragged and hollow……And if it was not loved, LOVED,  it did not get bought….close was not good enough….and loved was fine, even if it didn’t seem to fit. You can always find a place for something you love, after all, can’t you?

And if chocolate and red wine and white wine and whiskey (all together if necessary although that, as yet, has not been the case), writing blogs, and sobbing while running, and hiding away, and daily calls with LittleBro, and not sleeping, and not going to church, and HBO and French TV shows get me through each day, then that is good enough. It can all be kept, like Gandhi said (although granted, alcohol would not have made his list….), until the day I don’t need it anymore….until the day when I can roar on, without even trying…..