2013 has been a trying year. Three people I love were diagnosed with, and/or treated for life-threatening conditions. Then there was Isaac ...

 

I don’t know what you lot are doing in this limbo between Christmas and New Year but some of us are slogging our guts out watching films eve...

When I was ten I formed a club called The Cherry Pickers. There were four of us in the club and the only thing I remember us doing at our me...

I watched While you were sleeping last night in the great Hepworth season of film-watching, which is my homework (heh-heh…to help me in wri...

I’ve decided there is no point in taking action to dispatch my spare tyre until these are finished: I’ll have to make them last. In t...

Don’t tell Dave, but I am really enjoying our OFF Christmas. (After all, I did have the family meal on Sunday with crackers and Pictionary a...

I got up late yesterday, so was late at Bakewell market and then even later because I bumped into an old friend who bundled me into the near...

It comes to a pretty pass when you are single-handedly in the process of assembling a festive family meal comprising: roast free range chi...

To cheer you up while you take a break from the Christmas frenzy… further Christmas doings of our heroine, but this time – seven years later...

I thought you might like the next instalment of Sally Howe’s Christmas in Plotting for Beginners – following on from yesterday’s post….(so ...

Zoe and family are coming on Sunday for a BIG MEAL so I got up early to zip down to Bakewell for last minute food shopping, and Dave said he...

We’ve hit on a happy compromise for the OFF Christmas: Christmas is confined to my study, so I have a small tree (see pic on yesterday’s pos...

Our ON-OFF Christmas (aka Christmas in the Shed) – which is now part of the biennial domestic landscape at Hepworth Towers -  has an intere...

Forgive me, old friends, but some of my new readers don’t know about the ON/OFF Christmas at Hepworth Towers, which began as a joke in our k...

My half-dressed tree has nothing to do with our ON-OFF Christmas and everything to do with me rushing off to hospital in the middle of...

I’m feeling a bit better. I just have to stay away from the news. Also, yesterday I brought my new tree into my study. I’ll dress it today...

Who would have thought that an evening in a local pub the size of our sitting room, doing a pub quiz with a bunch of friendly women I didn’t...

I had a good day yesterday. I worked all morning on my own in the garden. That’s what I like to do at the moment. I don’t want to talk to an...

I’ve been feeling really low. Last night I cried my way through most of Billy Elliot. I haven’t felt this bad for such a sustained period si...

OK, I played the Glad Game last week. The effect was patchy. Sometimes I felt cheery, and sometimes I felt like this (found in our bath yest...

If your Christmas tree looks like this: and you’ve had enough of the short days and the long nights and your SAD light doesn’t seem to ...

I’ve been lying in bed trying to choose my small pleasure for today, but every time I think of one, I decide it’s not small, it’s BIG . e....

I was driving home from Sheffield over the hills at teatime yesterday, feeling sad, and then I saw the new moon. That’s another small pleasu...

Shunning the news this week and thinking about small pleasures has made me feel so much better. I see my local grandsons once a week, and i...