Because it’s a long time till Spring, and sometimes you need to remember how green the world can get…

This is Borrowdale, a valley about ten miles from where I live. Childhood holidays were spent here, and it is, in my mind and my heart, quite simply the most beautiful, tranquil, loved and living landscape in the world.

…while I clean behind your ears.

I received a sneak peak at my evolving website today.

Oh, wow. I wish I could show you…. but I won’t till it’s all ready, and that could take some time, seeing as I haven’t started writing the content yet! Eeeek!

I’ve also been buying books – I haven’t read romance for a few months, been on a Terry Pratchett binge, but I’ve been collecting recently. I bought Michelle’s latest, A Noble Captive the three Brides books from Kate Walker, Anne McAllister and Liz Fieldings’s contest (details here) and Julie Cohen’s Driving Him Wild. There was a Kate Hardy title there that I badly wanted to buy, too, but it was set in a maternity ward, and, frankly, I’m just not that strong. Weepie romance, yes. Maternity wards, yes. Both, um, no.

Actually, I think I’ll go back and get it, because I can always read it… after, one way or another, can’t I?

Don’t you just love buying friends’ books? I do. Makes me feel all warm and sqeeful.

Anyway, I want to have a stack of titles for when I finish with the Discworld oevre, and I fancy being romanced again.

Do you find what you want to read goes in phases?

I’m female, so I’m a multi-tasker. This manifests itself in a variety of ways – reading on the loo, writing in the car (via Dictaphone), plotting while praising husband on his annihilation of the Mongols in Medieval Total War II, taking the bean goulash off the stove with the left hand, taking a serving spoon out the drawer with the right hand and closing the vegetable drawer with the right foot at the same time – I’m definitely a multi-tasker.

This is a very, very good thing.

Because currently, without my trying very hard to do it, I seem to have ended up working on four books at once. Proofing Run Among Thorns, finishing Taken, revising a partial of Dangerous Lies and mentally plotting WIP #6. Which I shouldn’t be doing, because Danger: Deep Water hasn’t been plotted yet, and that’s nominally WIP #5.

Sometimes, only a WTF? will do.

Are you a one-at-a-time kind of person, or is it the more the merrier for you?

Durham is lovely, you know.

I mean, really lovely.

The weather was kind: a little snow on the drive over and back, a little rain while we ate delicious Italian food in the conservatory next to the 15th century bridge. In the darkness, the black river turned into watered silk as the raindrops struck it. It whispered on the glass overhead, and rustles the stately beeches on the steep riverbanks.

The next morning the sun shone. Brightly, strongly, adamantly, hurting the eyes. We walked along the river, passed by ducks and by University rowers, watched by jays and little bobbing yellow wagtails.

We talked, we rested, we relaxed.

I plotted a book.

Lovely.

One last thing to say, to the couple in room 16. Whilst we appreciated your sense of rhythm, and were frankly in awe of your stamina, if you are going to engage in an intimate activity on a squeaky bed that involves the headboard repeatedly striking the wall, could you have chosen a more appropriate time than 4.30am? We were going to give you a round of applause at the, er, audible climax of your activity, but, on discussion, thought that it might have spoilt your afterglow.

Husband and I are having a night away from home… the night they’re saying it’ll snow.

And we’re doing it in our second-best car, the one affectionately known as the Noddy Car.

This could be fun…

Back Monday.

… about, well, about the interior light not going off in my car, until I’d figured out what was stopping it. About the rain and the wind, and the fuel warning light coming on halfway up a mountain pass while the water was gushing out of the ground, and the road was slick with sleet. About the two closed petrol stations. About the over-long meeting on Thursday night, about stuffing envelopes with 500 seperate items because admin were too busy, about my phone breaking, my temper breaking, about my car braking not quite working.

I don’t want to talk about my windscreen wipers ceasing to work four miles south of Penrith on the M6, in the rain, in the gales, at approximately 10:45pm last night. I don’t want to talk about lying on the floor of my car, with my head upside-down under the steering wheel fiddling about with fuses. I don’t want to talk about having to spend too much money on a Travelodge room, or losing money in the vending machine so I could eat chocolate for dinner at midnight. We will draw a veil over my locking myself out of my room while I fetched said chocolate.

I’m not going to discuss the intermittent sleep or the clicking radiator in the room.

I could probably talk about the overwork today, but not about the walking miles to and from meetings because I didn’t have transport. Or the garages that were unable to fix my windscreen wipers.

Or the constant, burning, urge to SCREAM.

I am happy to praise the nice tow-truck driver who got me, and my car, home tonight.

I’m happy to talk about the hot bath I’m about to have, or the glass of port I just HAVE had. Tomorrow we can talk about my brother being here to stay, and our friend John visiting tomorrow so the boys can play war games.

But right now, mostly, I don’t want to talk about it…

(And hey, was that a drive-by Waxing?)