Hello everyone, happy February. Am keeping warm by typing like the wind, drinking buckets of coffee and hoovering up the carbs in the shape of piles of toast. It can be a depressing time of year, this long march between the last of the Christmas chocolates (even the liqueurs) and the Easter holidays and spring. But there is plenty to be pleased about even so. Outside my hut the snowdrops have their white heads cast demurely down and the earliest daffodils are sending green knife-blades up through the frozen soil. But the rabbits have already cut the first fritillaria off at the pass, their shoots are nibbled to nothing, so none of those again for another year.
As I write, it is a beautiful winter morning with sun glittering on the rhododendron leaves and a milky mist filling the valley below the frosted fields. The bright chill has an exhilarating glass-of-champagne quality, it tightens your nose, burns your fingers and settles coldly on your hair. The birds are singing bravely and rustling distractingly about in the dry leaves by my hut door. Every now and then I hear the thud of a squirrel above me, running along my hut roof.
The other great thing about winter is the darkness and the clear skies of the frozen nights. I’m regularly almost colliding with the trees in the drive as I swerve to point out to the children spectacular Orion striding across the heavens with his diagonal belt of diamonds and the supergiant stars at his shoulder and heel. I’d love to know more about astronomy but I can’t stay out for more than five minutes in these temperatures. It’s cold enough for two hairnets, as we say in Yorkshire. I hang about just long enough to spot what I think of as my own personal constellation, Cassiopeia, who looks like a huge ‘W’ in the sky. I hope my initial is the only thing I have in common with Cassiopeia, one of several pushy mothers in Greek myth who made the mistake of boasting about her offspring.
What have I been doing recently? Working on my new book mostly – more news of that anon – and as usual rattling off a few things on the side as well. Book reviewing, short story writing, and also a travel piece about my local area in which I explore Matlock’s unexpected links with Florence Nightingale and Mary Queen of Scots, and how a local hairdresser started the Industrial Revolution. This weekend we are taking the children to see a comic crime mystery called ‘Murdered To Death’ at our local Chesterfield Theatre. Whether it will be any good I don’t know but I loved the title.
I had a fun trip to Salford (not many sentences start like that) when I appeared on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour with Dame Jenni to talk about the trend for men to propose in embarrassing, over-the-top ways. The specific examples were the ghastly ‘marry me’ fireworks set off in front of Hollies Branson and Valance by their ‘beaux’ (as Hello magazine always calls them). But I think Prince William probably started it all with that oh-so-simple Kenyan hut on a friend’s estate that could only be reached by private plane. I may be wrong, but I suspect Kate would have said yes in the Slug and Lettuce.
On the self-improvement front, I bash on with Pilates and my piano lessons and have recently re-read two favourite books, The Great Gatsby and David Copperfield (the tiny print of the latter volume forcing me to push my specs right to the end of my nose and finally recognise I am even more shortsighted than I was before). I also stirred my first ever batch of marmalade, made by my husband, the preserves king. It was worth making for the fabulous citrus smell with which it filled the kitchen alone. Like a hundred very expensive scented candles all being lit at once.
This month I am looking forward to a half term holiday in wonderful Whitby, north Yorkshire. It is always bracing at this time of year but hopefully not quite to the extent it was in 2010 when we had to be dragged out of the snow by tractor. We have a great time mooching about the frozen wastes of Scarborough Castle and Whitby Abbey (scene of the opening of Dracula), followed by a warming Knickerbocker Glory or chocolate sundae at Scarborough’s wonderful, authentically Fifties ice-cream parlour, the Harbour Bar with its half-moon sweep of bar top, red-padded circular stools, coffee in glass cups and ladies in pale lemon uniforms.
Happy Valentine’s Day and a heartwarming February in general!
