Either a centuries old, petrified, mutant frog, possibly dropped by a Voodoo priestess out walking her dog, or a bit of old, dried root.

You can probably guess which one I saw. I named him Bernard.

Today we rode the steam train. I told Kai as he was falling asleep to think about the best thing from today. He babbled about when the train stopped and I bought him an ice lolly, and as I switched the light off I heard pretend licking and happy sighs.

I posted this on Blipfoto just before I went to bed last night and as I was falling asleep I thought, why did I do that? I should be blogging more moments like this. I should be blogging more, fullstop. No. Not ‘should do’, ‘would like to’. To be honest I have fallen out of love with the whole thing of late, lost in foggy places as I have been. And that’s okay. Permission to retreat is the thing I advise other bloggers of more than anything.

But I’m not in a foggy place any more, and it’s about time I started celebrating the day to day again.

So expect more posts like this. Hope that’s okay with you.

Thank goodness, the fog is finally lifting a bit. I feel like I can see again. It’s not all the time but when it comes it isn’t half worth waiting for. Life is beautiful again and I’m soaking it all up.

My step-mum discovering my missing camera hidden in her car helped a great deal. Can you tell?

I think the meds have kicked in too. I can think again, concentrate again. I’ve finished my first piece of knitting in a month and I’m managing to stay awake past 8pm a bit more often. Party on, people.

It’s a bit lovely having my brain back. Now I just need to resist the urge to try and catch up with two months of thinking and plans all at once. I think maybe this is that bit just after you wake up when you’re not quite ready to move and when lying still watching the sun through the curtains letting your dreams settle seems about the best idea.

*presses snooze button*

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve not been having a particularly easy time of it of late. It’s probably not ideal to be starting a new year with a failed marriage, no job, no money, only a hazy recollection of a flu-ridden Christmas, and a cracked rib (from COUGHING! can you believe it?!). But there we go. There I am. It could be worse, and I sincerely mean that.

Like most people who are rather adept at falling over, in the metaphorical, not-being-particularly-good-at-this-life-business sense, I am also a pathological getter-back-upper. I sort of have to be, don’t I? And the one thing I can say is that although I don’t seem to be making much headway in avoiding the falling over bits, (and still having the inevitable rolling around wailing period when I do), I AM getting better at getting back up again.

This week I have mostly been doing that. Little by little, with all the usual stumbles and trips and bambi-esque wobbles, but look! I’m up! I am!

And I thought that for all the other getter-back-uppers, or perhaps those of us still lying somewhere with our face on the floor, I would recount some of my very best tried and tested strategies for picking yourself up and getting going again. I can’t guarantee they’ll work for you, but they work for me:

1. Sleep

A lot. I mean 8pm bedtimes, people.

2. Buy a book

Doesn’t really matter which one; something fanciful and absorbing like this one, or a good old self-improving one like this one. The only condition is that it is a good book. Because you can’t read a good book without being changed a little bit, and CHANGE is what we’re after here (in that we’re trying to get from the prone-floor-position to somewhere new, are you with me?)

3. Do something that you know makes you happy

I know this sounds a bit obvious, but it’s amazing how long it takes me to remember to do this one. For me it’s taking photographs, and sitting in bed watching films doing my knitting. So this week I remembered to do all those things in great big dollops, and, surprise and surprise, they DID make me happy. Duh.

(you can click through to see some more if you’re really keen.)

4. Make a change in your routine

If my week feels like it sucks as it is, then I need to change it, right? Simple.

This week Kai starts nursery. Two blissful mornings a week, paid for by my lovely Dad, to help give me some time off to work and just have a bit of a break. On a whim I have signed up for a pottery class for two hours on a Tuesday morning. It will mean new people, a new environment, maybe a new skill (but more likely lots of misshapen ‘trys’), and, most importantly, doing something completely different for no other reason than just because I can.

It’s probably not going to change my life, but who knows, worth a try.

5. Pick a new path, anyone will do, and walk down it

Because we are bit hopeless (let’s face it) we aren’t going to worry about where we’re going, but hell, we’re moving, that’s the main thing. The point is to give it a go.

I’ve made plans to do some work, unpaid but very, very worthy and hopefully inspiring and exciting and all the things that make me feel like it’s worth me being here. It definitely counts as one of those ‘not sure where it’s going’ paths but I’m not doing it to get anywhere, just to give me a new landscape to look at for a while and hopefully to be able to do something good along the way.

6. Do something that scares you

Pick one of those niggly little avoidances, something that sits at the bottom of your mind like a damp old toad.

In a week I am going to walk through the doors of an evening art class. Since having to give my place up at Art School last year I haven’t been able to pick up a pencil or a paintbrush. All my confidence is gone. So I’m going to make myself go, at least once, and see what happens.

7. Pick up something uncompleted that you have still to finish

You don’t have to finish it (because this is the no-pressure guide for people like me that cave under pressure), but you DO have to add to it.

This year I am doing another year towards my Open Honours Degree with the Open University, English Grammar of all things, and my first level 3 (read=hard) course. My big, brown course box came this week and it felt good to feel like I would be adding another 60 points to my total in the next few months. I might even finish the damn thing and graduate next year, you never know.

8. Do something radical to your appearance. Go on, be brave…

Like this! This was a bloody good idea today. Huzzah.

9. If you’re really desperate, do all the above.

I did. Desperate times call for desperate measures my friends. We’ll call it the flinging damp, balled-up paper towels at the ceiling approach. ONE of them will stick, at least.

10. THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE: Give yourself permission to quit.

If the book’s boring, get a new one. If the new path turns out it leads to the middle of nowhere or Somewhere Prickly, double back. If the change in your routine doesn’t work out, try something new. If your dramatic change in your appearance feels like a mistake after a couple of days of looking in the mirror, take the new coat back or go back to hairdresser or WHATEVER.

Because, having established at the get-go that we’ll probably fall over again before too long, we are aboslutely NOT making resolutions here, or promises, or anything else official and confident.

We’re just giving it a go.

Best foot forward comrades x

Here’s to a full turn of the seasons since I discovered photography. And to many, many more.

This post was written for Week 34 of the Gallery
The theme this week was Seasons

This morning, I put on half my wardrobe and went out while it was still dark to watch the Solstice sun rise. I left the boys safe and warm and wandered, alone but with a head full of thoughts for company, to my quiet nature sanctuary.

There was a spring in my step as I walked on pavements, glittering with quartz, avoiding frozen puddles and leaving deep footprints in the hard frost. Because last night, on the longest night, I got MY longest night for 18 months.

Kai slept. At last. He slept. And so did I.

Waking up briefly at 10pm, he settled holding my hand and then I didn’t hear from him again until 6am. When I went in to him, all tousled and wrinkled from his long sleep, he smiled me a smile that told me he knew he’d done an important thing. And with a excited hug and a frantic tug towards our bedroom he was eager to snuggle up with me and his dad and have his first, long and happy feed since before he’d gone to bed. By Jove, I think he’s got it.

It may not be repeated tonight, in fact I expect not, but that’s ok. We’ve turned a corner here, I can feel it. And the hope for better nights, and finally some refreshing sleep, has never been stronger.

And so, with the energy that comes only from a decent stretch of sleep, I walked this morning. For over an hour I sought out the sun from its hiding place and watched as it rose, glowing and golden from the horizon. I watched the light change, touching the icy marshes, and the world transform.

I thought a lot. About the last 18 months, about the next year ahead. About my hopes and my anxieties and my confusion sometimes about why on earth I am here and what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. I didn’t find answers, but as the geese flew across the grapefruit sky in a perfect V, I too found some peace.

A new day has dawned.

Happy Yule everyone x

In case you were at all worried that I had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown over the weekend and had been whizzed away to a padded room sans Wi-Fi, I’m here to reassure you: I’m fine. The being whizzed away part was true, although there were fewer men-in-white coats and electric shock treatment and more obese ducks and sitting around drinking tea watching the sunset. Either way, it was good therapy. Dad’s off to China so this weekend marked our family’s pre-Christmas gathering at a beautiful cottage nestled by the canal. The weather was gorgeous, the company witty and entertaining (well, I was anyway), the Christmas tree was only slightly crap looking. There was food, there was cheesy Christmas music, there were long walks in frost. It was fab.

Now I’m home and trying very hard to fight off all the worries that I had thought I’d left behind.

I have a ton of stuff to do before the end of the month. Cleaning is one. Pulling 2,500 words of literary brilliance out my ass is another. Finding a way to survive financially through the toughest two months of the year is pretty high up there too. Oh yeah, and it’s Christmas isn’t it. Which means I should probably write some cards or something.

Apologies if you’ve arrived looking for the Writing Workshop prompts but I’ve decided to close up shop till the New Year. There will still be blogging and twittering, but as-and-when, in between all the other stuff with no added pressure of workshop deadline’s type blogging and twittering.

There is good news though: if you’re REALLY stuck for inspiration this week then you are very welcome to email or tweet me and I will provide you with your very own, customised, one-of-a-kind writing prompt. Call it a Christmas present.

In the meantime, if you fancy looking at some beautiful scenery and some ducks and stuff then click here to be magically transported to the rest of my weekend snaps.

And because this post seems to have a slightly (and unintentionally) melancholy edge, I’m going to finish on a high note. Apologies if you’ve seen these already but it is TOO cute not to share…

I was disappointed not to get the chance to do the photo prompt on this week’s workshop. Photography (of the amateur kind) is a bit of a secret passion of mine, although not one I seem to have invested a lot of time in lately. My camera is a bit rubbish and not working very well, with a battery life of about 20 minutes if you don’t use the flash, but it takes reasonable pictures.

So, this morning when there was finally a break in the rain, me and Kai wrapped up and set off to take some photos to introduce you to the very best thing about my home neighbourhood. We moved into our tiny terraced house 7 years ago at a time when I still couldn’t walk very far so it was actually only once I had started walking longer distances again, about 3 years ago, that I discovered this place.

There is a lot I don’t like about where I live. It is extremely urban and grey, right in the centre of our town. It only takes ten minutes to walk to the town centre which is a plus point, but the off-set is endless streets of wheelie bins and on-street parking, dog poo and just the odd, stunted tree. Our neighbours are horrendous and although we’ve made a good first home, I’ve never really put down roots here and am, quite frankly, desperate to move.

But this place is my sanctuary, my breath of life in an otherwise pretty soulless part of town. Two minutes walk from my house there is a footpath that winds its way between estates, coming out alongside the wide open space of the Common, working it’s way under the main roads and eventually to the town centre itself.

Rubbish and graffiti nestle alongside the trees and vegetation but the over whelming feeling is one of green and open skies, nature finding itself a little foothold and not letting go. As you walk you eventually leave houses behind, walking through the middle of the gorgeous town graveyard and coming to the wide pools and marshes of Nature Reserve that sits nestled against our little town.

It’s like having a little piece of the countryside that I can escape to whenever I am feeling a little hemmed in by the oppressiveness of urban living. I am a country girl at heart and having this small peace of green so close has saved my sanity many times over.

Anyway, enough words now – here is the rest of  my little slice of home…

P.S. Dear Santa, if had maybe a spare Canon SLR lying around and that you might like to give to a good home, I promise I would be good for the rest of my life. (I still believe in you by the way…) x