Festive message to anyone who would expect a Christmas card from me: I've spent the money on badgers, instead. I hope everyone enjoys a magical midwinter and a happy, successful 2009.
1. On Friday morning, the alarm clock is switched off until Sunday night.
2. As I pay for my sewing bits, the smell of the pastie in my bag breaks free.
3. A book, Fiona Robyn's The Letters, arrives by post. I sit in the bath with it and later curl up on the sofa to finish it. I can't escape its clutches until I understand all its twists and mysteries. I felt the same way about Anita Shreve's book, The Pilot's Wife. But The Letters is funny and English and gently domestic as well as enticing. The heroine, Violet, has got along pretty well in her life by being an un-bending workaholic. But now she is 51 and living alone. There are things she wants -- reconciliation with her lover; a better relationship with her exasperating grown-up children -- and she is beginning to realise that she can't have them without changing. Then a letter arrives. It was written in 1959 by a young woman waiting to give birth in a mothers and babies home. Who is this mother-to-be and what does her story have to do with Violet? Fiona, who also writes the blog A Small Stone, and its spin-off A Handful of Stones, has promised to visit 3BT on her blog-tour, which I'm very much looking forward to.
