This year I have been thinking rather a lot about planning. When hubby retired I think I was a bit lost as I hadn’t needed to share my ideas or plans on any great scale for quite a while and being a person that can memorise the next months appointments and even carry a rough idea when dentist and optician appointments are due during the year,  I very rarely referred to a diary.  But that wasn’t going to work as a couple as it left hubby floundering and me wondering why on earth he was doing something different to what I had planned – which of course I hadn’t communicated to him.

So we started to plan together on Sunday evenings, Mandy with her Erin Condren and all the stickers, colourful gel pens, stamps with chalk ink and gorgeous washi tapes, accompanied by hubby with a book of 1001 things to do in London, the Londonist and various other whats on in London and Warwickshire websites and a map of the underground. That concerted effort that lasted maybe an hour really set the tone for the following week.  It didn’t always work, sometimes we would get rained out or just not feel like doing a long slog that day, but the ideas were still there and ready to pick up and pop into the diary at a moments notice.

Various ways of planning have been experimented with, and I find as my diary gets busier and busier that I actually do need a diary, maybe thats an age thing, but I am wondering how I managed without one. Bullet journaling comes and goes, mainly when I am in clean all the things and sort it all out mode. My Erin Condren  was brilliant for organising and planning and as the week went on it turned into a scrapbook of postcards and leaflets of events and cute sticker photographs printed by my zip printer, becoming a perfect memory of our 1st year of retirement, it is totally rammed I can barely close it.  So I am changing that around too, this year I will be solely using my Erin Condren as a scrapbook of our lives together, to record all the joyful things that we see and do and have bought a Mambi Happy Planner in the new Big size to plan the week with. It will be big enough to include all excursions, exercise, meal plans, photography and other hobbies ideas and time slots, domesticity and anything else that may appear. Along with that I have been playing with a Cocoa Daisy, Daisy Dori mainly because they are just so pretty, but this allows me to concentrate on the month in hand and slots very nicely into my travelers notebook, along with my diary (a Hobonichi Weeks, the paper is just gorgeous and fountain pen friendly!) and with that a journal that I write up daily. Have I found my herd of Unicorns?  I’m not sure, but I think I am getting close.

This year I aim to experiment with Power Sheets, well I will when they come, they arrived in Paris and then went to Germany for a wander around, they are in London now, so I should see them soon. I’ve also picked up a couple of books about living well and How to Live a Good Life by Jonathan Fields is certainly hitting the spot.  And although we are still in the embryonic stage of exploring my deeper thinking, needs and wants it has already become abundantly clear that photography has become a driving force behind my creativity this year. I also know that spending too much time on social media, addictive as it is, has exhausted me, sometimes I feel like a rat caught in a run, running up and down, up and down and therefore it needs to be reigned in and controlled.

But there is good stuff within the digital world, notably the world and its wife do videos these days, so exploring the use of Photoshop and Lightroom has never been easier and to that end I aim to use Lynda.com a couple of times a week, as well as using Youtube as a tool not just entertainment.

This year our plant based diet is going to be ramped up to five days a week, we have been hovering at three days for a while, so we are ready to take the next step. I think we will always enjoy eating meat, but as we both enjoy all the vegetables and noticeably feel better when we are more attentive to our diet, it just makes sense. Obviously the usual murmurings about exercise and alcohol intake apply.

Apart from photography, diet and exercise as the main components of my year ahead, I really want to live as presently as possible.  I know that these have been the buzz words of the last few years, but I have pondered with them for a quite a while and at last see how it all works, together, for me, at a deeper level and it is getting easier.  And I know that when I make that effort, and actually it does require quite a bit, hubby and I’s life together just gets that little bit more colourful and much more memorable and if I know anything, it is that I want to enjoy and remember every single second, which of course is impossible, but as much as I possibly can.  I want to remember these crazy, fun filled days forever, even if I might need an aid memoir in my later stages.

Happy New Year everyone, safe journey.

Thank you all for your love, laughter and friendships, sent with love x.

If there is one thing that I love more than anything else, it is to blow the cobwebs away with a walk in the woods and never is there a better time to do this than on Christmas Eve before the festivities proper start. Having checked online with what is and isn’t legal these days with regard to taking a little bit of greenery for my festive bouquets we set forth. I do love these woods, I’ve loved them since my eyes first cast sight of them which was probably knowing my parents at just a few months old.  I know them like the back of my hand and it is one place that I miss painfully when I am away.I felt the same surge of excitement and deep calm that I always feel as I enter, the feeling of coming home but not knowing quite what I will discover. Hubby and I walked through the woods until we came upon the old railway track going to Balsall Common, well you have to imagine the sleepers and rails, long since lifted. We used to play fabulous games of Cowboys and Indians  running in and out of the woods and pretend to hear the trains coming by listening for the vibrations on the rail by pressing an ear to the track,  safe in the knowledge it had been decommissioned by Dr Beeching in the early sixties. Now it is a Greenway which to be honest isn’t as much fun as you have to watch out for cyclists whipping past you at 30 mph.We collect a few logs that have been torn from the trees in high winds, they were lovely to watch on Christmas Day, crackling and hissing on top of the hot coals. And a few bits of greenery to bring winter green into our home.And I breathe the deep, deep green, so fresh country air. I can’t wait to try this walk out another day, it looks amazing. And after picking laurel, berries and rosehips from the garden to mix in with a few roses,I made two lovely displays which reminded us of the woods and our wonderful five mile hike on Christmas Eve.

Peace and Goodwill to all men.

If there are two things I love most about Christmas as an adult that has gone through the child rearing process it is this, I love fresh flowers and long, as in five miles long, long country walks. The fresh flowers belong in the ‘extravagant just for me’ category and the long five mile walk belongs in the ‘this keeps me more sane than anything else I know’ category.

I’ll post about the walk another day, it was blissful – and its been a hectic day and I’m just about to pop to bed.

But the flowers are just so pretty, they are a combination of leaves picked from the roadside and what was once an old railway track, turned into a long flat walk, roses bought a couple of days ago and laurel and berries from our garden. 

As we head into the last few days before the main event I start to relax and just enjoy this moment in time. The shopping has been done, including the sprouts. We are wrapping up the presents and the socialising and are just about to pull up the drawbridge.

We had one last jaunt to the theatre to see Jack and the Beanstalk which was just amazing and a  quick drink with long lost friends.

And now to sleep to dream of lovely jaunts tomorrow and the quest to find a Christmas log for the fire.

Christmas is busy isn’t it?  Even when retired, it seems hectic, but in a good way.  Hubby and I have been soaking up the sights and sounds of a country Christmas this year. We kicked off with a Victorian evening in our county town. And the weather was really quite mild. Although you’d never know this by how wrapped up I was, but then I do do snug, very well. Hubby enjoying his wander around, listening to all the carols, mini concerts and watching the morris dancers.  This event does seem to have gotten much bigger over the years, it took us a good couple of hours to get around. We finished with a trip to St Mary’s to look at all the beautifully decorated Christmas trees and to vote on them. This was my favourite called Flander’s Fields.  (I think by the WI, but I’ve lost my notes!) The following week we were off to my home town to enjoy the switching of the lights on. It was as always great fun and again we had very good weather. As well as that there was a lovely visit to Santa, at Stoneleigh Abbey, it was too cute.  We wandered around the gift and craft fair admiring all the things. And a burger and carol evening provided by St Johns was a just a lovely moment in time.

We have enjoyed theatre trips,  meeting up with family and friends for meals and coffee’s and drinks and more coffees and more drinks and more meals, I think that roundabout slows down after lunch today,  there have been theatre trips to be followed by another theatre trip at the end of the week which I am really looking forward to and a quickly booked cinema trip with an old friend and not forgetting the birthdays that creep into the celebrations at this time of the year.  And then, like everyone,  we must fit in The Christmas shop, although the drinks run is done and dusted.

It is good to be busy at Christmas, I hold onto all of this so tightly when we have that awful stretch of manky weather end of Jan/Feb.  You have to have the treasures to fall back on.

Well I must go, my knitting group starts in fifteen minutes! Now where is my knitting?

A most amusing cat.

It is one of life’s greatest pleasures to have children come to play in the home at Christmas and never more so than when it is family.  Distant, but not in distance, cousins came to play today and we had so much fun. We all had a very good lunch of pizza with salad and garlic bread followed by ice cream with strawberries and then settled into the very serious business of icing gingerbread men.

From the moment that the door had been knocked one could hear the spontaneous crackle of chatter and laughter as they entered, coats discarded, shoes thrown off as the conversation became more energised by the moment.  Soon after lunch we prepped the table for the icing extravaganza and the energy and chatter was reaching fever pitch. And then five minutes in, you could hear a pin drop, which isn’t bad for an age range of 15 to 2. You could hear the concentration in the room as each strove to make their own individual masterpiece. Their Mum and I smiled to each other, it was just perfection.As we soaked up the moment. And almost instantly the spell was broken as we burst into laughter as we watched a little icing eating going on. Deep in thought, perhaps as to what the next gingerbread should be.  There was a little playing with the nativity set. And a little giggling in the big arm chair. All too soon we were just about finished, all boys and girls were very proud of their iced gingerbreads and we all had had a lovely afternoon. All gingerbread men and women with the most whacky of stripped trousers and jazzy suits, reindeers with the brightest of red jelly noses and squiggly monsters, morphed icicle’s and snowmen placed neatly for a quick photo, when I realised. One of us was still going strong.  He was so cute. Eventually all packed up in a box, ready to go home.

It was the best of times, I hope to remember it always.

St Johns Church has been a part of my life on and off for the last 50 years and to be honest while in London I’ve very much missed it’s familiarity and warmth. I wouldn’t call myself a regular church goer by any means, I just pop in for a bit of a boost when needed. But this is the church I call home, the church I was christened in, the church I started to go to after a few years at the local Sunday school held in a local school, the church I followed pathfinders in and eventually the church I was confirmed into. I’ve seen family and friends being married there, babies and adults being christened and said goodbye to well loved family and friends.

So when I came home this time and felt in need of some quiet contemplation in the church I call home I was just a tiny bit upset that its renovations had not been completed yet, so I bided my time, waiting and waiting, regularly checking their website, which to be honest does not appear to be updated as often as it could be. When a flyer came through the door, announcing the local carol services, of which St John’s was included. It went straight in the diary. It was lovely to see the newly polished St John’s looking so pretty as it opened its doors to its first full service. The choir was in fine form, the church was packed to the rafters and the chosen carols were just wonderful and we all sang with enthusiasm and vigour.  What a glorious start to the next hundred years or so.