If you could hear the racket outside my window, you’d be very grateful I write a blog and haven’t gone all podcast-y on you. As I write, there’s a jackhammer, a digger, and a cement mixer on the go. Building an extension and gutting a kitchen and downstairs bathroom, all at the same time, has proven somewhat challenging. The dog spends his days panting, pacing, and giving me slitty-eyed attitude from under my desk. Hubby is trying to hold global conference calls with the cement mixer outside his window. One exterior wall is currently nothing but a sheet of plywood as we head into November chills. The dining room is a sea of boxes full of kitchen equipment; or it was until we had to relocate said boxes when water started dripping, then gushing, through the dining room ceiling. This is nothing to do with the construction, I hasten to add. It just hasn’t stopped raining since they dug the first foundation trench and parts of the roof we didn’t know needed attention now need attention. ‘It never rains but it pours’ wasn’t coined by Shakespeare during construction of the Globe Theatre, but rest assured, someone had the roof off something when that phrase was born.
Luckily, I have a coping strategy for chaos. I read. There’s something about the ingrained motor memory of turning a page, the eyes flicking left to right, left to right in a rhythm honed over decades, and the knowledge that on the next page something amazing will emerge that transports the soul away from the diggers and the jackhammers and into another world. I hear people say they never read. To me, they may as well be saying Planet Earth is flat or the sky is green. How do they survive construction projects? Relatives at Christmas? Twenty minutes of watching the news? Anyway, I’ve read a lot of good books lately so my First World construction headaches are manageable. Isn’t that what reading and writing are all about? The ability to escape, to put yourself anywhere in the world – nay, universe! – anytime you want?
Now for the less soggy and chaotic news. The new website is close to completion and the final edits on the photos are in. I’ve gone for a ‘traveller who reads, writes, and gardens’ vibe. I chose this because, well, that’s me in a nutshell. Of course, there’s more. I also volunteer my speech and language therapy skills at a local school, support refugee populations where I can, hike all over Exmoor, attempt to keep my shaggy-coated Watson reasonably groomed, and occasionally make a cracking crumble using fruits from the orchard. But when you must condense yourself into two thumb scrolls of a mobile phone screen, ‘travels, reads, writes, gardens’ about sums me – and my author brand – up. Travel is a recurring theme in my writing, and my two works-in-progress take me deeper into my passion for plants.
The photos you see on this blog are just some of those that will make their way onto my new website. (Thank you, Andrew of Flamin’Galah Photography!) That site will be online in the next month or so, along with the introduction of a new newsletter. You’ll have the opportunity to signup for ‘Weeding and Reading’, full of my adventures in renovating a large, walled garden with ponds and streams, an orchard, and an old linhay with ancient wood lintels that just screams to be my ‘writing-in-the-rain’ garden room. (Once, it’s watertight and cleared of all the construction material, that is.) I’ll also share what I’m reading, whether it’s the latest inspiration for new garden design or a novel to be read in your wellies.
Don’t worry, fellow travellers, relocators, search-for-homers. This blog will also continue. I’ll update you on progress as I settle into the Exmoor lifestyle, still oscillating between wanderlust and hiraeth. I’ll take you with me as I experiment more with train travel now I’m back in Europe. I have a Christmas train trip from Exmoor to Edinburgh booked. Seven hours will be the longest train journey I’ve ever taken and I’m looking forward to seeing how it compares to plane travel. One question I hope to answer is will there be those huge bars of Toblerone at train stations or are they just airport staples? What? Yes, as a matter of fact I do think it’s an important question.
Right. Off to change the bucket under the dining room leak, then back to reading something set in a quiet, dry location. Sahara Desert anyone?
Images: Andrew McGuire at Flamin’Galah Photography