Happy New Year from London!

On the list of the most stressful things people do in their life, moving house and staying in hospital come quite high up. I had two hospital stays and moved house and garden, all in the space of 6 months between April and October 2015. I can confirm it really is stressful! I am still not finished in the house, but I finally got kitchen curtains up a week before Christmas, after having been here in my new house for 7 months. The garden will take a lot more time and I have no idea when the last plant will be planted in the ground – it’s just going to take as long as it takes. But I am happy I moved and the new house is much more suitable for me as it is a bungalow so no more stairs to climb and no stairs out to the garden.

Decorating with lights – inside and outside

There is a price to pay for too much of anything good. I think we can all agree that too much nice food ends up on your hips. Too much of this nice weather has resulted in record breaking rainfall with flooding many places here in Britain, and tomorrow we are facing storm number 5 in just 6 weeks. Here in the more protected and quiet corner of South East storm Eve will probably be just windy weather and a lot of rain though. Not that we need any more rain, whenever I walk around in the flower beds here in my new garden, my wellies make a ‘squish – squelch – splosh’ sound for every step I take, and the clay soil that was hard as concrete and I had such a struggle getting a spade through in the summer is now absolutely perfect - for pottery.

Springtime feeling in December

A lot of people are still struggling with the aftereffects of storm Desmond, especially those that were flooded. Here in the quiet corner of the South-East where I live, we didn’t notice the storm so much apart from very windy weather. Spare a thought though for those over 6000 people who got flooded and are now having to spend the next 6-9 months in temporary accommodation while their houses are cleaned out and renovated. Winter storms are a yearly occurrence here in Britain and flooding is quite common, some even get flooded over and over again only years apart. I am fortunate to live on the sheltered side of Britain – we are too dry in the summer but we are also spared the enormous rainfalls in the winter.