The long road back from nowhere






I'm not really sure where I have been the last few months. I feel like I've been asleep for the majority of the summer; I drifted off somewhere around the end of June and woke up in late September. I have spent the last few weeks pulling myself together and trying to work out exactly what caused me to suddenly beat a retreat from the world. Things had been bad at work and I remember suddenly waking up in July feeling wretched and exhausted. And then it's all a bit of a blank. I took a lot of baths. Finished a few paintings. Grew some tomatoes. And finally came to the conclusion that I had put myself through a bit of a battle this past year.

My plan for 2012 was this: keep exercising (at least four times a week), carry on with writing the book, keep eating healthily, take on a bit more teaching to help with the bills, find true love, paint my living room, be more sociable, be prettier, be better at everything, sell lots of work etc etc. Add to this meditating regularly, visualising regularly and taming my relentless negative inner monologue and suddenly the sensible part of my brain (the one synapse not exercised and self-helped into a state of inertia) went

"Er, 'scuse me? This isn't a lot of fun. Is this how you wanted 2012 to go?"

And the rest of me (particularly my knackered shins) went "No, not especially". And so I took to my bed like a Victorian invalid. Only not really because I still had a full time job. Needless to say it turns out I had Some Issues To Process which I have been doing just like a healthy, modern, balanced woman should do. I'm sure it's all been very useful. The only thing with all this navel gazing is that you forget to pay attention to anything else. I can't remember when the first autumn leaf fell. I don't remember what I was doing during that late summer heat wave we had. I vaguely remember sketching Mevagissey harbour (see images). I'm pretty sure it rained in August but the rest...well. Who knows? And then I was reading through last summer's blog posts and everything about that time came back in a rush and I thought "this is why I do this! This is why I blog- it's my way of paying attention". So I have a new plan for the rest of 2012. Stay awake. Look. Smile. Write it down.

Participation's what you need





Ironically, I had a word for 2011 and that word was participate. Ha.
I have been away and now I am back. For how long I don’t know. Truth be told, I am not very good at this blogging lark. This is because I am quite antisocial , quite shy and prone to extended periods of introspection and inactivity. Which is what I have been doing for the last 2 months; being maudlin and lazy and watching period dramas. I would love to say that I’ve been terribly busy, juggling creative projects, gadding about, being single and fabulous but no. That would not be true. There has been chocolate and Drinking Alone. Which is never good. So I haven’t blogged because I didn’t want to drag my sorry, miserable arse over to this space and complain and not offer up anything creative as some small compensation.

However, here you are. Some paintings and scribbles. Just for you.

Small landscape studies




A whole week has gone by without access to the Internet. I had a week booked off work to get on with the painting and planning for my show and, of course, I have been relying on Mum and Dad's laptop for the last year. It's astonishing how much time can be frittered away just by dithering around on the Internet. I have spent the week painting, reading, making bread, planting foxgloves, lavender and chocolate cosmos, snacking almost constantly, having a sofa delivered, sending it back because it didn't fit through the door, feeling embarrassed, making the stressful pilgrimage to Ikea to buy a smaller sofa, realising that over the course of 7 years I have accumulated many, many throws, buying another one from M&S anyway and, of course, watching daytime TV.
As predicted in my last post, there is a small fly in this particularly girly pot of ointment. Turns out my upstairs neighbours keep strange hours and like to watch their TV with the volume up. So the above list has all been undertaken with the low level hum of exhaustion in the background.