Hello and a happy new year!
(Virginia Lee, clay sculpture and drawing; from her blog here)
I suppose I’ve been hibernating, in a way, these past few months. It turns out that December was quite a difficult month for me and by the time we reached the holidays all I wanted to do was hide and read. And then the transition period for Brexit ended, and there we were, me here in Belgium and my fellow countrymen in Britain, and even though I was completely prepared for it and knew what to expect, I suddenly felt excluded and rejected by my own country. Which was irrational, but there we are.
Anyway, after that massive whinge I can assure you I am feeling a lot better now. ‘What’s happening in Belgium?’ I hear you cry. Well, like everyone else we are mainly avoiding other people and most things – museums, galleries, theatres, cafés – are closed. Schools are not, although secondary schools and adult education centres are providing a mixture of online and in-school lessons. Hairdressers have just re-opened! People all across the land fluffed their grey roots and danced for joy. (Not me, as I’m a home-haircut person.) We’ve just had a verrrry cold week, which displeased the hens. We were warned by experts that icicles Can Be Dangerous. I played in the snow and never knowingly wore fewer than three pairs of socks.
(Boris Zvorykin, illustration for Snegurochka, 1925; gouache and ink; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
I’ve read a lot of good books and I will write about some of them here. I might change some things about this blog, I might not. I’ve been practising driving the car (I had about eleventy billion lessons in the summer and autumn, and now I have a special learner’s licence which means I can drive alone without my husband!!!!). The driving part is not so bad and I can now do this without turning into a trembling wreck, but I’m not terribly accurate at parking. Yet.
And I’ve gritted my teeth and got back to work on novel #2. It had been languishing since April last year. I had written a first draft, and then made a proper plan, and got halfway through a second draft when I abandoned it. Blowing the dust off it, I’ve realised that narrating it from two alternating viewpoints wasn’t working so I have been changing and planning some more and pulling out a subplot that was a bit rubbish. (A lot rubbish.) And then the wonderful Golden Egg Academy ran a series of free seminars for aspiring children’s writers over one weekend. The seminars were great: inspiring but also very practical and full of tips you could take away and put to immediate use. Judging by them, Golden Egg’s creative writing courses are extremely good and worth every penny but even so sadly beyond the gallimaufry purse at present (and anyway my writing is still very much a self-indulgence and not really a serious pursuit). So this was truly an opportunity and a boon.
I found a tiny snowdrop in our front garden this morning. That seems as good a sign as any to wriggle out of my nest of dead leaves and moss and emerge blinking into 2021.