Pink, pink and more pink

Happy Monday to you all and thank you so much for your comments on my last post.

I popped into our local village this morning and was bowled over by the pink decorations many of the local shops and businesses had put in their windows.

It turns out that this is all in aid of The Lady McAdden Breast Screening Unit - affectionately known locally as BUST - a free service for all women of any age and unconnected with the National NHS screening service.  The screening does not include a mammogram, rather a place where you can check out any lumps or bumps, pain or any other breast symptoms. A place you can get advice from specially trained breast nurses. They do such a fantastic job and all they ask is for a donation whenever you visit.

Hence all the pink - and hats of to all those who organised this fundraising week in Thundersley where customers can make donations in their local shops.

While I was there I came across one those pop up libraries. I think I wrote about this a few years ago.  Anyway it's back in the village and such a lovely idea.

Hope you all have a great week. 

P x

Floating bookshop

I love London and we often spend hours just walking around and exploring the hidden alleyways, cobbled streets, marketplaces and old buildings.  It was last year that I heard of this fabulously quirky bookshop that is known as the "Word on Water" a floating bookshop barge on the Regent's canal and so we had to go and investigate.

On our visit it was moored at Granary Wharf near King's Cross, where regular jazz bands play either alongside or on the roof.

It cruises and moors up between various locations on the Canal including The Angel at Islington and another close to the Olympic Park at Stratford.

It was a book lover's delight - so many fabulous second hand books

Its uniqueness had me enthralled

It had its own resident dog and even an old iron stove below deck

  

 This visit certainly came up to my expectations and didn't let me down.

Have a great weekend.

The clearing in the woods

What started out to be what we thought a pleasant stroll admiring the changing colours of the trees turned out to be a nightmare

Have you ever gone for a stroll through the woods, taken a wrong turn and spent what seems like hours trying to get back on track - or the very least find a clearing ahead and a road back to civilisation?  This happened to us yesterday. 

What would normally be a twenty minute stroll, lasted 1.5 hours!!  The trees were getting thicker and darker, not a bit of sky to be seen and at one point Mr M said lets go back to where we think we went wrong. Definitely a no no. I just wanted to be out. A jogger who obviously knew the woods well, did not even know the name of the road where we'd left our car but insisted that there was a road ahead if we just kept going! Ahead seemed to go on forever and getting very damp and muddy.

At last I could start to see daylight and yes - a clearing in the woods. Yay! However, it was nowhere near where we'd begun our walk and so had to put the sat nav on the phone to see where we were - a mile away - and so our walk, instead of being perhaps a mile  in length max, turned out to be 3.5 miles (as tracked on my phone app Map my Walk).

Foraging was the name of the game and after I'd scraped the mud off my boots and had a well earned cuppa finally managed to put this together for my dining table.

Moral of the story? Stick to the path - even better, buy the darned thing!!

Thankyou for all your lovely comments dear friends.  See you again soon.

The beginnings....

So - going on from my last post I've taken the bull by the horns and signed myself up for a free online course "Start Writing Fiction" with an organisation called Future Learn and run by the Open University. I loved my six years studying with the OU and have missed it very much. It lasts for eight weeks and the study hours are around 3-4 a week - or more if you want. I'm not totally sure at this point if I want to write a fictional novel as such - probably a bit of fact (historical) and fiction mixed up.

Anyway the order of the day is notes - lots of notes - people watching notes;  notes about  overheard conversations; notes about body language; notes about different smells, sounds and daily life events. That's my homework for this week - taking a notebook wherever I go so I can build up a picture and create a fictional character.

Incidentally Future Learn have literally hundreds of free online courses, run by different universities and there's so many categories to choose from. Another one I've put my name down for  is called "Literature of the English Country House" - watch this space!

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses

Hope you all have a happy week and I'll be back soon.

Patricia x

Finding the time

Hello everyone. 

This quote sums me up right now - trying to do too many things all at once. Lots of thoughts. lots of ideas. Lots of plans and basically lots of not much being done at all.  My head bursts sometimes with all the things I want  to achieve and at times am like a Whirling Dervish.. Do you find that the more you want to do, the less actually gets done?

So taking things slowly is the order of the day and it's actually beginning to work. I spend so much time thinking about what I'm going to do that it eats into my 'doing' time. Planning is the key I believe and am having fun using my old Filofax again and actually writing up lists and notes rather than using electronic devices for all my hurried thoughts and ideas.

My next project? I've always wanted to write a book - and do you know what - I'm jolly well going to give it a go - given that I can find the time!

Have a great weekend dear friends

P x

(pictures by courtesy of Pinterest)