Today was the first time I can remember decent sunshine for what seems like months. I would love to say that it was pure love of light that inspired me to walk to Hero’s school to collect her, but, although that was a part of it, an equally large part of this decision was the fact that the car is completely buggered, and is at a garage having been declared unfit to drive. Oh, the pain. The woe! The WOE! A new gearbox, having had the car only five months, and despite it having a warranty, we’re still looking at kicking in £1500. That, my friends, is some gearbox.

But I can take this in the spirit of the new year. Yes, this is shit, and yes, it’s annoying. But the day that we learned this woeful diagnosis also brought the news that, as of the end of March, Quercus will leave his job. He is being made redundant, and has been offered a deal which should equate to roughly ten months’ salary as a pay-off. No bad thing, I tell you. I hope, I so hope, that this year will be a new start. We had a really difficult 2012, somehow. Too much dividing and conquering meant that I spent much of the year feeling lonely, tired overworked and harrassed, while Quercus felt lonely, sick to death of renovation, and exhausted. It was probably one of the more difficult years of my life, truth be told, and is at least partly shown by my lack of presence here. I just got to the point where I had nothing left to say, really, and it felt as if life had dwindled to being a constant stream of nappies to wash, noses to wipe, meals to prepare and sleep to yearn for. Time spent actually doing fun things was at a bare minimum, and we just spent all our time working, working, working. Eventually, of course, this gets you down, and it took me going back to work to realise how lonely I had been while on maternity leave.

Anyway, things now feel rather better. Working again, while in some ways loathsome, means economic recovery, to an extent (which would be a larger extent if it weren’t for things like the sodding car, but let us draw a tactful veil over that particular indiscretion), and more time to think, given my commute. This has meant that I have started writing again, and have managed to come up with seven thousand words towards the book I would like to write. It has also meant a lot of thinking about what I actually want out of life, and what I’d like to do this year, some of which may come to pass, and some of which may simply pass. Either way, I am ready for a new phase to begin, and it feels like Quercus’s job situation is the impetus for this to start.

In other news, I have a spiral brotform. It is awesome.

And you?

It has been so long since I posted regularly that I had to think about my password quite hard. Well, as hard as I think about anything these days, which is somewhere between a cottonwool and a brie-like consistency, I would say.

Rain, rain, rain. Dark days, my friends, and shitloads of floods and gales and all that. But this is all made bearable by the fact that we have wood-fired central heating, working and fully installed, and we’re only considering killing the man who fitted it all, so I think that must count as a success. If we’re honest, at one time or another I have contemplated killing most people, so the heating engineer isn’t particularly bad. Anyway. I digress. In fact, that is really what blogging is for me these days: digression. I mean to post here, and I think about things I could write about. Then somewhere between actually logging in and faffing about with cameras and whatnot, the urge wanes and I end up contemplating either my navel (which translates reasonably well in blog terms) or the counterful of crumbs I can see across the kitchen floor (which doesn’t). I think the trouble with dipping in and out of blogging is that you sort of lose the momentum, and the sense of community, and then it’s trickier to work yourself back up to it. For one thing, practically, I just have so much less time to do it these days. When I started blogging, I was a full-time PhD student, after all, which is tantamount to saying a professional layabout, and the most pressing things on my calendar included making sure I didn’t miss the lunchtime episode of whichever dodgy 1980s murder mystery was currently being shown on the BBC. Now, with two short people to look after, two cats, a house renovation project, a job, a freelance job, an attempt at novel-writing in progress (yes, yes – shut up – I know it’s horribly predictable, and no, it’s not a ‘chick-lit’ whatsit, and no, it’s not a love story), presumably a husband with whom I spend time when we’re both conscious and in the same place (I say presumably because these circumstances happen so rarely as to make the reappearance of the Gordian knot seem likely), and a notional nod towards maintaining some sense of friendship with people I know…. Time – it is not infinite.

But I would like to post here a bit more frequently, so I’m hoping that maybe the stuff I’m intending to do with Hero and Mirth in the next few weeks will galvanise me.

School continues to be fine for Hero. She’s not yet going full-time, but the tiredness that friends warned us about doesn’t appear to be a huge problem for her, and she’s enjoying the social and creative aspects of it, I think, despite telling us that she misses us when we’re not there with her. She did have the perception to say that school is more fun than being at home when Mirth is teething, mind you, which amused me. Mirth continues cheery and easy-going for the most part, although a recent stint of waking at five has been good fun. I honestly can’t complain, though – when I look back at this sort of time when Hero was little, I was just constantly exhausted, and getting through the days was about the best I could manage. Mirth, while an early waker, does sleep much more consistently, and has done for quite a long time, when I think about it. She is a cheery little bundle, with lots of teeth now, and constantly mobile – climbing, rolling about the place, following her sister and putting her hands over her eyes when asked to do something she doesn’t like, as if to make it simply go away. She doesn’t say as many words as Hero did at this age, but she is far more physically capable than Hero was – swings and roundabouts, I suppose, in this case.

We have a downstairs again now. Furniture. Electrics. Carpets, even. It is … odd. We’ve been back in there for a few months now, but it still doesn’t feel quite finished, partly because there are odds and ends to do like tidying up post-stove-fitting plasterwork issues (don’t get Quercus started – his fury knows no bounds), but also because we’ve largely just unloaded books and that’s it. No pictures, really, or placing of stuff – just a breathing-out after months of living only in the kitchen and bedrooms. Sometime I hope I’ll summon up the energy to have a think about what I’d like to go where, but for now, the urge to sink on to the sofa and Just Be is too strong, my friend.

My weight loss continued for a good while after I posted last. I went, finally, from 83kg to 65, and that appears to be where I’m staying. I’ve gone back to doing quite a bit of yoga; I find it helps me sleep, and the space in my brain which it appears to create, particularly if I do it last thing at night, when everyone else has gone to bed and the house is quiet, and dark, and mine alone, is both useful and calming. I didn’t really follow a diet, as such – just stopped eating as much as I was eating, and nothing between meals – and I hope that means it’ll stay gone. I’m happier with my weight now than I think I have ever been; the last time I was this sort of weight, I was a teenager, and I was far too busy wishing I was thinner/taller/cleverer to really appreciate it at the time, so this time around, I’m just feeling bloody chuffed, while also feeling a hint of smugness at never having got stretchmarks when pregnant. It’s all good.

New boots because they now fit my legs. Jeans, cords, some leather gloves. Constantly stacking the stove, but gloating over free hot water. Scraping the car’s windscreen. A vintage Kenwood Chef for my birthday. Contemplating making bread for the first time in weeks. Reading Juvenal’s ‘Satires’, and José Saramago. Quite liking Vermeer. Listening to the Fleet Foxes, Coldplay, Chilly Gonzales. Learning to play Chilly Gonzales’s ‘White Keys’ because my mother’s piano now lives with us. Scattering my mother’s ashes on a clifftop with the aged parent. Sorting out things that have been difficult between us for a long time. Learning that thing are very rarely black and white, and that there are infinite shades between these two extremes. Remembering that we are all just people, and most of us are doing our best, at any given time.

So, that’s the patchwork of life in the earthenhouse at the moment.

And you?

Somewhere in the last few weeks it has become normal that Hero is going to school. Three times a week, at the moment, she trots into the classroom, so far quite happily. As a summer baby, she was scheduled to start in January until the school learned that the official line is to have only one intake a year, which meant that the eight children who were to have started later would have cost the school £38,000 in funding, it seems. So, they asked, very nicely, if we were open to sending her earlier than we’d planned, and that is what we’ve ended up doing. To start with I felt we’d been cheated out of the autumn to ourselves; I had things in mind to do, you see, and they didn’t really include the Oxford Reading Tree stories. However, on balance, it seemed more important that Hero started at the same time as her classmates, and to her credit she has adapted so far very well. She still seems tired and a bit emotional on school days, and we are both finding that boundaries are quite important at the moment as she is certainly pushing us to delineate them clearly, shall we say (which is Parentese for ‘she’s being a bit of a trout at the moment’), but she is also telling us all about the people she’s talked to, and the pictures she’s drawn, and the rabbits she’s looking after (!), and these are all happy-making things. Together with the empty lunchbox she brings home at the end of the day.

Domestically, things are also improving. We are slowly but surely getting through the immense list of things left to finish off on the house. It’s funny, but as soon as you start living in the space you’re working on, the pace changes. Obviously. There is waxing of wood to do, and things like carpet-edging to fit in doorways. Quercus has just put some panel pins in the shelving for me, so that I could put up the autumnal felt bunting that I made last year, and we’ve managed to get the books all sorted; slowly but surely, the house becomes ours once more, after months of living in just the kitchen, surrounded by boxes of our things, all packed away for the duration of the renovation work. I am rereading ‘Catch-22′, having found my rather dog-eared copy when unpacking; I had forgotten quite how amusing it is, but am enjoying rediscovering it, and remembering why it’s long been in my top five.

I am still struggling to get to do things with the children in the afternoons. Since I’ve been back at work, I never seem to be in one place quite long enough, and while I mean to do all sorts of interesting things when Hero gets home from school, or indeed on the afternoons when she hasn’t been, too often this dissolves into perhaps some baking, or time spent pottering in the garden. In theory, we’re making watercolour birds and perhaps doing some felting, but in fact, we’re just not, really. I hope that once we finish off all the niggles with the house, there will be more brain space and energy for such diversions; for now, half of the arty-farty supplies involved are in a chaotic bag under the kitchen table, and just the very thought of fighting my way through that puts me off…. Roll on completion, or something. Or is that one of those things like thinking you’ll know what you’re doing when you reach a certain age, I wonder, and will I still feel a bit knackered and a bit too tempted to just think ‘fuck it’ for ever?

Some time ago, and indeed many times ago, I mentioned how miserable I have felt about my weight, ever since I was about, oh, twenty-two. I said all the usual guff about how I ought to lose some weight, and how I’d do it sustainably, and how it would take ages but I’d need to be disciplined about it, and not eat shitloads of chocolate.

And then I did fuck-all about it, for fucking ages.

And then I had a fit of the guilts about the fact that I was going to visit all my mother’s difficulties with weight and the negative body images that went with it upon my small daughters, so that they in turn could find themselves overweight and underhappy.

And then I went back to work after Mirth’s first year, and decided that enough was enough.

So I lost 14kg.

Partly through just fucking eating less, and partly through developing a healthy if somewhat obsessive relationship with the stairs in the buildling in which I work, all nine floors’ worth.

And so I find myself thinner than I have been since I was a teenager. Wearing size twelve jeans. And calf boots which actually do up.

It is not obligatory to reenact the things your parents did, it seems, after all.