For reasons that I can't yet write about here, life has been a bit of a hard slog recently. But on the advice of my friend Travis, I sat down this evening and wrote a list of reasons to be cheerful:
1 Toute Allure is nearly finished (it was very motivating indeed, to discover a few weeks ago that Pierre L, one of my blog readers, had pre-ordered a book yet to be written!)
2 Biff no longer has a mushroom growing on his head.
3 The window is no longer patched up with a Jiffy envelope.
4 There is one corde of wood in the garage (though still waiting to be stacked.)
5 Travis has been made redundant from his TV job and is about to move to France for six months to hopefully make a reality series about life in the Poitou.
6 I'm going to London tomorrow for 24 hours (and this time tomorrow night, will hopefully be having a glass of champagne in Browns hotel with a friend.)
7 Unlike some parts of the Charente, we have electricity and have not been flooded.
8 One of my blog readers, Lesley, has named her car mimi pompom.
9 A friend in London has located a (possibly illegal?) source of old-fashioned, 150 watt light bulbs (I know it's not PC, but I just can't bear these enormous, new-fangled bulbs that cost six euros a pop and give out hardly any light.)
10 There are mysterious green shoots in the courtyard.
11 It's almost spring and the sunflowers will be out soon (ish).
And finally, ... (added as a postscript - see comment below):
12 Lovely emails from readers.
Two years ago I hung up my high heels, put the Prada handbags into storage and left behind my fashionable West London life to renovate an old village house in rural France. Et voila. This blog is about what happened next....
I think it is great that, eight months after release, Tout Sweet still has a perfectly respectable ranking on Amazon. And you've gone up a place at Waterstone's South Ken -- that is really nice.
I know it will take more than a year, but I am looking forward to Toute Allure.
Have a good time in London.