Except it turns out the Merryneum also contains quite a lot of TV to catch up on and people to see, and things just don’t happen like you promised yourself they would when you get up at 11am everyday and have a nap at midday. So this year I’ve leaned into it. It’s physically impossible to achieve anything much in a house with a still-open Quality Street tin, so why put too much pressure on yourself?… Read More How to spend the Merryneum
I’ve caught myself looking back on 2017 a few times recently and thinking I don’t feel like I’ve achieved much. It’s normally when I’m on my way to work, because small midlife crises are exactly what Monday mornings are for. And then I realise that I’ve left my Cornwall flat to walk to my Cornwall office where I do the new job I didn’t have this time last year and then I realise that a couple of things might have changed after all.… Read More Let’s all pretend we care about each other’s resolutions for a minute
Let’s be honest, it’s Christmas and if it’s not Quality Street or two-day-old turkey that’s never been in the fridge who really cares? But it’s also the end of a year in which some things have happened that deserve a mention. Or they probably don’t but my brain is a Ferrero Rocher now.… Read More Things that happened to me this year that you don’t care about because why would you?
I’m heading back to Watford for Christmas because my life is an endless parade of glamour, so I’m currently packing. Which does, of course, mean I am doing anything I possibly can that does not involve packing, but there’s a suitcase in the corner of the room while I do it. An empty one, of course.
Which leads me seamlessly onto the undisputed best Christmas films ever according to me, an expert who does not need your input:… Read More The top 5 Christmas films of all time (do not @ me)
when I left the shop and walked away, I bumped (almost literally) into something like fifty santas in Falmouth high street. Their costumes ranged from the detailed to the actually-I’ll-just-wear-my-red-dressing-gown-because-that’ll-do, but they pretty much all carried drums. They’d stopped to sing a few verses of a Christmas carol, but they soon started drumming and marching up the high street.
I followed them because, well, they were Santas and I have Christmas in my heart and soul forever. … Read More The Saturday Falmouth went batshit
Famously, I lost my shit a few months ago over a single shooting star, so I feel like we all know how the walk home went. My initial disappointment at seeing clouds in the sky broke up as fast as they did. Stars started to move. I made some very loud ‘ooh’ noises, completely ignoring the fact that people in pretty, probably-not-double-glazed houses were trying to sleep. Then I staggered home like a drunk person because I was looking up at the sky the entire way. Which was fine, because I only nearly died twice.… Read More Fake space and real space are great
The last two London jobs I’ve had involved unprecedented bacon proximity. As a law firm admin assistant, I would be sent out a few times a week to buy breakfast for my boss from a little Italian deli where cabbies queued out of the door and every item purchased came with a free side order of mild sexual harassment. Their bacon was fantastic. To this day I don’t know what they did to it. I used to watch them and I can only assume it was cured in crack, because they didn’t seem to do anything different to what anybody else would do.… Read More My kingdom for a bacon sarnie
I’m not going to lie. It’s hard. I try to take it one day at a time, and it works perfectly well from Mid-January to Mid-November. And then the truly dangerous times hit. The times where I’m just one glass of rosé and an hour with a pack of Sun-In away from sacking everything else off and fulfilling my destiny as a one-woman tribute band, desperately searching for the chink of light at the end of the giant, Wham!-shaped tunnel.… Read More I can never live up to Wham! and that’s why I drink
any time my feet don’t feel completely stable on the ground I freeze up and lose the ability to walk like a human being, which makes falling over almost inevitable (see also: paddlebarding, roller derby). Whichever way you slice it, I my dignity ends up getting bruised. Much like my bum.
So I am, frankly, dismayed to find that we’re going to be spending this weekend under a weather warning for snow and ice and all of the horrible things that come with that. If I wanted to have to deal with that I would have stayed up-country. But I say things like ‘up-country’ now, so we all know they’re never going to have me back.… Read More Dear Cornwall: Oh hell snow
By Sunday we were a full three days into December and I still hadn’t sung a single Christmas caroll, which didn’t seem right. I’m not a religious person by any means, but hot damn I love the merriment. The Christmas tree festival at Princess Pavilion was starting with a big switch-on, a carol concert, and –… Read More Weird moments from the Christmas carol concert
