writing – Kathleen Jowitt

Books I intend to finish in 2026

January 7, 2026January 7, 2026 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

Kobo ebook reader showing the cover of The Priory of the Orange Tree (Samantha Shannon) at 70% read

I started them in 2025, and am enjoying them enough to finish them. I just didn’t get them over the wire before the end of the year.

The Priory of the Orange Tree (Samantha Shannon) would probably have got there but for the fact that it’s a library book. My e-loan expired on Boxing Day, when I was somewhere around the 65% mark. I went straight back to the hold queue, and managed to borrow it again on New Year’s Eve. Now I have until the 15th, and the pressure’s off. Maybe too much so. We’ll see if I can finish it before then. Anyway, it’s great fun: an epic fantasy that’s attempting to, and generally succeeding in, evoking all the dragon mythology of East and West, and throwing in 16th century politics too.

Towers in the Mist (Elizabeth Goudge) has in fact been in progress since before 2025. I can’t remember when I started it, but it was probably some time in 2024. I was enjoying it, but was finding it harder work than I had the brain for at that point. Now I suspect it’s getting in the way of my starting The Players’ Boy, which arrived several months ago and which (most unusually for me and Antonia Forest) I haven’t yet opened. I’m sure I will be in the mood for atmospheric historicals sooner or later.

Public Schools and the Great War: the generation lost (Anthony Seldon and David Walsh) is research for the work in progress now tentatively known as Household Rancour. It’s about as depressing as you’d expect, but very interesting, and very useful for my purposes. I’m very glad that I stumbled across the recommendation while idly scrolling with no thought of writing in my mind.

Everything I’ve Ever Learned About Change (Lesley Garner). Everything I’ve Ever Done That Worked was one of the books that shaped my mind and attitude when I read it in my teens, and I still consciously apply many of its principles (Be A Music Listener; When The Sea Is Rough Mend Your Sails; The Sea Is Your Dinner Companion, etc). Now I’m 40 and have worked more of this stuff out for myself, so Garner’s later books (I also read Everything I’ve Ever Learned About Love last year) aren’t blowing my mind in the same way, but I’m still enjoying this, whrn I remember to read a chapter over lunch.

Spirituality in Season (Ross Thompson) follows the liturgical year, starting with Advent, and I’m reading it in real time, so to speak, so if all goes well I’ll finish it at Christ the King – the end of November.

Everyday Nature: how noticing nature can quietly change your life (Andy Beer) is a book with a section for each day. I started in the autumn of 2024, was going quite well in the spring of 2025, and then, like so many things, put it down when my mother died. So now I’m trying again. I’ve read the bit about dunnocks twice now and still can’t tell the difference between them and sparrows.

On a similar note, The Morville Year (Katherine Swift), a collection of garden columns. But that follows the old year and runs March-March, so I’m saving it.

Good enough is not bad at all, or, Book Bus Stories: this year it’s a zine

July 21, 2025July 21, 2025 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

A stack of photocopied A3 paper covered in dense handwritten text. Some sheets have been folded down into A6 booklets.

Last year, Book Bus Stories was an exhibition. Next year, it might finally be a book. But this year, it’s a zine.

I haven’t been writing much in recent months; you may have seen how quiet I’ve been over here and guessed that it reflects a prolonged period of literary inactivity offline. I haven’t had much time, I haven’t had much energy, and, if I’m honest, a lot of the time I’ve been lacking the inclination too. It’s a side-effect of motherhood that I didn’t expect at all: for well over a decade I’d had a story more or less constantly writing itself in my head – until I had a baby, and it all just – went. It was if my brain had been replaced with someone else’s, someone who didn’t write, and had no interest in writing. Which was just as well, really, because she didn’t have the time and the energy.

Every now and again an idea rushed back in, and I’d get very excited. And either I’d lie awake with a sleeping child in the crook of my elbow and know that if I moved I’d wake her, or by some miracle I’d find an hour and get it written down, and then it would stick there because by the next time I got a free hour there’d be something else that needed doing, or that seemed more fun.

Meanwhile, Smashwords (which I use to distribute the ebook versions of my Stancester books) kept sending me emails about migrating my account to Draft2Digital, which kept reminding me that I’d never sorted out my tax code on there and therefore had (a frankly pitiful amount of) money sitting on my account, and every time I felt irritated and slightly despairing of ever selling any more of my existing books, let alone ever finishing a new one. 2020 – the last time I published a book – was getting longer and longer ago, and I was feeling less and less like the person who’d done it.

Then one lunchtime I went to the Wellcome Collection. They had an exhibition of zines, mostly by disabled people. They talked about how zines are amateur, scruffy, don’t have to be perfect. In the corner was a table with paper and pens and a sign encouraging you to have a go at making your own zine, about saying the things you had to say.

I had things to say, things about grief and loss and memory.

I thought, I could do a zine.

A book still seemed a very long way out of reach, but I could do a zine. Or I could at least try one. I went back to my desk and folded a sheet of A4 paper into eighths. I drew a bus across two of them. A little doggerel quatrain emerged from my mind with barely any trouble at all.

Back at home, I unearthed an A3 pad and started on the real thing. There was a poem I’d written years ago, intended for the eventual Book Bus Stories book, which went straight in. In a charity shop I found a book of photographs of Paris, all chic and moody and monochrome, which, combined with the experience of speedrunning a dozen years of (moody, monochrome) family photographs while preparing for my mother’s funeral, made me think everything looks better in black and white, and then, everything looks sadder in black and white. That became a piece.

I photocopied several pages of my father’s Paris Is Well Worth A Bus and, after several false starts, got a reasonable blackout poem down.

I stuck down a Kimberley Ales beermat and an Artichaut de Bretagne sticker to make wheels. I got out the Dymo machine.

The cat trod on the paper while I was working on it and I remembered my father yelling “Trolloper!” at her; I drew a cloud around the pawprint and wrote about how it helps and hurts to remember things like that.

I filled in the body of the bus, the platform, the window frames. I thought I was done. Then I went to Gay’s The Word (on a bit of a weepy high because the General Synod of the Church of England had finally done away with Issues in Human Sexuality as a requirement for ordinands), picked up Joe Brainard’s I Remember, read about twenty pages, and knew that I needed to fill in all the white space with the things I don’t remember.

On Friday I took the whole thing to the library and did a photocopy by way of a test. It looked great. (Everything does, in fact, look better in black and white.) I took it to the print shop and got a proper print run (fifty, in fact) done. Then I took the whole lot home and, over the weekend and today, cut and folded the lot into booklets. Now they’re packed in a box, ready to go down to Ventnor Fringe and the Book Bus with me tomorrow. It’s a good feeling.

I made a zine. It’s not perfect. And it’s not a book. But it’s good enough, and it turns out that good enough is actually great.

Return of the writing brain

January 7, 2025 kathleenjowitt1 Comment

Sky, winter sunlight, and bare branches are reflected in a puddle on a tarmac path

My writing brain started up good and proper yesterday. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s having managed to post here every day for a month and more. Maybe it was having a day in which I’d promised myself I’d do no work and only minimal Cursillo admin. Maybe it’s because it’s almost eighteen months since the baby was born and that’s just how long it takes for a brain to get going again. Maybe it’s because I did some actual proper singing and it unblocked some metaphorical tubes. Or maybe I’d just knitted some arbitrary length of combined sock. Who knows.

Anyway, in the morning I found myself rereading some things I’d written. I fixed an plot hole in one of them. And I found myself thinking more and more about the project I was working on up until, well, a little more than eighteen months ago. Actually, it’s been bouncing around in my head for the last few days, but yesterday it started demanding my attention. And now it’s telling me I need to read the book on the Dance Band Era, and get hold of a wind-up gramophone and play the 78s, and rescue all the rest of the dance band 78s, and read I don’t know, who survived the First World War and wrote about it? Siegfried Sassoon, read Siegfried Sassoon, and oh yes, definitely David Blaize, and probably pick up that First World War history that I got about as far as 1915 in, and find out about twilight sleep and would an upper middle class woman be expected to breastfeed in 1924, and work out a better name for my hero (he is called Julian at the moment, which is a bit misleading)… And probably reread Romeo and Juliet just for the hell of it except that’s probably not the best use of my limited time, or rewatch it, except goodness knows I never get three straight hours free these days. And I would say read Surprised by Joy if I hadn’t just read it and concluded that, while I’m very pleased for C. S. Lewis that he got out an environment that was making him miserable, it would have been useful for me if he’d stayed on and could have written about what it was like being at school and watching form by form carted off to war, knowing your time was coming. (And good grief I don’t think his Professor Kirkpatrick as written would have let him get away with the logical fallacies in Mere Christianity, but that’s not remotely relevant.)

I started getting lines writing themselves again. I found myself wanting to reread what’s already there to make sure I hadn’t written them already, or written something that they would contradict. The cogs were turning, turning, getting up to speed. The writing brain was well and truly running. It kept me up mapping what fandom (such as there is) calls the Montacrew onto early twentieth century public school dynamics (let the reader understand). And then the toddler woke up and insisted on a really, really long feed.

You recall that I am meant to be resting and recovering. So yes, today was a washout (although I did some more singing practice and am feeling a lot better about my impending performance – and finished reading Touch Not The Cat, which is very slightly relevant.) So no, I haven’t actually added any new words to this project yet. But I’m so very glad to see it again.

Excavating writing fossils 2: yarn forward

October 7, 2024 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

A folded A4 envelope with knitting instructions written in two columns. A fluffy black cat with white paws is passing through the frame.

I still have another page from a dead notebook to share with you, but this isn’t it. This, as you see, is an old envelope with a bit of knitting pattern written on it. Indeed, it fell out of a knitting book earlier today as I was finishing a baby hat – this hat:

A baby's knitted hat in grey yarn with a white trim and a pattern of deer and a crowned heart in white

Experienced knitters will see that this hat and the pattern on the envelope have nothing to do with each other. Indeed, as with the last post, I can remember exactly what I was trying to do: lengthen a short-sleeved blouse to turn it into a cycling jersey. I didn’t finish that; it’s still sitting at the bottom of my knitting bag.

I’m a bit of an intermittent knitter, you see. At the moment I am possessed with a wild enthusiasm for it, am telling myself that I am going to make all the socks in Cute Knits for Baby Feet, and plenty for myself as well. Since socks are a lot quicker than blouses I may even get a few finished. As you see, I have most definitely finished that hat.

Then I turned the envelope over, and I found something quite different:

The other side of the envelope has a note reading:
'Daisy's friend is called Pippin.
The alien actress is bewildered by people mistaking her stage name for her real name or vice versa'.
The cat is reclining behind the envelope as if posing

Daisy’s friend is called Pippin.

The alien actress is bewildered by people mistaking her stage name for her real name or vice versa

I know exactly what that’s about too. Or, rather, exactly what those are about: these are two separate notes about two separate stories.

The first one is Daisy’s Yarn. (Here, have a PDF.) That got finished, rejected by whatever call for submissions I originally wrote it for, shopped around a bit, and picked up by a podcast that now seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. Fairly standard.

The second one is a Book Bus Story. Or it’s going to be a Book Bus Story. I don’t really have a proper link for that yet, but it’s going to be something like this, except a book. There’s a draft of that story on the page – it’s inspired, by the way, by the way that transport enthusiasts often make a careful note of 3267’s 1970 British registration number and ignore the real story – but I’m not happy with it yet. My hope is to get Book Bus Stories done so that I can sell it at next year’s Ventnor Fringe. Will that happen? Who knows? I have a lot of writing hopes and at the moment most of them just aren’t happening.

That’s not all there was to the envelope.

The envelope is presented spread out with two A6 invitation cards to The Authors' Awards and The Authors' Awards Winners' Tea Party, Tuesday 20th June 2017

Invitations to my first and – so far – most glamorous literary prize event. I swanked about that quite enough back in 2017, so I won’t repeat myself now. All the same, it was quite a boost to my self-esteem to remember that I was there and I did that.

I don’t know if I can save the alien actress story. There are more words to it than that line, but there isn’t much more substance, and I have no idea what it needs. I’m almost certainly going to frog that blouse. Tony gave me one of his cycling jerseys and it fits me fine, and anyway, I haven’t been out on my road bike for well over two years.

That’s not really the point, though. The point is this: all the years when I wasn’t doing any knitting aren’t relevant now, when I am, when I’m finishing hats and socks all over the place, and looking forward to trying cables for the first time. I was knitting, and then I wasn’t, and now I am again. So I might as well trust that it’s going to be the same for writing, that I’m going to get back into it, writing notes to myself and turning them into stories within months or weeks.

Maybe there’ll be more glamorous prize nights. Or any sort of prize nights. I don’t mind. At the moment I’d just like to be sure that I’m going to get another book done – and I can’t be sure, because the only way to get a book done is to do it, and at the moment I’m not doing it. But I’m glad this particular fossil came to the surface: it makes me believe that I can.

Excavating writing fossils

September 26, 2024 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

A large rock on a stony beach contains a battered ammonite fossil

I’ve been clearing out my desk. Well, both my desks, actually: we’re all moving around at work so I’ve taken the opportunity to chuck quite a lot of stuff. But I meant my desk at home, the bottom drawer of which is full of exercise books containing longhand drafts of my three novels and quite a lot else besides.

It isn’t quite so full now. Having decided that the literary critics of the future are unlikely to care enough to compare my early drafts with the finished products, and that I need the space, I’ve started ripping out and recycling pages. I’ve been glancing through them as I go, though. I’ve noticed a few things: the mild shock when I come across a character with what is now the wrong name; the surprise when I find snippets from projects which I’d have said shared nothing with each other butted up on facing pages; the odd work-related note. I didn’t think I’d started A Spoke In The Wheel before I’d got Speak Its Name done and dusted, but there are Polly and Vicki just across the page from Peter and… who’s Gina? Oh, right, yes.

Then there’s this. It’s a sort of warm-up exercise, trying to get myself into the right frame of mind – that is, the character’s frame of mind – to write one of the trickier scenes in Speak Its Name. I can’t remember now whether I felt particularly stuck and needed to write something that wasn’t the scene to get myself going, or whether I just knew that it had to be good, but I knew immediately what this was all about.

Lydia is fed up with Colette because:

she doesn’t appreciate how easy she has it

she never washes up

she is pressurising [sic] her to come out

it was her idea to get Becky involved

it would never have happend if Will hadn’t found out, this whole house…

so scared of confrontation, so conflict averse, never talk about anything

unilateral decisions about the two of them

always cooks late

bigoted about science

thinks Lydia’s friends are stupid and lets it show

this house is not as much fun as she thought it was going to be

and she hates being beholden to people

in a way she’s responsible for Lydia having to think about any of it

Lydia still doesn’t quite believe a F/F relationship can be godly, blames Colette for getting her into it

she is just so noble and self-sacrificial it’s not true

why both, when they can’t be married?

That’s Colette who’s just so noble and self-sacrificial, as if you couldn’t guess. I do like the way that this is a mixture of the little day-to-day annoyances and the big existential incompatibilities. And I’m pleased that almost all these themes are still in play in The Real World, even though things have moved on. At least my characterisation’s consistent.

Then down the bottom of the page I’ve written:

give them something to laugh about

“coming out party”

The coming out party comes quite a bit later, in the finished work; apparently it was very much connected to this scene in my mind – but I’d forgotten: that’s what this row is about. I’m not sure about ‘give them something to laugh about’; it might be what turned into ‘He shall have his resignation’. Which really does come quite a bit later – and is very much connected to the ‘coming out party’.

Interestingly, the next thing I wrote wasn’t the row. It was the making up. Over the page:

Lydia stayed in bed until past ~~ten~~ eleven, until she could be sure that Colette would have left the house. She had been awake for hours, had watched the narrow line of pale December light creep across the ceiling, listened to the rain spitting pettily against the window…

Which isn’t all that different from what ended up in the finished book. Page 214 of the paperback, if you’re playing along at home:

Dawn broke and dulled to drizzle. Lydia stayed in bed until past eleven, until she could be sure that Colette would have left the house; she lay there watching the narrow line of light creep across the ceiling, listening to the rain spitting listlessly against the window…

Now I catch myself thinking about why I made those changes; if they were successful; whether I’d do the same thing again. Which wasn’t going to be the point of this blog post. Apologies, hypothetical literary critics of the future; that’s all you’re going to get. Most of this volume’s already gone for recycling, and that presumably included the actual row (now page 210-214).

Which was going to be my point: that little exercise worked, even if it wasn’t quite the way I was expecting, or indeed, remembered. I’ll try to remember, next time I’m stuck on or intimidated by a scene: write it down, write down everything that’s going on in the point of view character’s head, wind it up and wind it up, and then – let it go. Stand back and let the scene write itself. Even if it wasn’t the one you were expecting.

A new departure: The Book Bus Espace Libre

August 1, 2024 kathleenjowitt2 Comments

Posters in art nouveau typefaces say:
The Book Bus
Pop-up gallery
Sunday -Thursday 10h00-16h00

Espace Libre
The bookshop will be back on Friday. In the meantime the bus is still full of stories. Come and see!

This summer I rather unexpectedly found myself coordinating and curating an exhibition. This is a first for me, and I’m rather pleased with the result.

Ventnor Fringe was on. I was going to be there. So was 3267, in the guise of the Book Bus. So far, so normal. I’d missed last year, the baby being just too tiny, and was looking forward to returning to my summer arts hit.

Ventnor Fringe has been getting bigger every year, in terms of both space and time, and this year it was going to be ten days long. It was only going to be reasonably practicable to make the bookshop happen for four days of that, and the preferred distribution of those four days was both Fridays and both Saturdays. Which left a five-day gap in the middle. Perhaps we could have some sort of an exhibition to fill it…

Such was the situation as described to me in mid-June, and to my delight the creative bit of my brain, which has been in and out and mostly out for the past two years, immediately rushed in. Various other people were having ideas too. Brilliant! My brain was coming up with a grand overarching idea to pull it all together:

This bus is usually a bookshop. So what do you get if you take the books out of a bookshop? And what if that space is something that has seen a lot in its time?

A title appeared. Espace Libre. Free Space. Maybe Espace Livre? No, trying too hard. Let it speak for itself. This is just another way to express what I’ve been trying to do with Book Bus Stories, assuming I ever finish the thing. If I had finished the thing it would make an exhibition in itself. But it could make a little part of one, maybe…

I angled for the job of coordinating it all – perhaps a trifle ambitious, trying to do it all from the mainland and with a baby clinging to my legs, but I wasn’t going to let that worry me – and the rest of the gang were extremely happy to let me do it.

So off I went. I selected (extremely select) quotations from my father’s accounts of how he got the bus this side of the Channel in the first place. I polished up three of my own Book Bus Stories to make a small display – and commit myself to finishing the rest of the damn things in time for next year. I spent quite a lot of money on boards and various forms of adhesive. I bought chain and cable ties in the DIY bit of our wonderful local department store, and if the assistant thought it was in any way weird she didn’t let on. I printed out everything I’d written. I posted the whole lot to Ventnor. And I chased and chased and chased the other contributors, and/or my family members who had undertaken to organise the other contributors for me.

Then I got to the Isle of Wight and spent a frantic couple of evenings sticking photos and cards to boards, or, in one case, making holes in a board with a corkscrew and attaching books with string, chain, and cable ties, while the baby was in bed. And we moved the whole lot onto the bus on Sunday morning.

In short, I had a lovely time.

This was a combination of the kind of project and people organising I do in my day job, and the kind of creative work I do in my free time, and it was the first time since I’d gone on maternity leave that I’d got my teeth into either of them in a big way. My brain had come back, and, since I’d been a bit worried that it had dissolved and dribbled out of my ears some time between COVID and quickening, this was incredibly exciting. I can do this kind of thing. Not only is this reassuring in the context of my return to work next week, it’s also encouraging to think that I might be able to return to some of the three or four books I have been attempting to write on and off since 2021.

I’m not going to have a huge amount more free time in which to use reclaimed creative powers. I get a couple of train journeys and a couple of lunch hours every week, and all the fruit trees need pruning. I will aim to get something done. I hope to post here more frequently, too. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, here’s a look at The Book Bus: Espace Libre.

The posters from the top of the post have been stuck to the windows either side of the rear entrance of a 1930s Paris bus

Board with photos of Paris buses in service and in preservation, with a description of how Robert E Jowitt brought Paris bus 3267 to England

Why am I not writing?

June 21, 2024 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

A fluffy black and white cat peers around the corner of a laptop

Why am I not writing?

I have about one hour in every day in which I have both hands free, and writing has been coming a long way down the list of things I could do in it. And it’s never the same hour for very long: I don’t seem to be able to adjust to the ever-changing routine quickly enough to get much done. Sometimes I see the moment and grab it, but not often.

Why am I not writing?

So much of my life at the moment is focused on the baby, dependent on the baby. That’s why I’m not writing much here. I don’t want her to embark on life to find that the internet already knows all about her. This time is private.

Why am I not writing?

It just doesn’t seem very important at the moment. There’s nothing in particular that needs to be written by me, now. No idea has yet grabbed me by the throat and insisted I write it.

Why am I not writing?

My creative energy is going on other things. Smocking. Cursillo. What to do with a bus that’s a bookshop when it doesn’t have books in it.

Why am I not writing?

I just don’t feel like it.

Why am I not writing?

#
ghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhFGRt

Why am I not writing?

(There is a cat on my keyboard.)

Why am I not writing?

I am writing.

Little by little. More and more, week by week. Even when I wasn’t writing at all, I was writing. I’ve kept my diary up to date all this past year, and never had to catch up more than a week at a time. Even when I had to write in very large letters to fill a day, or just stick in a picture instead. I’ve written reports. I’ve written letters – fewer than I’d have liked, but some. I’ve even opened up some of my pre-baby projects and added a line here and a line there. There hasn’t been one big bam! I’m writing again! moment – or, rather, there have been several, but they haven’t released an exciting new flood of words. More an occasional dribble.

But I’m writing.

And even if I wasn’t…

… that would be fine. There’s more to me than writing, more than I know about yet. And, while writing is one of the most important ways in which I find out about myself, it isn’t the only way. This last year – these last four years – has been a time of huge transition for me, in many different dimensions. I’m still emerging.

Who knows, I might write about that.

Back on the metaphorical bike

March 14, 2024March 14, 2024 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

A sock in the process of being darned in a weave of white, green and terracotta, held up in front of a TV screen showing a cycle race on a white road

As you might have guessed, I haven’t been writing much recently. At first I didn’t have the brain. I’ll write more about that, some time, maybe. Then I didn’t have the time. Still don’t, often. I get about ten minutes at the computer at a time before people start howling. If this post turns out very short, you’ll know why.

Instead, I’ve been exercising my creativity in more three-dimensional forms. I’ve been going for projects that I can pick up and put down again without their unravelling completely, and at the moment I’m tackling my mending pile and posting about it on Instagram under the #MendMarch hashtag. The picture on this post shows a mend on top of a mend; the new one features a long white stripe in between cypress green and terracotta, in honour of the Strade Bianche which you might just be able to make out on the TV in the background.

But I did manage to put together a list of the five best cycling novels for Shepherd. I think I’ve remarked before that there aren’t very many to choose from, and I suspect everybody puts The Rider at the top. No shame in that. It’s a brilliant book.

As for the literal bike, I’ve been out once on my faithful red town bike to go to an ultrasound appointment that didn’t happen (long story) and had a few goes on the cargo bike, which may or may not be being recalled (boring story). It’s all a bit of a waiting game, really, but we’ll get there in the end.

December Reflections 18: I said goodbye to…

December 18, 2023 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

A blue fountain pen with the lid on, a closed notebook, and part of a magazine showing Judith Kerr with the original Mog

… my identity as a writer, for the moment at least.

My other best decision of 2023 was turning down my first ever book contract. I meant to write about that – first about getting it, then about turning it down – but I never managed it. Not longhand (can’t get to a flat surface), not touch typing (very rarely have both hands free), not dictating (distracts and confuses the baby). Any solution I find works for a week or so and then fails. All I’m managing is these tiny little blogs, typed with one hand on my phone

More to the point, I just don’t want to. The urge to write (fiction, long form non-fiction, poetry) has been patchy over the last couple of years, and non-existent over the last few months. I could force it, but why? Only recently have I found myself thinking myself back into a character’s head (what would Julian make of war memorials, anyway?), and I’m not in any position to do anything about it. There’s time. It’ll come back when it wants to come back.

In the meantime I’m refusing to beat myself up for not being Superwoman. A friend told me about seeing a documentary about Judith Kerr in which the great author said, very matter-of-factly, ‘Of course I couldn’t do any writing while the children were small.’ So there we go. If stepping back is good enough for her then it’s most definitely good enough for me.

I’m hoping it’s au revoir rather than goodbye. But, the way things stand at the moment, I’m honestly much less bothered than I’d have predicted two years ago.

Handiwork

November 26, 2023 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

Mushroom shaped glass stopper caged in gold coloured wire with green and white beads

Here’s one of this year’s Christmas decorations. They’re a bit experimental: I picked up a box of decanterless stoppers in a charity shop and have been caging them in beaded wire crochet. The solid ones are going to be a bit heavy for trees, but should be just about okay hung close to the trunk. I’m going to hang a big bead from the bottom.

I’m finding that I’m not terribly interested in writing at the moment, and I’m very much enjoying making things in three dimensions instead. Having finished my fishpond skirt, I’ve moved on to these beaded things and am thinking too about picking up my knitting needles again, and finally getting around to trying out my new big darning loom, and I’d like to do some patchwork too… Meanwhile, writing… meh, as they used to say on the internet. I expect I’ll get caught up by it again sooner or later, but for the moment it seems to belong to another life.