I’m tired. It’s been a lot. It’s only January. And then I speak to my friends in the states and the grief and rage comes in pins through their faces on the screen and pierces me too. It’s only January.

Yesterday Jojo came for lunch and we laughed about stupid funny things and she told me some tragedies and we shared vegetable soup and sausages and lemon drizzle cake and walked in the easy cooling mist up to the stones then further, higher up into the woods. She said England had become the best temperate place to plant Sequoias. We’ve so many here. The one in the wedding circle is six people arms outstretched round. We kissed the Chestnut tree and shook hands with the Juniper tree and slid home down steep muddy tracks stopped by roots and held by branches. She cycled away before the light failed.

I was in London last week looking at flats, I’m moving there; not hook line and sinker, but for this shoulder period of a decade before my children can reasonably think of the farm as beginning again, I’m taking action. I’ll go between the two. I don’t know how the routine will unfold, but I’ll find out. And already I’m appreciating the cosy known warmth of it more. I came home and everything was here and thirty years of nesting enveloped me. That’s the trouble and the beauty of it. It’s easy. Known. Little effort. With everyone gone I could easily disappear. Which I don’t want to. I’m not ready to. So London it is, pushing me out onto my visible edge again. The cats will have to cope. We’re in discussion.

I read through a draft of the new book yesterday; determinedly a novella, it needs work, obviously, but there are bits that are not bad. I’ll let it rest for a while and then get back on it. It’s building. There is something there.

And Substack LIVEs - yes, I’ve been doing a lot, and more to come. I get so nervous in the run up; my stomach goes, I wonder what the hell I’m doing, why do I do this to myself? and turn in circles trying to find a calm. I tell myself this (which is the truth): they are an exercise in presence, they give me the gift of connecting, they feed my curiosity, and when those three aspects come together they are the best fun. I’m always full of high afterwards, searching for more. The other day I saw Jane Fonda had arrived on Substack so I asked her. Imagine. You never know who’s going to say, Yes.

Love

Eleanor

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