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A Holiday Assortment

being a selection of crafts, games, incident and etymology which have enlivened the holiday season for me and may well perform the same service for you.

We don’t usually have a Christmas tree in this household. I don’t like plastic and I don’t much like felling trees either. We did try a living tree in a pot, but keeping it alive proved more than we were capable of. Thus the usual absence of tree. This year, however, as I was hanging out the washing on Christmas Eve, I accidentally broke a branch off the rosemary which grows beneath the washing line. So this year, we had a tree, albeit not a very large one.

A spiky green branch of rosemary in bud rises from a yellow plant pot on a white shelf. Around it are a small corked ceramic jar, a sheathed paperknife, and a small metal model of a camel.

It did manage to bloom at one point – you can see the buds in the photo above if you look carefully – but alas, it didn’t put down roots in the soil provided, and it did not long survive the Twelve Days of Christmas.

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Coming Soon! A Season of Change

Change is afoot!

For reasons which I Am Not At Liberty To State (yet), the three novels I have published to date may shortly cease to be available in paperback form. Or in paper form at all.

But what you lose on the swings, you make up on the roundabouts.

Side note: I am having difficulty thinking of anything that one might lose on swings which could then be recouped or regained on roundabouts. One’s lunch? No. One’s wallet? Doubtful. A parkouring thief who sails across the playground on the swings before being trapped in the roundabout like a comic actor in a revolving door? Unlikely, to say the least. However, far be it from me to question the metaphoric wisdom of Those Who Have Gone Before.

A woman sits sadly on a swing, back to the viewer. The swing next to her is empty. In the background is a roundabout, also empty.
This woman has clearly lost something on the swings which she has not yet regained on the roundabout.

However.

While I am hoping in the future to make my books available in quality hardback form, in the shorter term the role of the roundabouts will be played by….

(drumroll please)

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How to Live Without TV (a Past Post)

This post was originally published over five years ago, but it echoes a book I am currently reading (or possibly the book echoes the post – they were published in the same year). In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport writes, “you’re more likely to succeed in reducing the role of digital tools in your life if you cultivate high-quality alternatives to the easy distraction they provide. For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.”
Oof.
I feel Past Me provided some good advice here for Present Me on how to not get sucked into the small screen. So, bearing in mind that we’re not just talking about TV here, how do you live without TV?

  1. Remove TV from house; delete all TV-related tabs, apps etc.
  2. Ta-da! You are living without TV.
black and white drawing of a TV dumped in a rubbish bin


Except what we really want to know is not how to live without TV, but how to thrive without TV. (Side note: if English was a more sensible language, that would have rhymed and been an all-around more catchy sentence.)

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