Hello, and I hope you had a lovely Easter weekend. I am actually writing this on Good Friday, in a snatched few minutes before the next onslaught of jobs. No idea if I will actually make it past tomorrow.

It has been a stressful week, but I will try hard to not apportion blame.

It began badly, when the painter arrived on Monday. For some reason, somebody had booked a man to decorate the entire house, beginning the week before Easter. This is generally a busy time, as all the family, including my mother, come to stay, and then on Easter Monday we invite the whole church and anyone else who wants to come, and we all go for a country walk and have a cream tea. Last year we had about 80 people, so it involves baking quite a lot of scones. And having the house tidy. And is not helped by having a bloke painting random rooms the week before.

But we survived. The painter man turned out to be relatively low-impact, though having to empty whole rooms is not without a certain amount of chaos, and chemicals smell horrid, so windows have to be open, so the house is cold. I couldn’t write in my normal place, and so shared the kitchen area with son who’s back from uni. It wasn’t completely terrible, and I managed to write 13,000 words of next book. I think I write best when depressed.

The main reason for the depression is that, due to repeated nagging from various people, I went to the doctor about those chest pains/breathlessness I told you about a few weeks ago. Part of this involved blood tests, and I was told I need to cut down on cholesterol. Which is frankly awful. I am not sure that a life without cakes and flapjacks and cheese sauces is necessarily one I want to live. I spent the week rebelling, and baking said flapjacks and cakes, and then feeling guilty, so forcing them onto other people.

The weather is also being rubbish. As I write, I have just returned from a particularly unpleasant walk. The fields are not just boggy, they are lakes. Son made a lot of fuss about having a hole in one wellie. The chickens insist on leaving their cage because it’s not actually snowing, but they are cross, so sit on the back doorstep frowning at me. The back doorstep is now covered in chicken poop, so that’s another job before the cream tea (in the rain) on Monday.

The ducks are happy though. And randy. Ducks in the spring are incredibly randy. Which means lots of eggs, but I have been removing them because I don’t want more ducks, and now the laying boxes are empty each morning. Which means they are hiding their nests. Which means they will arrive with a clutch of ducklings in a few weeks time, and I will have to either fish them out of the pond, or leave them for the magpies to eat.

Anyway, I have survived so far, and if I make it to Monday I will be feeling calmer. Am hoping lots of people still come to cream tea, even if the weather is bad, otherwise I will have many pots of clotted cream to dispose of (or eat, if I decide the whole cholesterol thing is best ignored). Perhaps I could post them out with copies of Clara. A sort of unusual special offer: Buy a book and get a free pot of cream. Perhaps not.

Enjoy your day and have a lovely week, whatever the weather.

Take care,
Love,
Anne x

PS. Had the BEST review today – the local bookshop wrote on twitter that a customer had so enjoyed Clara that they’d gone back to buy my other books. Excellent. Have you bought a copy yet?

PPS. As I set the table for Easter Sunday dinner, I put out napkins. We don’t use them very often, because some of my family never use them, and they are bit of a pain to wash and iron afterwards. But for special occasions, we use cloth napkins. Which reminds me of something I read this week.

Did you know, that Romans used napkins, and their slaves would watch while they ate? When the master had finished eating, he would screw up the napkin and leave the table, signifying he had finished. But sometimes, he would leave the table and carefully fold the napkin. This was a sign to the servants that he wasn’t finished – he would be returning to the table. Now, if you read the Easter story, you will read in John’s book, that when the disciples got to the empty tomb, the grave cloths were left there, abandoned. But the napkin which had been around Jesus’ head was carefully folded…