the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

We get along. So far, we have not done too badly with cutting back on utilities, but the cold snap that we are now entering will not be fun: The heating will get turned up a bit, I can’t have the Berkshire Belle getting cold. She is my not house flower, my orchid, and needs nurturing at times like this.

Otherwise, we are fine. The Hastings Hottie (she’s still hot stuff, if even she does feel the cold) spends part of her days trawling the internet for good food. She has a short list of suppliers now, for fish, meat, continental foods, curries and more. We also have a couple of good butchers locally and we have a fruit and veg box delivery. I do all the cooking these days and, with good ingredients, we eat well, and I think that that goes a long way to keeping us healthy.

I have stalled on most of my projects but have started writing a lot again. The writer’s block that had enveloped me suddenly fell away and the keyboard has been getting a pounding. It is a long time since I published anything other than a blog, but maybe 2023 will see something come from the series of ideas that I have been working on. Some of these go back ten years or so. I had been writing short stories for bank holiday blogs, usually putting myself into some weird situation, historical, sci-fi or whatever. One or two of these started to get too long for blogs and so I began to develop them into outlines for novels.

It is a very big step from a blog to a short story, let alone a novel and when the first one ground to a halt I tried another, then another and another. I have about seven partly written and might get one of them done one day. My non-fiction stuff still sells the odd copy and, if we are lucky, pays for an annual literary lunch. I’ll never get to Dan Brown levels of sales, but I did, for a short while, have a Number One Best Seller on Amazon, even if it was in a rather niche category.  Going back to blogs, I note that on this page I have published over 500 posts. Seems a lot.

My other writing at this time of year is to produce a poem a day for the Berkshire Belle. I start on the 13^th and do the twelve days up to the 24^th. This year I threw in a short story of how we got together in the style of Jane Austen, and that went well enough for me to then do another one about the first time that I saw her in the style of a dime novel, and then had another go at the day we got together, but in a 007 meets Gunsmoke pastiche (it was full of in jokes that only the two of us would get). The other nine days had poetry, and, for me, there was some of my best work.

Christmas, for us, was the usual quiet affair. No-one came knocking nor will we did not go calling. We had some nice things to eat, more than enough to drink and, most importantly, have each other. That will always do for us.