Homework

At least you get to eat them afterwards. I had another go at this week's exercise, this time with a batch of marmalade and almond muffins, shot from various different perspectives. This one doesn't fit the brief, but it's the one I'd be most likely to use in a blog post.

Yesterday actually did go downhill after I posted, because we had an email from our house-swap partners in Spain saying that they couldn't go ahead with our planned Easter swap due to the mother of one of them having just had a stroke :( I'd been really looking forward to it, so I went to bed feeling decidedly glum. Today, though, I've been researching AirBnBs in the area as an alternative, and there are quite a few reasonably priced possibilities, so all is not yet lost.

More happily, I received a parcel of books today, bought with some of the proceeds of recent eBay sales. So I'm settled by the fire with Jean Lucey Pratt's journals. I first discovered her via Simon Garfield's collections of Mass Observation diaries written during and after the Second World War. She is such a character, witty and intelligent, and it turns out that she kept journals from the age of 15 until her death in her late 70s. Even at 15 she clearly has a talent for writing. On page 9, her dad, who has just learned to drive, is driving them back from Cornwall:
Across Salisbury Plain it began to rain and I tried to sleep, until Daddy bumped into a cow. The cow's mild expression of pained surprise tickled me, so that I sat up once more and recovered my spirits.