Birthdays

...cakes and light

Today is my birthday. It’s not a birthday with a zero in the number so it’s not particularly significant although it is to me as there is no escaping that I am getting very old.

January is not the best month to have a birthday. It’s too close to Christmas and New Year and lots of people are short of money and/or are having a frugal month because they are denying themselves all kinds of pleasures. Clearly my family didn’t get the message about avoiding January births. I shared a birthday with one of my uncles and I have a niece and a nephew who like me were born in the second week of January. I also have a great-niece and a great-nephew who arrived in the third week of January which means there are quite a lot of birthday cards to post this month.

On the positive side I don’t really consider it to be the new year until just after my birthday so if I was making resolutions - which I’m not - I wouldn’t have to do anything until tomorrow. As I’ve said before I am very anti giving things up for new year and in any event I have given up almost everything already, I neither smoke nor drink alcohol, but I do want to improve my diet so will be eating less cake and more vegetables. I’ve made this casserole a couple of times and it is really delicious and freezes well.

Last night I had tea and cakes with TB and SF and today I went for a very good lunch in Bermondsey with TB and London Sister.

Progress on the restoration of my windows is very slow. The carpenter is a complete perfectionist and, as I expected, the windows are in a much worse state than he originally thought they might be. He did warn me this might be the case. I imagine that it will take several more days for the work to be completed and then the next job is the painting. I keep telling myself it is really worth it and I’m sure that when summer rolls round (and I have forgotten how horrifically expensive it is) it will be a real pleasure to have windows that glide up and down. It is very stressful having workers in the flat most days and I can’t wait for it to be finished. One of the things I am not enjoying is having to be up and dressed every morning before 7.30 a.m. I know lots of people wouldn’t consider that terribly early but since I stopped working I am rarely out of bed before 8.30. even though I usually wake up much earlier than that. On the plus side I have been going to bed really early and am sleeping better.

I scrolled through my photos to find a suitable picture to illustrate this post and I realised that I have hundreds and hundreds of photographs of windows. It’s strange when people talk about where they live they rarely mention their windows even though they are so significant in creating the character of a room. I love the fact that my sitting room gets so much sunlight in the afternoon and in the morning in winter I can watch the sun rise while I’m still in bed.

There was no sunshine today. Instead we had torrential rain all day. Apparently one of the consequences of climate change in the UK is that it when it rains it rains more heavily. There are large puddles everywhere as the drains are clogged with leaf mould and rubbish. As least it isn’t as cold as last week. I was planning to go for a country walk tomorrow but I think everywhere will be very muddy. I’m either going to go with friends to visit Pitzhanger Manor or go to see Hamnet on my own. Not sure which yet.