Energy

I've managed to get quite tired and run down recently, so yesterday I gave myself a break. I spent most of the day lying in bed reading this blog, which is my official new favourite. In it, an impossibly cute and elfin woman buys hideous second-hand dresses, transforms them into impossibly quirky little outfits, and then sets out on a series of impossibly stylish nights out in art galleries and bars.

It is just about the perfect blog to read as you sit in bed in your middle age, patting a stomach entirely made of different types of cake, whilst wearing a huge brown fleece poncho bought in a charity shop and not altered a bit. Unless you count cutting the price tag off.

When I saw the poncho I thought how lovely it would be for camping. I imagined folding it up neatly until it was time to pack up the sleeping bags in summer. I have not taken it off.  I do not look in the least bit elfin in it. I resemble a large, misshapen easy chair that someone has attempted to cover with a blanket.

I was obviously thinking a lot about summer and camping this week as I borrowed a camping cookbook from the library. My holiday cuisine is mainly based around emptying jars of sauce onto packets of gnocchi. In this book, people in wellington boots dig large pits in the ground in order to bake whole roast ducks which are decorated with slices of orange.

It's not comforting, when you barely have the energy to get dressed and put some oven chips on a tray, to know that elsewhere people are refashioning clothes and going to bars and cooking ducks in pits. It only brings home the importance of rebooting the Happiness Project I started last year which has somehow found its way onto the back burner.

Chapter One is called Energy. Expect updates.