My hubla is celebrating his birthday today. Not that it’s his actual birthday. Because why should the commemoration of such a momentous event last just a day? Medical professionals these days recommend that due dates for births are broadened into likely ‘birth weeks’ and I believe birthday celebrations should follow suit.

With our birthdays falling just a week apart, that would mean 14 days of revelry for my hubla and I, which suits me just fine.

But this year there’s more to my demands than sheer self-indulgence. My hubla has been on an NHS waiting list for over a year, desperately waiting to have a painful varicose vein treated (yes, he’s young for that, but a few years ago he had testicular cancer, and there turned out to be some unexpected side effects).

After hobbling around for several months, he thought about going private, but £1,500+ versus free is an easy equation to make, so he waited, and waited, and waited some more.

Then he got a phone call – a cancellation meant that he could be treated in the next few days! The downside? It was to be on his birthday…

On the one hand, a horrible way to spend your most important day; on the other the best birthday present in the world. So at 11am on his birthday he headed off to our local hospital, gowned up and settled down to wait, and wait and wait some more. He finally got treated under local anaesthetic at 5pm, having missed his birthday tea with our niece and nephew, in favour of spending six hours of his birthday in a hospital ward all alone because relatives weren’t allowed in (we take up too much space, apparently).

But now the waiting game is over, he has a pain-free future to look forward to and doctor’s orders to eat cake, drink beer and party. So the celebrations are back on. Hurrah!

© Stock.xchng

However much people tell me that it was invented by greetings card companies, however much I tell myself that it’s a shamelessly sentimental holiday, there’s a big part of me that just adores Valentine’s Day.

I come from a family that like to celebrate every possible occasion, from Christmas to Diwali to the Chinese New Year. As a child I was used to associating Valentine’s Day with receiving cards emblazoned with hearts and signed by mystery suitors with handwritng uncannily similar to my mum’s. It was a day when my parents would sparkle at each other and there would usually be something especially nice for tea.

These days, two years into my marriage, I’m glad to say that romance is still on the agenda, and it really doesn’t have to cost a lot. I’m lucky that my hubla ensures I always have flowers (currently gorgeous purple irises), but our Valentine’s tokens to each other were personal rather than expensive - my hubla graciously accepted wonky homemade card from me, just as he will accept a wonky homemade card for his birthday.

Not being blessed (or cursed) with an overflowing imagination like mine, he buys his cards, avoiding anything padded or sporting a printed poem.

Often we celebrate Valentine’s over a special meal eaten at home, but this evening we’re going out for dinner, partly because January was particularly grim this year and partly because the recession has led to some fab restaurant deals (hurrah for a positive-side to the credit crunch!). We feel in need of an excuse to get dressed up, eat some good food and smile at each other in a candle-lit setting.

Actually, that latter bit is the part I love best about this day. It’s not really about gifts and cards and flowers, its about being given a nudge to devote some time to the person you love, and a candle-lit setting isn’t a bad place to do it.

© Stock.xchng

Ah, Sunday. I do love Sundays. Even though my hubla is slogging away at work today, and I too have spent, oh, maybe an hour working this morning, there’s a gorgeous sense of relaxation hanging over me. Plus I have fun plans for later, which means I actually had a reason to get dressed before midday - hurrah!

It may seem slightly ridiculous (and possibly verging on disturbing) to celebrate having cause to change out of PJs on a Sunday, the one day when most people remain firmly glued to bed-wear, but as any freelance writer knows, when most of your week in spent inside with only a vase of white roses (aw, thanks, hubla!) for company, any activity involving leaving the house becomes a novelty.

Yesterday was very exciting because I had reason to leave the house not once, but twice, and not just to empty the recycling bin! The first time was to got to a lunchtime end-of-show party of my pet photographer’s art exhibition, and the second time was long after nightfall and involved cocktails and lengthy discussions about a friend’s torrid affair with a married man. So a good time was had by all (apart from, perhaps, the married man’s wife).

Today’s adventures involve meeting up with my entire immediate family sans hubla, and attending a local cheese fair. I’m not exactly sure what that entails, though I assume it will have more to do with sampling tiny cubes of locally reared cheeses than riding waltzers made from cheddar.

I’m slightly disappointed that it’s not a chocolate fair, rather than cheese, but, whatever, it’s a reason to go out, talking of which, I’d better go and surgically remove my slippers in order to don more outdoors-worthy footwear.

As a writer I’ve been warned against making too much use of coincidence as a plot device. Early drafts of my stories and novels quite often have characters fortuitously coming across the one piece of information or meeting the one person they needed to move things forward.

I think it’s partly because I see my own life as a series of coincidences. I always have to make sure that in the next draft I make the main character more active, less wafty so that they choose events rather than events choosing them.

But in real life, coincidences often crop up in ways that would never work in a piece of fiction.

Take yesterday, for example. Yesterday afternoon I had the excitement of going to the diabetic clinic to be fitted with a blood testing monitor that will take continuous readings for three days and then, hopefully, present me with a graph to let me know what my body gets up to when I’m not paying attention. Could be interesting!

The weird thing was that while I was waiting for the diabetic specialist nurse to see me I could hear a baby crying and I thought to myself, How funny, all babies sound just like my nephew. I suppose all babies sound the same.

Then when I went into my appointment, the nurse said, “Did you know your sister’s here seeing the other nurse?”

So it was my nephew!

I managed to get linked up to the monitor in time to catch my sis before she left and we went for a coffee afterwards, which was nice as we hadn’t caught up since Christmas. I suppose there are some curious advantages to both of us having diabetes.

The nurse seemed surprised that I hadn’t known she’d be there, but we don’t often discuss such boring things as diabetic appointments, so even if I’d seen her yesterday we probably wouldn’t have known we’d be at the hospital at the same time today.

My plot-lines may have a propensity for swinging from one coincidence to another, but one thing I do know is dialogue, and we have much more interesting things to talk about than that, at least, most of the time.

© J Darley

Unexpectedly, I got my wish. After lamenting the end of the Christmas break and return to reality, snow sailed in and brought most of the UK to a halt.

I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but if I’d known at that moment that I was to have a wish granted I might have chosen something a bit grander, more life changing, such as, ooh, I don’t know, a nice fat book deal.

The snow has been rather remarkable though. We southerners quail at a few flakes, buses and trains are cancelled, minor roads closed while ambulances howl endlessly along the bigger roads.

I had plans for every night last week, and all but one failed to happen, one because the bus I needed to take to reach a birthday party was cancelled, one because a friend lost her nerve about venturing out onto the ice, another because another friend came down with a cold and lost her nerve. The one that did take place had no excuse not to, as my hubla and I went to the house of our next-door-neighbour-but-one (next-door is a glaciers) for dinner. Even then, I almost slipped and fell, and wore a woolly hat for the two-second journey.

My cousins in Colorado would laugh at so much fuss for a few inches of snow, but I think it’s all about what you’re used to, and, according to the news, to how much grit your council has on standby (not much, it seems).

In desperation, I’ve headed out each day, and lost myself for an hour in the vast Victorian cemetery up the road. It made seem like an eerie place to go, but for the resting place of so many generations of dead people, it boasts more life than any local park. At this time of year the basking adder is hiding away, but there are still plenty of birds flitting from headstone to headstone, and holly and ivy runs more rampantly than on any Christmas card.

In the snow the cemetery was even more impressive than usual, with stone angels sporting fluffy white highlights and tombs encased in glittering shrouds.

With schools closed many local kids were exploring the woods that grow across the cemetery, and as I wandered through one morning, two bobbies marched towards me, each hailing me cheerily. What on earth could they have been guarding there?

Being amongst wildlife always seems to bring out the friendliness in people. While we strike past each other stony faced on the streets, we nod, smile and say hello in parks and, in this case, cemeteries. It’s as though being surrounded by trees prompts inherited memories of earlier times when people really did greet every person they met.

I like to think I’m a relatively intelligent and organised person. I keep my receipts, file my invoices and generally keep an eye on my finances. So filling in my tax return should be a doddle, right?

A few weeks back I registered to complete it online, activated it and filled in half the pages, then, realising I wasn’t sure I was doing it right, saved all the pages and booked myself onto one of the Government’s free Self Assessment courses.

The course was excellent, and with so, reassured that I knew what I was doing I returned to the Government’s online gateway and logged in.

Only, I couldn’t find my way back into the Self Assessment section. In fact, the screen stated I didn’t have access to it and suggested I register for online services.

Which I thought I had already done.

Bewildered, I phone up the online helpdesk, who told me in no uncertain terms that I had clearly de-registered myself and needed to start again from scratch. I was almost in tears by this point, and politely asked how I could have managed that, to which they had no answer.

So, unable to do anything else, I reregistered and am now waiting for another activation code to reach me.

Only, I just received an email with the subject line “Please remember to complete your tax return.”

When I opened it up, it stated: “We note that you have not yet submitted the Self Assessment Tax Return that you started to complete using our online service. Please remember that you must submit your tax return on or before 31 January 2010.”

What?!? When I phoned them to find out what had happened to the form I’d begun to complete, they claimed it had never existed, and now they’re emailing me to ask why I haven’t finished completing it.

Well, the answer is probably because I was told it doesn’t exist.

Turns out it takes a lot more than intelligence and organisation to complete a tax return, especially when the Government who are asking me to do it seem hell-bent on making it as confusing as possible.

Government: 1; Judy: nil

Last night I took a trip down to my local cinema to watch the Michael Jackson documentary This Is It. Pieced together from footage taken during planning and rehearsals for his planned come-back tour.

The film has made already made motion picture history as the highest grossing concert film of all time, no doubt helped by his death earlier this year and the morbid fascination of people like, um, me…

I grew up in a time when Michael Jackson was still considered cool and not yet particularly creepy. The dance moves to Thriller were even taught in PE classes at my school. Back then my sister had a bedroom covered with his posters, so I wasn’t surprised when she asked me if I wanted to go and see the film with her.

And I was happy enough to go along. As the years have ticked by, the man may have become a bit of an oddity, but he remained a talented oddity right up to his death – a showman whose dance moves and distinctive singing voice had been honed through a painstaking perfectionism that shone out throughout the documentary.

The other thing that shone out, rather bleakly, was how desperately lonely he was. Not one of the countless people in his inner circle treated him as an equal. To most he was a God, awe-inspiring and adored, but not loved in any real way. There’s a definite difference between being lauded and loved, but I really don’t think Michael Jackson had experienced enough of the latter to recognise that the adulation he received from his team wasn’t it. He didn’t even seem aware he was surrounded by sycophants. But, that said, perhaps ignorance really is bliss, or kinder than reality anyway.

The film was an homage to a man who never found the love he sought, and didn’t even know it. This Is It? Really? I think it could just as easily have been called Sycophantasia, though I’m not sure whether Michael would have been the magician or the apprentice…

The house of Twink

I seem to have spent a lot of time with small people in recent weeks, by which I mean children, not the vertically challenged. In fact, one of these was my husband’s niece, nicknamed Twinks, who is all of six years old and is expected to reach over six foot when she’s fully grown.

At the moment she’s still pretty dinky though. She came to stay with us on Saturday night and apart from staying with grandparents who live a few minutes walk from her parents, this was her first time away from home without her mum, so we were a bit anxious. What if she refused to go to sleep or turned into a monster at midnight or, worse, cried? As it happened, she was an absolute angel from the moment she arrived till her parents picked her up the next day.

Twinks arrived with enough luggage to see her through a week away, with a pink wheelie case stuffed with Disney princess dolls, a hairbrush, Mrs Bunny the hot waterbottle and a spare pair of knickers. She also brought a pink backpack filled with a pink book of fairy stories, a pink toothbrush and toothpaste, and a furry pink (see a colour scheme developing here?) pencil case bulging with felt tip pens.

As soon as her mum and dad were out of sight I handed Twinks a pink apron to wear and I put on a navy blue one I’d been given by a Scottish cookery school I’d reviewed. Then we covered the living room floor with newspaper and set to work with a massive pad of paper and some kid-friendly watercolour paints. I painted a boat and Twinks painted a tall red house, then Twinks painted a picture of me, her and my husband in a boat bobbing on a blue green sea beneath a sky filled with blue seagulls and pink stars. Love the creativity, especially the fact that she made James the smallest of the three of us when in fact he’s 6ft 4″.

After a bath to wash off the excess paint, I tucked Twinks up on an inflatable bed in her pink princess duvet and we read a story together. Then it was time to sleep.

Just one small problem: our spare room is small and narrow and sits directly alongside our neighbours’ kitchen. Almost as soon as I left the room they decided to switch on their extractor fan and filled our spare room with a strange whining, growling sound and a smell of cooked potatoes. Poor Twinks! She shouted out in protest and I stayed with her for a while until the noise and smell drifted away, at which point a motorbike roared past and someone nearby set off some fireworks.

“Why do you live in the city when it’s so noisy?” she asked.

“Well, because we work in the city,” I said.

“When I grow up I want to do what you do,” she said, and I was flattered until I realised that somewhere along the line, I’m not sure how, Twinks has got it into her head that I draw for a living. Not far wrong, I suppose – I do produce pictures but with words.

It made me think about being six years old and having endless possibilities about what to be. I clearly remember believing that by the time I grew up someone would have realised I was really a princess so I would, by now, be living in a turreted castle and wearing a crown. But I guess living in a tall red house and being a writer is a pretty lovely second choice. I only hope Twinks is as happy with her future choices. Providing the colour pink is involved in some way, I’m sure she will be.

Pink skies © J Darley

I’m a fan of summertime. Warm days, sunshine, a world full of thriving wildlife and flourishing greenery - what’s not to like? This passion means that often at this time of year I feel a flutter of foreboding. But not this year. This year I’ve fallen in love with autumn skies so dramatic that summer seems pale in comparison.

October has been generous with its colour palette. One advantage of shorter days is later sunrises, which means that when I walk to the train station I’m treated to visual acrobatics as astonishing pinks, pale blues, frail gold and silver somersault through the air, so slowly they seem only to seep.

Then in the evening I arrive home to floods of apricot, copper and peach so intense I wish I was a painter so I could attempt to capture a sense of the overwhelming the richness. If I saw someone wearing a dress in these colours I would either envy them their boldness, or dismiss their taste as gaudy.

Nature seems to be putting in one final, heartfelt effort, as wildflowers soak up the remaining heat from the season, squirrels bounce by and, this morning, the river’s lone cormorant raised his thread-beaked profile to greet me.

This cormorant is an old familiar. Once as I walked in to town I watched him wrestle an enormous eel on to the slick riverbank where the pair fought like something out of a vintage dinosaur movie, until a greedy gull swooped in to rob the cormorant of his prize.

This morning, however, there was no drama - merely a moment of contemplation in the early light that made me smile.