Day 197

I wasn’t supposed to wake up until 07:30, but woke at 06:30 and felt wide awake, so I got up and had plenty of time to (sort of) prep my Radio Stradbroke show (lots of summer vibey stuff – note the expert language). Managed to do a photo dump onto Insta, too, of most of the cat pics I took in Agios Nikolaos – there are so many cats there, and the locals look after them and feed them, which is another reason to feel like the place is blessed. There’s even a cat church there – well, we called it the Cat Church because it has doors with cat reliefs on them, and there was an old guy there feeding about 8 cats when we happened on it.

The sun is out, which makes a change after such a grey week. It makes a huge difference. Being in the sun and its warmth, as T just wrote to me an hour ago, has a massively healing effect on body and mind; you just have to choose the right time to do it (noon is not a good time). My body loves the feeling of being suffused by warmth – it stops aching, stops creaking, stops feeling weak. It’s real.

M and I will later do that most romantic of things – go to a DIY shop to look at paving slabs. We need to get the back of the house straight so we can train the cats in using the new cat flap; they need to be able to get in and out of the house on their own, and not have to wait for their inefficient human servants to open the door into the garden for them. And I need to chase bookshelves builders, too.

To the left of this screen is my day job hardcopy in-tray. It needs sorting out as it’s irritating me and looks untidy. Not this weekend, though. I need to be serious about the life/work balance (and probably better written in that order, that phrase, actually).

This morning I thought I’d try an Americano rather than an espresso for my second coffee. Not a fan, I must admit. There’s just something about the volume and roundedness of flavour with an espresso I can’t seem to find anywhere else.

Not been this fragmentary in some time. Maybe it illustrates a sort of freedom from pressure for the first time since we got back from AN. And perhaps my continual referrals to AN are not just because it is a wonderful place, but because that was our first 2-week holiday in decades. And that’s why we need to do it every year. To find time, to find each other, to find ourselves.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 150