This is what happens when your name is Charlie and you’re not very good at it:

You say to yourself that having perfected the Madeira cake ten years ago it shouldn’t be all that difficult now, even if that ten years ago was the last time you made it. You hide behind a veil of knowledge while secretly crossing your fingers - that half pint of milk should, by rights, still be in its bottle. But it’s too late now and it’s soaking into the mixture… is that a lump of butter amongst the blend? Oh God, there’s another one. It shouldn’t be that way, it should be undetectable. It needed to become intimate with the sugar but in the rush to get it finished there was only time for a quick who’s who before whisking it off, quite literally, to assist the eggs in their quest for salvation from the vanilla essence. Once the flour and salt arrived, well it was a task in itself digging the rest of them away from it’s quicksand tendencies. And that was when the milk came in.

Light but firm it is not. “…So that a knife should come out clean when pushed into the centre” it is not. But a dessert for the family it’ll just have to be because there’s no time to make another one.

Now that I’ve made the decision to blog every other day the ideas and inspiration that had come back to me have all run away again. I do have something I’m working on but I can see myself not posting before it’s done (and it’s taking a while) so as I’m finally reading Jane Austen, one of my goals for this year, here are my thoughts:

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Having brought up the unpredictable nature of fire alarms for my series I thought I might expand further. When I get ideas at night I can’t sleep until I jot them down so the credit for this blog entry goes to my Insomnia for causing me to be awake in the first place. No need to clap, she’s a dab hand at it by now.

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I walk into the kitchen, open the fridge, and see the pack of blueberries that has been there for a good few days. Dad says I can have as much of it as I want and then leave the rest for him. I tip the lot into a bowl. Dad can have the rest if he wants, you never know, plastic might taste good. Yes, I’m kidding, I actually took half the amount and left him the other half.

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To start with, if the male of the house requests to do the cooking, let him, and don’t offer to help if he gets into it because you’ll inevitably end up standing there like a moose. There are only two ways his results can go, either fantastically fantastic or hideously hideous. There is no average and truly it must be said that whenever you say “it’s ok” you’re actually thinking “oh God, why did I let him do this?”

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Gregory has always been rather popular but never more so than when her best-loved book, The Other Boleyn Girl, was picked up by Hollywood.

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How many times do you read over something you’ve written or play something you’ve composed before deciding it’s finished? For me the number is innumerable. Since the time a few years ago when I realised that perhaps all the lengthy descriptions for geography, school projects in history, poems and lyrics for songs that I’d written meant that my biggest passion was writing I’ve never once let myself off from editing. Very rarely am I completely satisfied when I hit the upload button or print something out for someone else’s perusal and up until the middle of last year I was still continuously going back to my first reviews and editing, even though I must have gone over them a dozen times when I first finished them.

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Some time in January 2009 I made a resolution, to read more. I had hardly read for the past few years, a handful of books at the most, and I wanted to change that. As a child I’d been a bookworm.

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