I am absolutely LOVING HubPages.  I tried Squidoo and other places on the www, but I have come to absolutely love HubPages.

I've written a fair few hubs there now and they are doing well, and (dare I say it) I just LIKE them!  They look good, professional, and are a great showcase for the writing work we do at the Exquisite Writing Team.

Here is a cool widget that shows the pages I've done (called Hubs) and i just love using this site.  It's quick, easy and entertaining and I get a lovely professional looking result.

I've been hard at it all day!  We've had an emergency project due to a writer falling ill, plus I've placed online 4 new hubs for advising small (and large) businesses about online marketing and eb presence.

One on affiliate marketing monetization, and how to monetize a website using affiliate marketing.

One on the use of traffic exchanges for business websites

One on how to develop content and information websites

and one on small business websites

I have just been notified that I've reached Platinum Author Status (as opposed to just being an Expert Author) at http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Julie-Ann_Amos

Obviously this is a big achievement, and I'm very grateful to the team for making this possible!

Today has been a rather strange day. I went to Tesco for some supplies for dinner (as Rud had agreed to make meatballs), and some fresh fruit for a salad and some mixed leaves. I also got 6 cucumbers. Now, that may sound strange to some people, but I've loved cucumber since I was a child, and have always tended to favour cucumber on crackers for a nightime snack, and cheese & cucumber instead of cheese and biscuits, etc etc. Rud makes homemade Tsatziki; there are a number of things we make with it – and we go through maybe 4-5 a week at least…

The checkout man picked up a cucumber and of course, it wouldn't scan through the beeping machine, so he had to key in the convenient 75 digit number by hand instead.

"Do you eat a lot of salad?" he said, waving a cucumber at me, with 2 in his other hand. "No, not at all," I replied without thinking, "we should eat more of it really." He smirked and winked at me, and for one horror struck moment, time stood still….

Over my embarrassment, I got home, and went to change my shirt. The cleaner had been. In my bathroom was one of those large silver (at least, in this case) intimate objects. This one even had a wrist strap. So does my Samsung i780 Blackberry equivalent phone, by the way, but let's just say I don't mind being see with that in public.

I got a terrible sinking feeling. "Umm… Did you put this in the bathroom?" I asked Rud, hopefully. "No," he said, "where did that come from?"

I realised the cleaner must have found it, and discreetly put it in our bathroom for us. Which would have been fine, had said object actually been mine. Or Rud's. Or even "ours".

I can only assume a B&B guest (we take Bed & Breakfast guests in our spare room) had left it behind somewhere and it had ended up caught up in the washing or something…

Still, I should be grateful for small mercies. Today would have been an exceptionally bad day for it to fall out of a pocket in Tesco.

Well a strange day – firstly the new section of the ExquisiteWriting.com website is live – here: http://www.exquisitewriting.com/music-writer/

We had a fantastic client who has allowed us to post his work as samples, and another amazing client that wrote us a lovely testimonial, so the Music writing section is now up and running. With Rud being a musician it makes it easy for us to do audio and music related work! We get a lot of queries to write music sites, press releases, bios, MySpace pages etc etc. It was just so nice to get such a lovely client endorsement.

OUTSIDE the office it was a hot day. Sunny, warm, and surprisingly buzzy…

We have with wasps. We are inundated with apples on the trees this year; the branches are almost touching the ground (and in some cases resting ON the ground). And we are discovering that dogs and wasps don't mix!

Gilly got stung in his mouth today, Rud stood on a wasp yesterday in the bedroom, and we chased them out of the office all morning – and it became apparent that either we have a nest, or we have some kind of weird affinity with wasps!

Enter the apple trees. Where the odd early apple has fallen off, aided and abetted by a rather careless mower man on Tuesday, they are mangled on the ground (well, chopped to rotting pieces by said lawnmowing). And a wasp magnet.

I had a look and saw at least 30 under ONE tree (we have 5 apple trees, one pear albeit sans fruit this year, on greengage and one plum) and I decided that was it. This was WAR!

Armed with a wasp trap, homemade from a drinks bottle full of apple and mango juice, I braved the garden to stand the trap on the railings around the deck. Nearly standing on another wasp, I decided to make another – they take all of about 2 minutes to make! By the time I had the second one ready, the first trap had already caught 3 wasps! Now, for all the Buddhists out there, yes, the trap DOES kill the wasps, but there are a lot of worse ways to go than drowning in apple and mango juice. Ask my slugs.

By 6 this evening we were wasp free at least for the most part, and I'm very relieved. Gilly isn't exactly famous for his common sense (this is the dog that runs into lampposts because he doesn't look where he is going!)

I've been up all night, working. It's a busy time, and with my Father being ill I have times when I can't work the hours I'd like to. Plus I'd planned a relentless month from mid-July through to August on marketing. Online marketing, running ads, making squidoo lenses, getting the online presence consolidated… even outsourcing a goodly part of the work to the team it all takes time. August is usually a slow month in the copywriting business, and as a ghostwriter your workload can go very slack in July/August. But this year it's been busy.

Which brings me to the blog. I never thought I'd say this but I have so much to say I'm keeping a list of things I need to write about! I just need to find the time to be the prolific blog writer I'd love to be…

It's a grey early morning here in the forest. Planning a late night working I had a belt of caffeine at around 2330. Unfortunately it didn't seem to kick in… until around 3am. Then I was wired and the whole how-late-to-work questions was taken out of my hands.

It wasn't an unpleasant night. I worked. I Twittered. I Facebooked. I Squidood, I worked my socks off. I went out in the pitch dark and rain with the torch and hunted slugs with Gilly at 3am (one of his favourite pastimes). I got soaked but won (slugs 0 Julie-Ann 16).

Then I had 2 pots of camomile, lemonbalm and aloe vera tea (that's 2 pots of a blend, not 2 pots of each!) in desperation. It's supposed to be calming – but it's 6am and it's taking as long to kick in as the caffeine did!

In a minute I'll go to bed and lie awake for a bit. I might even play with my new phone. Not games, you understand, but I'm the type of person who gets a real kick out of setting tasks up and reminders and to do lists. And it passes the time when Rud is fast asleep. I'll probably get off to sleep just in time for Roxy (who sleeps under the bed) to come scrabbling out at 9am to greet Leanne coming in to work. Then the postman at 930 (Gilly will bark if I am in bed and theoretically at risk of missing it). The dustmen at 10 (more barking). I wonder if it's worth bothering going to bed at all!

And by that I mean not some silly Internet Marketing hype about how to get rich, but how to seriously increase your profile online.  As if the 63,800 hits I get when you type Julie-Ann Amos into Google aren't enough...

I've been spending a lot of time recently working on Internet Marketing.  Why?  Two fold if I'm honest.  Firstly my Father is very ill, and I am a workaholic (officially certified) and so do have a tendency to throw myself into more and more work when times get stressful.  But secondly, because it will drive my business forward and bring in new clients that are currently not seeing us and what we can do for them.  (And it's cheaper than going out).

The business I run - www.ExquisiteWriting.com - is one that needs a little more promotion, so we've been going through the time-consuming process of building links and profiles.  Elance have kindly showcased me in their Elance University, and I have been adding a presence at  FaceBook, LinkedIn, Squidoo,  Constant Content, Ezine Articles - all over the place, building up the various profiles that channel work to the company.

I've also had some Squidoo lenses built and done an extensive programme of submissions to online article directories which is only just part way through (no I didn't do them personally, do I look like I fiddle much with HTML?).

The rewards from this won't come through for a while, but already traffic is increasing.  To back all this up, my new book on Ghostwriters and how to work with them will be out on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk very soon (in the next couple of weeks) - and of course I'll be selling copies myself too.

So what's the point?  To generate business of course!  And to let go of any ongoing need to protect the intellectual property of my name.  There are pages and pages of stuff out there on the www I did that is uncredited, and a mass of information that is.  This is the world of copywriting and ghostwriting.  While some clients pay extra to pretend the work we did for them was written by THEM, other pay to use my name and say I write for them.  It's odd really.  

I am increasingly asked "How do you find time for it all?"  It's simple - I use the team.  We have a strong team of experts who cover all kinds of areas, including internet marketing, so it's very easy to leverage the talent we have in-house when work needs to be done.  Plus, I believe in doing what it takes to keep things moving in the right direction.

I still handle every project personally.  I do NOT write projects for clients any more, except on a very exceptional basis.  I am for example exploring 2 ghostwriting project at the moment where the prospective clients need a UK ghostwriter.  But I have such talented people in the team I'd rather manage the business and make sure clients get what they want, rather than spending time researching and writing myself.  That way I can of more of the fun things, such as spending just a little time on FaceBook, and working on my own books for future publication (no I do not intend to stop writing).

I love what I do, pure and simple, and that's why I work so much.  I have a great team, lovely clients (well, most of them!) and the satisfaction of having built a power global writing business.  Plus I run a busy internet bookshop too - we currently have over 16,000 books for sale!  Oh, and the Bed & Breakfast, which enables us to share a little of the beauty of the Forest here with others.

It's interesting; one of the reasons why I blog very little is that I'm aware of what a great life I have, and how idyllic it must sound to some people. I just think sometimes that keeping saying how wonderful it is around here must be annoying to my former colleagues still doing the hellish commute in the City to work in the Finance Institutions.

As soon as I think, however, that maybe I'm letting down the people who DO like to read it, the following day I get THREE emails asking why I haven't written for so long! It's as if the Universe nudges me when I'm starting to walk down a particular path, and says, "Get a move on!"

Then I noticed how that happens more and more for me. I heard a song on the radio in the morning a few days ago – Garth Brookes "Every Now and Then" (yeah I know you know you're getting old when you start listening to Country but at least it's not Jazz…) – and thought about a couple of people from the past. Then one of them emailed me that same day. Odd.

I've been commuting for best part of 2 years now to Kent and London to do HR Consultancy to clients, and with diesel the price it is, and a 4 hour commute each way, even in my beloved Alfa Romeo with automatic everything, it was getting too much for me. So I recently decided to stop consultancy and gave notice to the companies I currently work with, that whilst I'd offer telephone and email support I no longer would consult on-site. A week later my Father was rushed into hospital with a serious illness, and is still there, making the trips impossible at the moment anyway, so no commuting for me for a while.

I decided to focus on more writing - I wanted more time to write – the only thing I regret not doing as yet is writing fiction, and it would be fantastic to have time to do this. I also wanted to get some more books out into print this year and onto Amazon, because it's been a long time since I published a new book. Then a client rejected a book they had ordered so I instantly had a ready-made book to publish. Not one I'd be happy putting my own name to, actually, due to the adult nature of the topic, but an instant book, nevertheless.

2 years ago I decided my diet was unhealthy and I needed to detox and change it, and started to do so only to find myself 2 weeks later in hospital for a week with an exploding gall bladder. Just a not so gentle endorsement that my decision was right (if overdue).

So what's my point? Every time I think of doing something, I can either spend days, weeks, months procrastinating about it, being logical, weighing up the pros and cons, and coming to a rational decision. But only when I've made the decision and taken that first step down a particular path will the Universe send me a clear signal that it's right (or wrong).

How many people are living their lives waiting for the time to be right? I've heard it all - I want to leave work and set up to work for myself but it never seems to be the right time. I'd like to do X but I need Y before I could do that. I'd love to move but I'm waiting for the kids to leave school. Or worse, I'd leave him/her but it's not the right time at the moment.

Waiting, waiting, waiting. A planet full of people endlessly waiting for something to happen to they can do whatever they want to do. In my experience, that "something" doesn't come along until you've already committed to the action. And most people don't.

When I flew, (aeons ago now, in the RAF) when landing and taking off there was a time when in the best judgment of the pilot the takeoff or landing had to be seen through. When I was training you actually said "Committed" – which meant to the instructor/co-pilot that it was too late to abort the takeoff or landing. If anything wet wrong beyond that point, you went ahead and landed or took off anyway, no backing out.

I believe the Universe doesn't approve, or sign off on our choices until we're committed. Those of you waiting for that mythical, magical something will have a long wait. Until you get off your backside and DO, it won't come (remember Yoda – "Do or Do Not, there is no Try"). Please stop waiting, people. Life isn't a rehearsal, you won't get any of it back if you waste it. Start doing the stuff you want to…

The weather may still be cold and wet but there is a distinct air of Spring.  Walking the dogs in the Forest the signs are there - green clumps of grass-like bluebells starting to shoot through.

I was driving Rud to the train a week ago when I came up the hill on the back road through the Forest to the house and had to stop for a small herd of deer in the road.  They milled about a bit, debating what to do, and then one after another hopped over the hedge (which is chest-height) as if it was a foot high, into the Forest and were gone.

My marine fish tank, set up after Christmas, is doing well - pictures to follow.   Plus the new car goes like a dream although i will try to avoid waxing TOO lyrical about the Alfa Romeo, except to say that the compute system, Blue&Me is fantastic.  Reads my phone, dials via voice and steering wheel control straight out of my phone in my handbag, and plays all my music off a memory stick just like on the PC with playlists, folders etc all intact in the car.  Fully automatic - gears, windscreen washers and wipers, lights, door locks, etc etc.  If only the indicators were automatics it would save me doing anything but steering...

Life is good.  As a trainee homoeopath I've been well for quite a while and been to see my OWN homoeopath for a consultation which has done me the power of good.  I just feel very very well indeed!

The garden is full of tiny bulb flowers and crocuses, the woods are full of birds, Roxy is in season (please let there be puppies, please let there be puppies) and life here is - well, pretty awesome really.

Here's a picture of the little girl up the road that I made a sweater for this winter.  I make so many sweaters for myself that I  never take pictures of but this one was so lovely and she liked it so much that i thought I'd show it off!

I think Gilly thought it was tasty! 

No, I'm not dead.  I know, I know, it's been like forever since I wrote my blog.  I've just been so darned BUSY!  Dogs to walk, nuts to pick, Christmas trees to erect, even a blizzard on Friday...  Busy busy busy.

Christmas was suitably Christmassy with a HUGE tree so big Rud had to cut the top off to get it into the hall.  Surrounded by parcels and twinkly lights and pinecones etc etc.  Now we are back in the rainy season.  The stream has burst its banks yet again and I am so glad we bought a house on a hill!  The dogs don't seem to care that it is pouring with rain they still want to go into the Forest every day.

2008 will be a good year I'm sure.  Homoeopathy study seems to be going well.  I have Stained Glass every Thursday morning, and sitting in the studio waiting for me is my epic FISH window which is cut and leaded into place, and awaiting soldering.  Rud has even agreed I can replace the GIANT window in the hall with a stained glass one I make myself!

And tomorrow I go to testdrive my new car... it's still not a done deal but we narrowed it down to a fairly logical (if incomprehensible to the outside world) choice between 2 cars that are halfway houses.  The Nissan Quashqai, cross between a 4x4 and a family hatchback, and an Alfa Romeo 159 Sportwagon, cross between an estate and... well, an Alfa Romeo.  One is just a teensy bit more BEAUTIFUL... and I am beginning to understand why Alfa chose the marketing phrase "Follow your heart". 

A top of the range Alfa Romeo... yes the one with the USB port for music, full leather interior, metallic paint and  all the gizmos you could shake a stick at labelled in Italian in red glowing letters.... I'm sure I'll cope.  How hard can it be to learn Fuel, Temp, Climate Control, and a few other bits and pieces?  I'm fluent in Latin (or at least as fluent as anyone can be in a language that nobody knows it should sound anyway...)  I think the dogs will prefer  dark leather interior, don't you?   Not sure cream leather is their thing really... 

New Year, new car... yes, it's a slippery slope watching Top Gear, people, you have been warned... 

The other big change here is the new fishtank in the office.  Nothing but sand in it yet but as soon as I pick up the new Reverse Osmosis Water unit, I can start making water and adding salt for my other new babies.  Venturing into the world of Marine fish, starfish, hermit crabs, corals and sea anemones for the first time is really exciting!  But it has to be done SOOOO SLOWLY - like weeks before you can even put the rocks into the water everything is so sensitive!  Delayed gratification never was my thing... still, just think in 4 weeks time my tank of sand will be totaly transformed.  In just 4 weeks I'll have a tank full of water, sand AND rocks.  Sigh.

I'm not sure precisely when I started morphing into some strange version of Delia Smith, but it definitely does seem to be happening. It started when I change my eating habits and went from eating sandwiches and ready meals (unless Rud did the cooking) to cooking every single day for myself.  Usually fish and steamed vegetables, but occasionally stirfried vegetables with a variety of weird and wonderful experimental sauces.

Then I developed an urge for foraging in the local area!  It started rather gently with picking my own wild strawberries in the forest, and graduated via using our own apples from the garden and harvesting copious quantities of blackberries from the woods, which I froze in ever larger freezer bags, ready to make crumbles during the winter.

I graduated  to nutting expeditions collecting pocketfuls of hazelnuts which are absolutely delicious.  And then my most recent foray into gastronomic experimentation has been making my own soup!  I've had a problem with my oesophagus recently which probably stems from my operation in February, and the dietician is advised that I go back onto a liquid diet -- which I actually enjoy, but after a while of soup, I fancied a change.  So I decided to make my own.

The first effort wasn't unpleasant (at least at first), but I did find back to rather strangely I had absolutely no desire to eat it again after the first bowlful!  I think when one is attempting to make soup for the first time in one's life, red onion soup is perhaps not the easiest one to master, in all fairness.  And as I say, it was eminently edible but I did find a strange reluctance to have any more or even to keep it in the future.  It's one of those soups that you can't exactly taste as you go along because you just be tasting boiling onions which isn't that pleasant.  So you kind of have to wait until the end and then have a kind of surprise tasting.

 Today, I made carrot and butternut squash soup.  I have to say that I made the recipe up, I managed to break the blender in the process, and it is without a shadow of a doubt the best thing I've ever tasted.  So here it is in all its glory -- my recipe for carrot and butternut squash soup with a few extra ingredients.

•  chop one small red onion very finely -- ideally organic
  
•  fry until soft with a small knob of butter (that's a very small knob of butter, ladies, this soup can be very low-calorie if you don't mess around adding bad stuff)
• chop one butternut squash and 1 kg of carrots -- ideally organic
• add squash and carrots to the onion and add just enough water to be able to boil safely.
• and the leaves only of one packet of supermarket fresh coriander -- if you don't have fresh coriander, leave it out.  The dried stuff just won't taste the same
• remove from heat, allow to cool before placing in blender (very important you will break your blender if you add it while it's still hot)
• place in blender and blend until smooth
• return to saucepan and add one large can (400 g) of reduced fat coconut milk
• reheat and serve.  If you are saving some till later (and I think unless there are eight of you no matter how big your appetite you'd be hard pushed to eat an entire butternut squash and kilogram of carrots in one sitting) just stir very well and allow to cool.

I received this information from a client of mine yesterday. I feel sufficiently strongly about it to post it here.

Dear All

Just back from New York after being at President Bill Clinton’s, Clinton Global Initiative. Lots of you have asked to have an update so here is:

The Clinton Global Initiative was a life changing, jam packed 3 days and evenings in New York, with the highest calibre Heads of State, Politicians, Business Leaders, NGO’s, Scholars & Celebrities you would ever possibly witness in one room. To say it was a powerful room is the understatement of the century. There were 52 current and former world leaders there alone (32 current), around 20 Billionaires & the richest man on the planet. It was very humbling & profound to be there & an absolute privilege to hear first hand from the cream of world experts what’s happening on a global perspective on Climate Change, Education, Poverty Alleviation, Global Health. All were discussed from numerous perspectives, with how to make change through business dominating. The calibre of the speakers & panels were outstanding with many thought provoking, eye opening topics.

Climate Change dominated the entire event. Much of what I heard was very, very, very sobering; the alarming pace at which temperatures are rising, the predicted C02 emission levels in the coming 20 years due to China and India’s new economies. To be totally blunt, we are all going to be screwed if we cannot reduce carbon levels drastically in the next 2 decades. I heard the words “planetary catastrophe” too many times to make anyone feel comfortable about using any C02 at all. The time frame for this was 23 years.

To cut to the chase here, in the next 20 years the planet will output more C02 (if we all don’t make enormous changes in our habits) than it has in the entire history of the planet, temperatures are currently rising so fast there will be NO polar icecaps left in 23 years & sea levels will rise 10 metres globally. That’s a lot of our current world under water! You don’t need much imagination to work out that this could become a period of little more than survival. Carbon is killing the planet through manmade actions.

The positive things were that there are major commitments being made to change things. Ironically the public are driving business to change, business changes are driving political changes & the majority of politicians are catching up with everyone else. However President George Bush and, if you’re in Australia, Prime Minister John Howard, are what can only be called total idiots. They are both still in denial of the looming crisis. Personally I’d lock them in a room together & throw away the key.

Now you’re probably asking ‘but what if anything can I do?’ Well you can do lots. Start with your own home, changing light bulbs, being more energy efficient etc. Look at what you’re driving, should you change to a Hybrid? Get your communities involved, get your kids involved, get your fellow workers involved. Contact your local politicians. Act now – Act fast, every single one of us needs to, every day, in every way possible. Please don’t see this as just another fad that is going to pass, this needs MAJOR action from everyone of us.

Now that I’m back I’m considering what I intend to do in a wider community, global context. As part of CGI all members have to undertake a major commitment, myself included. I will keep you posted. Let me know if you want to be kept up to speed with what I decide to do that may require yours & everyone you knows involvement.

Below are a list of Clinton Global Initiative members that were present and are well known in their fields (in no particular order).

• President Bill Clinton
• Senator Hilary Clinton
• Chelsea Clinton
• Former Prime Minister Tony Blair
• Honorable Al Gore
• Sergey Brin - Google co-founder
• Chad Hurley and Steve Chen- founders of YouTube
• Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson
• King Albert of Monaco
• Carlos Slim Helu (now the richest man in the world, having overtaken Bill Gates last week)
• Ted Turner –CNN founder
• Rupert Murdoch
• Anne McKevitt
• Archbishop Desmond Tutu
• Steve Bing -Billionaire
• Gerry Adams
• Brad Pitt (Ladies, I spent 3 hours with Brad P, there were only 2 seats between us at the table!)
• Angelina Jolie (gents, yes she’s as gorgeous in real life)
• H. Lee Scott- CEO WalMart
• Jane Goodall - inspiration behind ‘Gorilla’s in the Mist’
• Donna Karan
• Robert Zoellick-President of the World Bank
• Michael Eisner-former CEO Disney
• Charles Crist - Governor of Florida
• Theodore Roosevelt IV
• Rev Jesse Jackson
• Morgan Freeman
• Andre Agassi
• Shakira
• Bianca Jagger
• Former President of Norway
• President of Columbia
• President of Iceland
• President of Ethiopia
• President of Afghanistan
• President of Philippines
• President of Argentina
• Prime Minister of Turkey
• Sultan Ahamed Al Jaber-Abu Dhabi
• Eduardo Braga -Governor of State of Amazonas, Brazil
• Honorable Hank Paulson-Secretary to the Treasury current Bush Adminstration
• Fareed Zakaria-Editor of Newsweek
• President of Dominican Republic
• Judy McGrath -CEO MTV
• Indra Nooyi-CEO Pepsi Co
• Tony Bennet
• Barbara Streisand
• J Craig Venter-man that broke the Genode Code

After a couple of days away from the office, I had expected yesterday to be relatively quiet.  But it actually proved to be surprisingly hectic.  I had a large number of client discussions to have, and also faced a morning at the Bristol School of Art where my stained glass term started.  A while back I spent a few days doing a stained glass window at Bath University, who had very good facilities, and I had decided that rather than working at home here with all the associated risks of tiny slivers of glass and dog paws, that you would book on to a course at a local college so that I could use their facilities on a regular basis.  It's a perfect arrangement, because it gives me access to extra equipment that I don't have to buy myself, and a workspace where I can leave my work between sessions without any risk to the dogs.

It occurred to me yesterday that I haven't actually either written about my previous stained-glass work, nor had I posted a picture to this blog -- so here it is!

 I'm actually rather pleased with it, and am now working on a slightly larger piece which is of huge orange, black, grey and white koi swimming on a turquoise blue and green background.  It's going to be a completely different challenge, because whereas in this piece every single line was a straight line, in the new piece, I've worked it so that there is not one single straight line in the entire design!  I'll try and upload some pictures as I go along!

Below is a picture of his first piece in progress, just so that all you doubting Thomases know that I did actually make it myself, with my own fair hands!

The seasons in the forest here are turning again.  After the wet, wet summer start we are now in full sun drenched summer.  I've seen the forest in three of its four seasons now and cannot wait for the fourth.  Not that I should have long to wait.  It's looming grey and wet again!

First we moved in during a winter of snow and ice.  We had so much snow we were literally snowed in the two to three days.  The little valley the village is in is between two forested hills, and looking down from the house onto the valley in the snow with twinkling orange street lights, and the smoke from the log fires (many people here are wood-burning for heating instead of having central heating) lying in the bottom of the valley like a great gray stream.

Then came spring, with acres of blue bluebells, white wood anenomes, and green fern fronds shooting up.  Plus the lambs, most of which are now gone.  Those that remain are as large as their mothers now, but the vast majority of them are, like those in my freezer, unfortunately long departed.  

Now summer, where the ferns are taller than I am and forest blackberries are starting to ripen.  There are thousands of hazelnuts, but the squirrels seem to be ravaging them fast -- which is a little annoying as they're not ripe yet, and the squirrels are only discarding them.  It seems as if the squirrels have to try and discard thousands of nuts just to see if they can find one right one.  The wild strawberries and wild raspberries in the woods I have been feasting on are just about over, which is a shame, and my secret supply of white strawberries (yes there are white ones which are very rare -- go and google them!) are gone for the year.  The barbecue on the deck season has begun, and the lamb is already tasting pretty good.  Amazingly succulent, and a freezer our size holds three lambs plus a bit of spare room for barbecue bits, hamburgers and the like.

When the lamb was delivered, we also asked that we get the bones of the dogs.  Which proved a bit of a mistake.  Every time the dogs were let out in the next week, they headed off down to the utility room next to the garage, and sat and waited to see if the meat fairy was going to come and open the Magic box of bones for them and feed them.  They've never had a freezer before, so don't really understand that the meat goes in fresh and comes out frozen!  They just see the milkman arrive with armfuls and armfuls of meat and put it into the Magic box, and then they get a load of bones and meat scraps.  I think they think the freezer's full of meat just for them. 

I'm eagerly awaiting autumn now when we can pick the apples from our trees -- four trees of different varieties plus a pear tree.  I work very long hours still, but in an environment where it doesn't seem so much like work -- in the beautiful forest.  The bed and breakfast? -- Forest of Dean tourists have been put off by an assumption that the forest is flooded (it wasn't) and as business has been slow, that's been fairly relaxing.  The dogs like visitors a little too much sometimes, and have a habit of sitting looking over the front wall for days after they depart, waiting to see if another lot will arrive.

Those of you who enjoy my blog might be pleased to know that I hope to blog more regularly.  Promises, promises I hear you say.  The thing is I have just bought a copy of dragon naturally speaking voice recognition software.  I have to say it does seem to be pretty good so far.  I've e-mailed people and warned them I'm going to be using it, and many people have actually responded that they have it and have tried using it already, but didn't find it much good.  I am taking the time and effort to train the system, and whenever I find a word that it persistently mis-spells, I just instantly record my own voice saying that word several times, and it seems to train the system and do the trick.  So possibly there will be more consistent blogging in future.

This past 2 weeks I've been out and about in the Forest a lot more with the dogs.  We now offer Bed & Breakfast in the Forest of Dean, and so I really want to get to know the woods a lot better, to be able to give great directions for walkers.  Plus once you get up into the Forest it becomes a little addictive....

The thing is, once you get just a little way into the Forest above the house, it's completely silent.  no road noise, nothing.  The hills and valleys are so covered with trees that between the ferns, trees and contours of the land all the road noise (or what little there is) is screened out.

I love the variety.  The Forest today isn't the same Forest of a month ago.   Then, everything was deep green on the ground, and with vast tracts of blue and white - bluebells that filled the air with perfume, and white wood anemones.  Now, everything is bright green.  The ferns are as tall as I am so almost 6 foot, and the colour splashes are PINK!  Pink rhododendrons, and large stands of foxgloves.  I wanted to pick some foxgloves for the lounge, but they're so huge and majestic, it just didn't seem right.  Rather like the lupins I planted in the garden - now they are all flowering it seems such a shame to cut them for the house!

There is a tall tree with a bees nest in along one path.  I like to watch the bees coming home in droves, and doing a little dance before they enter the hole in the trunk, high above the ground.  The noise is really very pleasant and soothing.  there are thousands of them so it must be a huge hive inside the tree.  Winnie the Pooh would have been up there after the honey...

And yesterday I rounded a corner on the path to find a huge deer standing in the way.She had her backside to me and looked at me over her shoulder for 20 seconds or more before crashing off into the trees in 4 giant bounds.  The dogs didn't even try to chase her.

I've now explored the whole stretch of Forest  above the house, and to venture further afield I'll have to cross a road.  The dogs are delighted that we go a different way each time, and they don't seem to care how much they know each path, every day they still love walking the same area.  They just seem to love the forest.

We have swallows nesting outside the living room window too, which is driving Gilly insane as they swoop at the window to get to the nesting site, and he keeps thinking they're going to fly in!  We also had a buzzard with a rabbit in it's claws fly over the house yesterday, which was a pretty impressive sight.  There's so much to see here, it's great to be able to offer guests in the B&B Forest of Dean wildlife as well as a decent night's sleep!

It is Spring here in the Forest, which means gardening in earnest. The builder who did the house planted everything with shrub bushes in blobs here and there, with tree bark in between.  Kind of a very sparse look but easy to maintain.  So having planted over 1000 bulbs for NEXT year (or at least having instructed Dad where to plant them...), it's time to put plants in for this year. I buy a car full a week to spread the cost and work. 

Spring also means sheep season.  For those of you imagining us surrounded by trees, it's not quite like that.  We are indeed surrounded by trees ON A MAP but you have to go about 1/4 mile up the hill from the house to get into Forest proper, or in any direction in the village, which is ultimately surrounded by trees.

This is old Royal Forest, which means it has been common land for hundreds of years. That means people have grazing rights.  Which means sheep.  Sheep look cute and country-ish when you're househunting.  There's a kind of "awww, how lovely" feeling having to drive slowly in case you round a corner and find them lying in the middle of the road.

Then Spring comes.

Lambing season.  You get a few days of cute lambs, little babies, looking idyllic by the side of the road. 

And then they grow up.

When the lambs get a little bigger, Mum brings them sightseeing.  They come down out of the Forest with it's scrubby grass and into the village for sweet juicy lawn grass.  You're grateful for the 5 barred gate on your drive as you watch them much their way past twice a day on their way down the hill in the morning, then up the hill in the afternoon.  They trim all the banks and front borders neatly, no need for cutting grass just yet.  They drive the dogs crazy (well they ARE sheepdogs!) but they get used to them eventually.  Regular emergency trips out from my office to herd sheep out of people's gardens when they leave the gate open during the day is becoming routine.

Then, the lambs get even bigger.  As in big enough to go walkabout on their own.  And then the fun starts.  A bass BAAAAAA!  (Mum calling lamb).  A shrill MAAAAAA!  (Lamb calling Mum).  About an octave apart and very sweet during the day, but as they munch back and forth at 3am every day it gets a little wearing.  I parked the car in front of the gate and a sheep hid behind it and we had nearly an hour of frantic BAAA - MAAA - BAAA MAAA back and forth at 3am.  

The house is built on a steep hill, in a kind of triangle of land.  The road passes the front door at the top, and the garage and drive are into the point of the V at the bottom.  We make a kind of sonar test ground for lamb-sheep sound distance tests.  Acoustics are even better at night as not only my office is at the front of the house but the master bedroom is at the front on the ground floor.  We have a small but lush bank of grass opposite the house on the other side of the road under our neighbours' wall.  One night last week I actually got up at 3.15 am and herded a lamb down the hill from right outside our en-suite window where it was miserably crying it's heart out in distress.  Mum was stood unsympathetically by the car bellowing at it to come and find her. 

I love the sheep, and love the rural life, but we're getting up later and later due to the nocturnal sheep noise.  Yesterday we drove to get groceries, and on the way back the lambs were springing.  Literally bouncing round the field on all 4 feet at once, as if they had springs on their feet.  The phrase gambolling lambs made sense.  Even had man Rud wanted to stop and watch, they were so funny and cute.  I guess the cuteness is worth it - I still go outside to watch the sheep and lambs go past, I just wish they'd go to bed at night - preferably somewhere  a bit further away.

We are now safely ensconsed in the new home in the Forest, and beautiful it is... cosy and warm and wonderful.  We bought huge leather sofas when we moved in which have proved invaluable.

I went into hospital on Wednesday for a routine op and they found adhesions between my stomach and liver which had to be removed, so I am feeling a little battered and bruised, so cosy and warm is good - especially as we are snowed in.  WhiteCroft from the living room windows is a picture postcard snowy village on a hill, with darkness bringing twinkling lights, and amber streetlights reflecting off the deep snow.

I'm awfully glad I got home on Thursday or I might not have gotten home for a few days because of the weather, and home is definitely where I want to be when I feel cruddy - stiff and sore.  My liquid-only diet for 4 weeks seems like a great idea right now with my tummy feeling sore.

The dogs love the snow, and the garden is full of pawprints and slither marks, so everyone seems happy. And Rud likes making me juices and smoothies and soups, and walking the dogs in the woods in the deep snow, so it's cosy hollow here for now!   Back to the sofa for me for a few days...

Oh, you mean the house we were buying in the woods...   Well after the apparently normal three months of slow torture that is house buying and selling in the UK, and three failed sales of our own house, we have actually bought a great house.  But not the one I wrote about.

This one is a five bedroomed house called Fairview bungalow.  Two stories and a garage beneath the house, so three really.  But called bungalow. Well, you just knew there would be something weird about it, didn't you?

It has a double garage for my bookshop, a huge room for Rud's studio, a wet room downstairs for the dogs when they've been frolicking in the woods, and is almost brand new.  Built by a builder and it's like a showhome inside!

Out the door, 300 yards up the road  and you're into the woods for the dogs.  Three pubs within walking distance.  One is a cider pub (YIPPEE!)

We've actually booked a removal van  which makes it seem pretty final that we're actually going at last...

Forest here we come... 

AND there's no Channel 5.  I'm not holding out any hope for cable TV!

Sorry Croydon, but you just don’t turn us on like you used to. We spent our holiday in Cornwall, on the beach and eating good fresh food in the clean air, and surfing for houses. We started in Gloucester, found the one we wanted, an old cottage, but the buyers accepted another offer (even though we offered full price!)

So we returned to dismal London to more nights surfing for houses. Rud found one. “Where’s Lydbrook?” he said. “In the middle of nowhere,” I said. “Look at this,” he said. And I did. A beautiful detached cottage, beams, cottage garden, and more or less the same price as this place we’re living in.

I explained about the big green area on the map being FOREST – the Forest of Dean in fact. Actually, if you want to be correct about it, the Royal Forest of Dean. “I like that one,” he said. I explained that it was a drive away from Gloucester and Bristol and not an ideal place for him and the studio and bands. “But I like that one,” he said. It was like a scene from Little Britain. We agreed that one was a bit too expensive, so he found another one. And we both wanted that one

We discussed living in the middle of nowhere. I called estate agents, and a week later we were still getting nowhere. The house we wanted – the buyers didn’t want to do any viewings. It had been on the market a year and nobody wanted it so they were taking it off the market. But WE wanted it. I called the estate agent every day to ask if she’d persuaded the sellers yet. At last we got a viewing time – just 24 hours before we hit the Forest of Dean to start viewing the places we’d lined up.

We saw a lot of houses. They were all, well, not right. Some were downright nasty. Some were dirty. One had a building site in front of it. One had dead wasps all round the lounge and woodlice in the bathroom. But we fell in love with the forest as we drove from house to house. The huge fern beds, the dappled light, the trees – and the clean air. The last house of the day was the one we wanted.

It was everything we wanted. Plus a lot of things that add character, but were somehow never in the master plan. I did, for one, assume we’d have central heating. And it did, but to me, central heating doesn’t involve chopping logs. And the organic garden sounded lovely, until I realised how great a responsibility it is – one wrong load of chemical on the garden and the whole ecosystem is shattered.

And the garden is, well… Huge. It’s more of a smallholding than a garden. 8 vegetable plots. Two lawn areas, one patio, a greenhouse two sheds… and a LOT of steps.

Rud of course is as happy as a sandboy. He gets to have his own axe. Maybe two. And at the price of logs it SOUNDS cheaper than gas... if slightly less convenient.

But the place is awesome. Wood flooring, wood windowsills, two wood floating staircases... Wod panelling in the dining room.. The biggest kitchen ever that runs the entire length of the house... with the log stove in it (of course).  We sat down and told the sellers we wanted it on the spot.

We visited the local pub and were made incredibly welcome. Within 10 minutes, we’d been told where to buy the best logs (of course, everybody visiting the village needs to know that, don’t they?) how to get fresh rabbits for £1 each (£2 gutted and skinned) and where to check out for a studio Rud can set up in.

By this time the logs were seriously worrying me. I am beginning to realise my fingernails and logs are not entirely compatible. I am suspicious about the seller’s pest control (“I talk to the slugs and tell them that if they leave the baby plants alone there’s be plenty for us all later in the year…”). The myth that you can get broadband in the village is still just a myth. As in UNCONFIRMED.  But it does have a beautiful conservatory (wood of course).  And it's own waterfall.

And there’s no mobile reception in the house. Apparently we can get one if we convert to Vodafone. They think. And the village floods but we don’t apparently. Hmm. This is going to mean a serious lifestyle change.

Two days later, offer all accepted, we take my parents to see the house. My Dad falls in love with it. We discover the river runs past the bottom of the road. Rid wants a kayak. A kayak. But of course… Do you think you can buy them on ebay? I think Mum likes it too but I suspect the logs are preying on her mind as well The logs are SERIOUSLY worrying me. Rud is complaining I am dreaming about logs and talking to him about them in my sleep. When he doesn’t answer I nudge him and say ”Are you listening?” In my sleep. Those logs are really getting to me…

The dogs will love it. They have their own small field at the top of the garden, and a right of way out into the fields at the back to the forest.We’re only 2 miles from the top of the garden as the crow flies to Symonds Yat. Opposite the house is the path into the woods. Just past the log pile outside the front gate. 

From the top of the garden all you can see of the house is a little roof off in the distance!
So we come back to London to sell our place as fast as we can so we can move.