So I find myself nearly at the end of my first week back at work after a much enjoyed and much needed bit of R&R.My news feed, and now yours by association is full of exciting honeymoon memories from the Deep South 5 years ago and even though I’ve just eaten a whole small wheel of brie on a jacket potato ( I really have), I find myself craving beignets and gumbo and red beans and rice.

I am a person that needs things to look forward to, tangible things, to get me through the tedium of a job I don’t much like and the day to day routine that comes with it. Typically in the early days of Joyless January, where your bank account is screwed and you’re in the middle of a juice cleanse, this used to take the form of booking a holiday.

We’ve been looking at flights for our next trip to France but can’t really confirm anything until after hubs has some meetings in Paris in about 10 days time, project sign off dates and the like, so my mind is all over the place and it needs some focus.

I got some lovely gardening and garden design books for Christmas, so I’m very much looking forward to trying to map out the garden as it stands, to some sort of scale on our next trip so I can use it to plan the structure I’d like it to take. This has thrown up such questions as, will Amazon France be able to deliver a trundle wheel? And, when was the last time you ever thought about a trundle wheel?

Brings back memories of pointlessly dragging one through the mud on the school field, or using it to measure how far your egg in it’s egg-box rocket had managed to travel without breaking.

I wonder if this sort of science based shenanigans prompted Dr Brian Cox to write “things can only get better” with D:ream?

There you see, mind gone off on a tangent again.

Day 5 of the no meat regime, currently not missing it at all, although last nights tea was not great. Usually I trust Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipes implicitly, they are some of my favourites, but I should have not put 2 whole heads of garlic into the pearl barley risotto, never mind what the recipe said!

Hastily purchases a Costco sized pack of Tic-tacs from petrol station on the way to work.

My “citrus-zinger” waterbottle (with a little compartment for popping in your fruit of choice in the bottom” has garnered many oohs and aahs from work colleagues this week. It’s currently just leaking a gentle trickle of lemony limey smugness tinged water onto my desk….. Anything that helps me drink 3 of these damned things a day I’ll take as a win.

Still it’s the weekend! This particular weekend means the annual wrestling match with a desiccated spruce tree and taking down the remaining decorations, without an overly interested bulldog running off with anything made of felt.

But hey, soon be Easter….

TTFN xx