December was a realisation of a dream……I took the month off to travel and research and read plays. Fantastic!
I have started writing HUMANS 4 as well as writing material for Simon Darlow and I to work on.
In the second week of December I ended up in Rock and Padstow, in Cornwall, with my sister, where we spent our childhood holidays. The Willcox family had a prefab bungalow in Rock when I was barely three years old and I remember my mother pushing two armchairs together in the very small living room, for my bed each night.
The memory of our yearly holidays is as clear as a bell. The primitive but stunningly beautiful roads with deep hedges covered in yellow snails, the rock pools that inspired the artist Barbara Hepworth and the vast moving expanse of Estuary water moving with the pull of the moon constantly.
The prefab is no longer there but I remembered the road and the incline down to the beach and the ferry from Rock over to Padstow.
My sister and I walked for miles each day. Finding hidden harbours and secret valleys….especially secret in December…..not so in the summer!
This year I am travelling a lot.
In the next six weeks I am in Antigua, France, Seattle, only coming home for the concerts.
Later in the year I am in the USA for parts of November and most of December.
It’s really exciting to know my feet will hardly touch the ground.
One of the weirdest phone calls I had this December was asking me to fly to Beijing with 10 hours notice to sing at Miss World. I was on standby because of an artist being taken ill…luckily I didn’t need to go over, as exciting as it would have been ten hours notice wasn’t enough time to prepare to sing on a stage surrounded by the most beautiful women in the world…..I would have needed a month to get ready for such a challenge.
It has been a FABULOUS two weeks. My sweet hubby was home. We had a lot of time together and a lot of time with good friends.
My Christmas was tee-total and sugar free. This wasn’t at all hard, I just made sure nothing tempting was in the house, but we still had one of the best Christmas lunches in years……Salmon En Croute, Dressed Crab, Roast veg and lots of Stuffings…….Robert is mad about sage and onion stuffing!
I am now half a stone lighter and pray I can keep the weight off, but as soon as I start gigging again I know the dressing room will be full of chocolate as the band insist it is on their rider. One way of dealing with this is hiding all the offending goodies in Wongs bag and telling him to lock it out of sight.
Now Christmas is over I am ready for the madness of 2016. There is only so much sanity one can take.
Christmas was one of the best, probably the first where I wasn’t in a “silence of grief”, thinking about my parents not being around. Perhaps time has lessened that pain.
Every pressie I received was perfect!
Lots of books, brilliantly chosen by Robert, one of the most surprising is a history of Durham Cathedral. I love Durham, it has an atmosphere like no other and every time I walk into the Cathedral I am in tears, it is so vibrant with energy, the right kind of energy, the energy of a community in harmony. Trevor Horn, the producer, is from Durham and he loves the Cathedral too, it is his favourite building and I think he sang there as a boy. I was on a show with Trevor a couple of years ago and all we talked about was how “elated” we felt when we walked into the Cathedral.
Every Year Robert and I make a pilgrimage there to pray at the shrine of St. Cuthbert to help bring healing to all our friends fighting the big C.
I would love to sit and write there all day but it is no secret about the healing power of St. Cuthbert and many people pass through each hour praying for a miracle, which makes me kind of not want to be greedy and take up too much space.
So far our prayers have been answered.
Another well-chosen gift from Robert was an entire collection of Sophia Loren movies, in Italian and in English. My god that women is a goddess like no other…such intelligence and beauty…I am a fan.
For Robert….. I bought him everything I saw him looking at in shops over the year.
My husband has a habit of returning to certain shops again and again and just staring at and holding items he likes and not buying them when you can tell he really really wants them. So I went back to all these shops and luckily his besotted items where all still available and I GOT THEM!
He was so surprised on Christmas morning….pressie after pressie of things I had spied him coveting….TEE HEE.
Now I am off to France to work on the new acoustic show starting in February. I have been searching for rare photos and strange stories from my past to regale the audience with.
I wish you all a HAPPY NEW YEAR AND A WONDERFUL 2016. See you out there.
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Every pressie I received was perfect!