This coming weekend is Mother’s Day, or Mothering Sunday as we used to call it when I was a little girl, a day which I know can be very difficult for those of you who no longer have your mum. I feel incredibly lucky to still have mine, pictured with me above on her ninetieth birthday. She was born the same year as the Queen so will be ninety-five in August and I have to say I think she looks amazing – nothing to do with her being my mum! She is very ‘upright’ which comes from years of teaching ballet I think, and she is still as sharp as a pin. I can’t wait until the lockdown travel restrictions ease and we’re allowed to go and visit her.
While on the subject of mothers, I tweeted about My Mother’s Secret earlier in the week posing the question, ‘Does your mother have a secret?.. Are you sure?’ I guess the follow-on question to that would be, ‘Would you want to know?’ The point being that some secrets are best left as exactly that… secret. These lovely photos were taken by my son’s girlfriend, Katie and I can’t decide which I like better – any thoughts?
Speaking of Katie, it was her birthday on Tuesday, but the celebrations began last Saturday with Taskmaster via Zoom with five other couples. Both Katie and my son, Dan absolutely love the TV show, but if you haven’t seen it the ‘Taskmaster’ asks celebrities to perform a series of tasks, some of which are quite silly to be honest, for which they get awarded points. It does require a certain amount of thinking outside of the box, although one of the rounds that Katie and Dan won had them thinking inside the box … the task was to pile as many books as possible onto a plate in a limited time. Instead of making a pile of individual books and hoping it wouldn’t topple, they grabbed two boxes of Alice in Theatreland books which I have ready to send off to the competition winners, totalling forty-eight books!! Needless to say, they won that particular task. In the end, the winner was decided with a tie-breaker; they had to balance as many of a particular item of their choice on their faces while standing on one leg. I’m not saying that Prosecco had affected Katie’s choice, but DVDs weren’t the best option. The winner chose peppercorns which he poured into his closed eye – great idea, although I think it was stinging a bit afterwards.
Back to the ‘Alice’ competition winners for a moment – the first twenty have been notified and will have their signed books sent out early next week. The picture is another Katie ‘special’ – I like the way she has used the shoes as bookends. You still have two more opportunities to win signed copies by signing up to receive my free newsletter before the next one is due out on Thursday and then answering the simple question based on quotes from Alice in Wonderland.
That appropriately leads me into Katie’s actual birthday on Tuesday. Dan had asked me if it would be possible to set up an ‘Afternoon Tea Party’ as that was Katie’s usual birthday treat to do with her mum. It wasn’t as ‘mad’ as the one in Alice in Wonderland, but it was certainly pretty crazy setting it all up. Monday evening and Tuesday afternoon were devoted to baking cheese scones, fruit scones, broccoli and walnut quiche, jam tarts and chocolate cupcakes, as well as putting up some decorations.
I’d also ordered some macarons and had this cake made by the lady who does my book launch party cakes. We even had cucumber sandwiches in homemade bread which were surprisingly good.
Katie and Dan posed beautifully for the photo above, but to be honest I prefer the one below of them doing a selfie. No wonder their selfies are so good when mine are so rubbish, it’s clearly all down to the length of your arms!!
So, all in all a very busy week into which I squeezed another hospital appointment and a further eight thousand words for my next book. I did have to have my deadline extended to later this month, but better it is right than just ‘done’!
That’s all from me for now, see you next week
Much love
Julia xx
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