Gentle Whispers

Over the last two days, I've slept for a grand total of 7 hours and therefore, I am now finding it extremely difficult to concentrate on the mountain of files piled on my desk and screaming to be dealt with. Instead, I am overwhelmed by the urge to blog, but what about, I wasn't too sure, my writing muse having last been seen cackling madly and disappearing away into the sunset. When in such dire straits, what else is there to do but take up one of the millions of tags floating around the Internet. So without much further ado, here we go: 1. What have you realized recently? That I am not the model of perfection I always thought I was and some changes might be in order.  2. Have you given your first kiss away? I'm not one to kiss and tell. Well, not on public forums anyway.  3. If you were to be stranded on a deserted island, who are the 5 blog buddies you would take? Ahem, hard choices, but fine, The Mad Momma , Una Madridista , Not Quite Nigella , Y...

I've been wanting to blog about my recent interest in baking for a while, well if you can call three years recent, that is. But I've always wanted to talk about the joy that baking brings me and how much I enjoy it. The calories, not so much. By nature, I am a rather random person. I don't function very well when neatness and precision is necessary. I like to think of myself as a big-picture person. Not for me the analysing of every detail and the nitpicking and the perfectionism. But it is precisely this side of me that baking, the exacting science that it is, challenges and I actually revel in it. There's something about creaming exactly 100 gms of butter with 50 grams of sugar and mixing in 300 gms of flour. Measuring, measuring, measuring, beating, whipping to create a cake that is so much more than the sum of its disparate parts. The exacting nature of baking allows me to put my vagaries aside and focus with a 100% on the job at hand that pleases me. For someo...

This was originally supposed to be a list of resolutions for 2016, but I think I'd rather make this about the year that was. In the last few years, the years have been in a pattern of peaks and troughs. 2012 was great, 2013 sucked, 2014 was lovely and so on... But 2015 really, it's hard to put it into words. If 2015 were a colour though, i'd pick blue. Sometimes turquoise, sometimes indigo, ever so often a bright vivid cerulean and rarely azure, but mostly, mostly it was just plain blue. I'd love to spill it all out here, the reasons, the anxiety, the sadness, the emptiness, but I can't. Not while people I know still read. Not while I still feel too vulnerable to deal with questions and comments and criticism. More than ever now, I wish I'd left this blog anonymous. But maybe some of it, yes? In 2015, so many life changes have happened around me, to the people closest to me, to those around me - jobs that necessitated moving out of the city...