Melting snow and melting down

Wow, who was I trying to kid that I'd have time to work on my cover letter this month?? We've been trying to move from our old house into our new (temporary) place, navigating through snow and ice and sorting our accumulated belongings into various piles, all the while attempting to keep tears / arguments / confusion / meltdowns and hair-tearing episodes to a minimum...sometimes winning, but quite often not. We had one of those nights last night when all the children were in hysterics about something different, none of them wanted to go to bed, and clearly they were sensing my need to get them there and open a bottle of wine as their resistance to the land of nod was at an all time high!

It's an unsettling time for the children, and I know I need to be sensitive to this. No amount of promises of seeing baby elephants and keeping chickens in Kenya (yes really, this would be my eldest's dream come true) will detract from the fact that the landscape of the world as they know it is in the process of dramatically changing. Children are incredible the way they live in the present moment and yet, the walls of security and comfort that they pencil around themselves are held up by their parents and if they see their parents in a flap - which I have been recently, more than I would have liked - then these walls wobble a little, and these insecurities are played out in feuding and words rashly spoken. Honestly, I'm not saying my kids don't ever fight, but this past week has been ridiculous.

So, back to my cover letter. Hmmm. At least I could reap the benefit of a past creative endeavour this week by a very short piece of work going up on a the flash fiction website, London Lit Project. The idea is that you write a vignette in exactly 60 words, focussing on a particular place in London at an exact time. I love the micro-detail of this, and since I'm starting to think about the next novel (which I'll write in Kenya, yes indeed, if it's the last thing I do!), the piece I wrote was inspired by an element of the novel. I also took the picture (same picture as above) and was pleased with how it turned out. It was one of those bitterly cold days, so freezing that I could hardly bear to take my hands from my gloves for fear of frostbite, but I did finally coax them out and took the picture of the bridge leading over to the Eel Pie Island, an infamous Twickenham landmark. Click here to have a read of my words.