A year on, and this time last year, that playlist was back in my head, being replayed on almost constant repeat on my iPod. Once again, it was the soundtrack to my life, and it was inspiring me. I remember one weekend afternoon/evening when Emma got called out work, I was working on Mr Tumnal in the garden under the shade of the umbrella and listening to my 2012 playlist on headphones and I was in the zone… and I didn’t realise that all around me there was the most torrential rain and a thunderstorm raging!

That was exactly a year ago today; the day that I put my last pen mark to Mr Tumnal’s story. Another year on, and I have a yearning to listen to that music again. In the intervening year, I have read, re-read, had-read, redrafted, edited, and had-edited my novel, and submitted it to publisher’s. No wonder then, that I am now getting itchy fingers to start writing again.

I’m not entirely sure that writing was quite the thing that Locog had in mind when they coined the Inspire a generation slogan, but hey, if it works! I wonder if every July will demand this music to be played?

Saturday afternoon was definitely hibernating weather and I tucked myself up with my book: Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper by Charles Butler. I actually bought this book when it came out back in 2006 but struggled then to read it’s selection of discursive essays on four of my most-favourite authors. Yesterday I was romping through its pages, and today, I have been doing the same.

I paused from my reading only in the afternoon to luxuriate in one of my annual pre-Christmas traditions: the making of the Christmas cake. Stir-up Sunday should actually be next Sunday being the one closest to my Mum’s birthday but we will be otherwise busy next weekend so I brought it forward. In the Shepherd household, it was always a family thing. My Dad would line and grease the cake tin with baking parchment and newspaper and make its little newspaper hat already for the four hours in the oven, and my brother and I would help my Mum get the ingredients all ready and ready to add into the BIG mixing bowl. And we’d listen to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker whilst we did so.

In the new-Shepherd household we seem to have a different tradition, one that we observed today.

I set my LP of The Nutcracker playing on the record player and prepped and made the Christmas cake whilst Emma snoozed into the afternoon, and then I returned to reading in the armchair whilst the delicious aroma of Christmas wafted out of the kitchen as the cake cooked…