Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love –
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you’re a lucky girl.

But if it shouldn’t, then
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.
In fact, may you be dull –
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

All those formative years of sharpened pencils and shiny shoes at the start of September have left me feeling all new-yeary now, as the mornings develop a nip (is it too soon for a winter duvet?) and the alarm is once again pressed into service after 6 blissful weeks of getting up when we wake up. Or not, if you are a baby who wakes around 6, in which case you are ignored until a more seemly hour. It’s ok to get up at dawn if you can slope back off to bed around 9.

I am toying with re-starting the blog; the trouble with not being excitingly ex-pat with every day an adventure is there is little to write about. And, you know, blogs have moved on: people have facebook. The world is full of mummy blogs and frankly they are all a million times more interesting than my got up, got the kids up, loaded the dishwasher had a lovely coffee mundanity. We will see. But Max does have a new adventure, which is probably nothing to do with his having recently turned 40, and a new blog to boot: he is newly expat in Kyrgyzstan, which reminds me I really must find a map and work out where the hell that is: I visualise steppes and camels and things but am almost certainly wrong.