A week off work in which I have no especial plans: part 1

I have a week off work this week; Mr W is at work having used up all of his holidays. As we have used up all of our money and motivation for doing things I am spending the week at home. It's sadly not going to be a "holiday from home", aka WW2 style where one goes out on picnics (it's certainly not picnic weather here today - gale force winds!), but I thought I'd share some of what I am getting up to.

Let's start with the weekend. I had a bit of a flu bug which left me feeling a bit rubbish, but meant that Mr W was prepared to indulge me by letting me watch the first episode of the new series of Don't tell the bride AND Outnumbered on the same evening (both programmes he secretly enjoys but only pretends to tolerate). We planned to go to the cinema on Saturday but the feeling that my head was about to explode led us to postpone it for Sunday. The film was Beautiful Lies, which we saw because it featured Audrey Tatou and was billed as being something akin to Amelie which is one of Mr W's favourite films. It wasn't really like Amelie, not nearly as good, but it was quirky and held our attention, and it was so nice to go out together.

Mr W did an awful lot of DIY, putting up SHELVES in the front room - yes, that was what the weird art installation is. As part of my Monday's task is to fill them up, I shall show you them properly in my next post.

I did some cooking - nectarine and banana crumbles, pear and chocolate pudding, and the highlight for Mr W - scotch pancakes for breakfast. Sadly I forgot to photograph any of them :( Sad as I used beautiful new Le Creuset dishes which were a wedding present from my friend Claire for the crumbles. Oh well, I'll have to make them again.

I also did some reading. It's been a while since I've read a book that reduced me to tears, but The making of us, by Lisa Jewell did just that. Mr W said that he could tell from the back of the book that it wasn't going to have a happy ending, but I'd picked it up on the basis that it was a Lisa Jewell book, I'd enjoyed her other books, and I hadn't read this one. It's a story about sperm donation, and about 3 adults who were conceived by sperm donation who find each other, and also a story about the man who donated their sperm, who is now dying in a hospice. Of course, this is very cleverly built up, we meet the four individuals first, Robyn who is training to be a Dr, Lydia who has amassed a fortune through inventing a special paint compound, and Dean who has just lost his girlfriend when she gave birth to their baby. I found the hospice scenes very hard to take; it is almost exactly a year since Mr W's stepfather went into a hospice to die. Mr W's mother handled the situation with amazing dignity; as Mr W is older than me and convinced that he will die first, I often wonder if I would manage to handle the situation with the same courage. How hard must it be to deal with something so hard when the very person you want there to support you isn't able to? Needless to say I sobbed and sobbed when I got to the end of this book.

Anyway, enough of being sad - I have plenty of things to get on with today so it is time to resume action after my little sit down.