It’s a lovely time of year in the Northern hemisphere now… Spring has definitely arrived in the UK, with warm temperatures and blossom everywhere! And Easter is just around the corner, with its promise of eggs and bunnies.

I know some schools have already broken up, but my teenagers don’t break for the Easter Holidays until Friday, so this week is the week I’ve begun making tentative plans for what they (and I) can do over the break.

1. Visit a Big House. We belong to the National Trust and I love visiting the large homes of yesteryear. Seeing the glory that was every day life to families not too dissimilar from the Crawley family of Downton Abbey and the hard labour that was the lot of the servants down below is a happy reminder that we live, hopefully, in better times. I’m thinking we’ll visit Erddig this Easter. It’s years since we’ve been, it has a secondhand bookshop for the bibliophiles and a cracking upstairs/downstairs exhibition about the people who have lived and worked there for generations.
2. Walk Along A Beach. It’s a long time until July or August when, hopefully, we’ll have a holiday next to a beach, so I fully intend finding a place with sand and water to stand and look out over. Living on the West coast of England, it’s always fun to visit the sea later in the day, when the sun is setting and we can catch a crazy sunset, hopefully. Our nearest beach has the advantage of being Crosby Beach, home to the art work, Another Place by Antony Gormley.  Although th ebeach itself is useless for sunbathing and sandcastles, the presence of these men looking out to sea makes for some fun for teenagers posing with them. 
3. Decorate. Sadly, my house needs the kitchen painting. It’s only a small room but is there seriously another room as difficult to decorate? Apart from the fact that every inch is covered with useful stuff that needs moving everytime you want to do something, there’s the fact that the room is one that’s so difficult to manage without. Either you have to break off from decorating to make meals, or all meals are eaten made by the local chippie. I have the Thursday before Easter pencilled in for this task, and I plan to listen to a book on Audible as I work. I’m wavering between Closed Casket, the latest Poirot novel, or Mount! which is Jilly Cooper’s Horseracing latest. I expect it depends whether I think there’s much chance of the kids coming in during any embarrassing scenes… And by the end of the weekend my kitchen will look like this….. in my dreams!
4. Organise our DVDs. We are big film buffs, and we have DVDs everywhere. I’m hoping that the promise of chips for lunch one day may be enough to encourage a little bit of alphabetising tidying to go on. I’m also looking into ideas for what to do with the DVDs we’re finished with.
5. Just hanging around the garden. I’m writing my book on Summerhygge, and I am loving being reminded of how much fun it is to just be in the garden and do nothing. I haven’t made it out to tidy up the lounge area yet, so I’m hoping that this holiday we can grab some time and a green bin and clear the leaves etc from there. That’ll leave it nice and clear ready for us to enjoy some top summer hygge together!

So, there’s the (short) list of my plans for the next few weeks. What are you up to? Have you got anything good planned for Easter? Between my book writing and house decorating, my time will be very stretched, but I’d love to see what you have planned.

Don’t forget you can join in my book tour, details on the Book Tour post from Monday, and that copies of my book are available in Paperback and Kindle version from Amazon.  If you purchase through the links on this page, I get a couple of pence extra per copy.

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