I’ve discovered that listening to worship music while I revise is actually really useful. I used to avoid it cause the lyrics would distract me but this exam season it’s help to subdue my panic during revision and is actually really comforting and nice to listen to while revising. It makes me happy :)

Been thinking about my childhood a fair amount today, after discovering that there are now copies available of my favourite childhood book. All used copies, but it’s a bonus. There’s a specific spell involving a willow tree and it got me thinking about… well, trees actually. But specifically the trees lining Elgar Avenue, the avenue that my grandparents lived near when I was young (I always thought the name suited my grandparents too). The road was full of small Victorian houses and the trees were all fairly close together and would blossom in the springtime. It was pretty lovely driving down a road of dense blossomy trees :)

My nan’s garden was nice too. My grampa was one of those people who took a huge amount of pride in his garden and it’s something my nan continued after his passing. It was a long thin garden and, ‘cause it was on a corner, triangular. One of the nearby neighbours had a tree adjoining that bottom corner, so it was always dark down the bottom of the garden. Cue adventure. I loved exploring down there. There were always spiders and ants and things, I liked bugs (unless they were in my room). My nan disliked the cobwebs I would acquire searching for bugs behind the shed. All sorts of other things would ‘live’ down there in my imagination too. Usually monsters. In actuality, there might have been a wasps’ nest down there. There were also cracks in the paving slabs and a tree with long roots that I would occasionally trip over - obvious booby traps set by those monsters. But there were also fairies and gnomes (living in the flowerpots) and things, so it wasn’t all bad. (Incidentally, evil things also lived in the alleyway to my nan’s garage, where I was told not to go because they were afraid I’d knock over my uncle’s attempt at vegetable growing. Witches lived down there, with all those herbs used in their cauldrons. But anyway…)

My nan also had an ornamental wishing-well water feature, which added to the ‘magic’ of the garden. I did genuinely believe that garden had magical properties. My uncle once tried to lower me head-first into that well. But that’s another story.

Anyway, that’s my rambling over really.