On a Rainy Day In November

I am home from a walk through a dove grey drizzly day. My cheeks pink and wet.
Now there is a towel, warm from the radiator, wrapped around my hair and silly socks on my feet. The house is warm and twinkly with tea-lights hidden in a little collection of sugar bowls and milk jugs on the mantlepiece, and a Lego castle I dare not touch gracing the rug, though its architect is away doing his rather wonderful impression of the Ghost of Christmas Past in his much adored drama class.
I have nothing to do today. It is the first Saturday in a long time that feels all mine. That feels like the Saturdays I used to know and treasure. So I’m going to read. I’m going to finish the trashy (but delicious!) Liverpool novel I finally had to put down at two o’clock this morning for fear of waking up with the words printed on my face, and I’m going to start reading Backwards in High Heels because it is has been sitting looking pretty and utterly ignored on my bedside for a Brocante lifetime now, and I really do need some pointers on the route to the rather impossible art of being female…
In between there will be the Guardian Family Section and the Telegraph magazine, the latest issue of Country Living UK (resplendant with some scrumptiously pretty ideas for Christmas), bacon with honey mustard on the little white rolls I baked this morning, David Gray on the ipod and maybe even a little Dido if I truly feel  like metamorphing into a thirty something cliche…
Later there will be Richard. Standing in my kitchen stirring flaky chocolate into warm milk for the best hot chocolate in the world. A pile of quilts on the sofa. Fairylights piled in the redundant fireplace. Tangerine skins abandoned on polka dot saucers and red wine in cheap glasses because I cannot be trusted with anything precious.
Yes. It feels like all the Saturdays of yesterday. Only better. Oh what it is to be happy.