August has arrived and the time has come for me to down tools and take my annual month long holiday away from BrocanteHome.

As you know the past twelve months have been uniquely horrible for me and though I am doing my absolute best to keep going, if I’m totally honest, I’m exhausted and my focus has gone astray as I try to stitch life back together and prepare Finley for university in September.

So as I do every year, I am going to say goodbye for a few weeks, so that I can make the most of my Finn, while he is still here, give the house a thorough shake up so that it feels like somewhere to enjoy again, sort the garden out (the gardener I had fell over drunk and smashed his face up!), focus on my weight loss (47 pounds now and counting1) and generally give myself space to heal and manage all the problems caused by Ste’s leaving.

So many of you have emailed me to ask how he is, and I’m so grateful that as well as caring for me, you also have such empathy for him. The answer is that I don’t really know how he is. We have limited email contact about the simple formalities of the break up and he seems to be just getting through the days. I have not seen him, nor heard his voice since he left and though my heart goes out to him, my worries here are such that I can no longer afford to be overwhelmed with grief for what was and really could never have been, and I need to make sure that I am giving my all to steadying the ship here, loving my family while they need me, improving my own wellbeing and opening my rather battered heart up to the possibility of another relationship.

BrocanteHome has been the mainstay of my life for nearly eighteen years now and oh how I love it. But I am not just a blogger, I am also a business owner and between the pandemic and my personal problems, the site has taken a battering that I need time to assess and address if it is going to be possible to keep it alive in its current form. As a society we simply interact with all that is online differently to how we used to even five years ago, and I know that I need to examine the content I currently create if I am going to take BrocanteHome in to the future.

So yes… I will be back in September. I am going to take Finn on day trips in our little She-Shed, get my hair done, attend a wedding, spend a while with my Dad, give the house a thorough top-to-bottoming, run my legs off on the treadmill, take long walks up hills and through forests, plan for Brocante, study my accounts, go for coffee with friends new and old, pack up everything Finn needs to move ten minutes down the road and carry on pampering my way to wellness so that never again do I feel quite as awful as I did just a few months ago.

I truly hope you have the loveliest of Augusts too, and I will see you in September.