I feel lucky today

I can't help feeling lucky today, after a wonderful weekend that actually, unusually for me, included lots of free time! I started the Bank Holiday weekend off by assessing the weather and then making a mad dash to the local garden centre for some necessary accouterments for my plan...plant as many seeds as possible and grow as much veg as I can this year! This follows last year's plan which was to start eating seasonally and more locally. I did well for six months of the year, then succumbed to some processed non-local junk...but I'm back on track and have been utterly inspired by Barbara Kingsolver's recent account of her family's one year trial of living sustainably: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Not having land in Virginia, nor the botany know-how, I'm starting smaller with some big pots and troughs of veg out in my gravelly but very sunny garden. Saturday's planting included: strawberries, radish, carrots, leeks, and...sweet corn! Courgettes and perhaps other things will follow soon. I'm so excited by the prospect of little green shoots I'm spending too much time staring out my window at the very soggy organic mud created in the pots by yesterday's downpour (will the seedlings survive?)

I finished my fantastic Saturday by volunteering to be a guinea pig for my friend's Indian Head Massage practice and wow was it an amazing massage. By the end of Saturday I realised that my feet have firmly rooted themselves back on UK ground. Jet lag drifting away...

Today I'm back at work, no matter that it's bank holiday. So far I've spent the whole morning reading student papers and after a few hours of this, when I tore myself away for a coffee break, I realised how filled up I feel right now. Lucky to be here. Lucky the sun is shining, if even for a few minutes today, lucky that the papers have been absolutely brilliant reading today and hence lucky I have such great students. Everything seems a bit rosy, and hey, why not! It's a rarely great feeling, this. And maybe it's because we're in my favourite month now, the lusty month of May. This deserves a song, and no one can sing The Lusty Month of May like Vanessa Redgrave, here you go...enjoy!