Thoughts on my summer
We head towards the end of a lovely summer – though hopefully the sunshine will continue in September – which was such a gift after the miserably late spring. Although I have sadly not spent much time in the garden this year, I have harvested the blueberries and am enjoying checking the courgettes (zucchini) daily as they grow so quickly once the shoot appears. My strawberries would have been great if the birds hadn’t reached most of them before I got hold of some suitable netting but I am all prepared for next year now. It will soon be time to erect my little portable greenhouse and next summer I’ll keep it standing so that I can return to growing the chilli peppers which my sons like using in their cooking.
I did more work in August than I could have imagined and still have personal and business items on my To Do List. Two of my clients took their holidays in July so I ended up tackling more of their work this month as well as tasks for my own business. The fact that the school was away on summer holidays meant I could also devote some quality time to working on some projects for a charity, particularly writing the Trustees’ annual report, filing the return with the Charity Commission and approaching some grant-making Trusts for further funding. The school finally became an Academy on 1 August; of course we were all away but the changes will start to make themselves evident next week when term starts and we have a completely new governance structure to work with and plan for.
The holidays gave me time to read some crime novels, which are my downtime treat. John Grisham has an amazing output; he always enables me to find a book to relax with and then pass on to friends and this summer I enjoyed The Racketeer. When visiting my mother in Hampshire I also invested in a couple of P D James novels from a charity shop. Death Comes to Pemberley (her sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) was particularly riveting and just after I finished it I learned that a TV dramatisation is expected so I’ll be watching out for that.
Suddenly the evenings are shorter and we are all gearing ourselves up for a busy autumn and chasing that elusive work/life balance…
