delight and diligence

I have come down to Bunbury to spend study week with my grandparents. So I am writing from the living room, with the hum of conversation in the background, and a soft trundling buzz of gentle busyness around me. Oumie is making a pie for dinner and Oupa is collecting our wine glasses to refill them. I can hear the sound of clinking glasses, chopping potatoes, and general kitchen rustling.
Its not a very cold evening. There is something about an intense cold that really enchants me, in a way nothing else does. its almost romantic. Maybe there is something in the action of making yourself warm. or maybe its the trappings of winter that I adore. the scarfs and cardigans. the mulled wine and tea and roasts. But its not just those things. they are.... ancillary. additions. things that result from the causative factor. its.... something deeper. something at the core of winter. maybe its just a divine amalgamation of all the chilly delights. but whatever it is, it burrows right into my heart, and i am in a perrenial state of enchantment.

oumie just said, sipping her wine - 'red wine is very good for colds.' she has the most beautiful ideas about wine. she says its all about 'ambiance'. she says 'you just dont have the same ambience when you have conversations over tea'.

oumie has a bit of an obsession for candles. its so sweet. so the house is filled with different lovely scented candles. oumie loves to create a lovely atmopshere.
every morning oumie and oupa wake slowly to classical music, and get out of bed at 6. they sit together in their dressing gowns, plodding and floating around in slippered feet. they have a pot of earl grey tea, and light a scented candle, and watch the sun from the big glass window.

its such a beautiful and inviting environment. I love being here. It gives me so much, nurtures me so much.

anyway, this is a very tangential way of talking about my study week. a bit of scenery detail is never wasted or superfluous in my opinion.

so here I am, for study week. and I often come here to study. it just seems to work so well in so many ways. to have such a clear and definitive change in environment, to signal the start of the week. to invoke and inspire the understanding that this is the week. sometimes a big shift is needed to bring about that change in attitude. it is also an environment that is conducive to diligence. its quiet - unlike my home which is charmingly cacophonous.

most of the time I feel so erratic, so inherently without structure. which i love. but sometimes I crave routine. sometimes, i celebrate some structure to frame my frenzy. Its interesting to know that i have a big capacity for diligence, and commitment. its interesting to reflect on my spectrum of capacities.

my routine is quite strict here. I am up at 6, and i stumble bleary eyed to the kettle to make very strong black coffee, and then off i go to study, and i dont stop (apart from little hobbit breaks for breakfast and second breakfast and sporadic teas) until lunch which we all sit down for, for an hour. and then steady study again until 5, when i go for a run.

i go running along the eaton riverside, which is one of my favourite places. I wrote a poem about it actually which i think is on this blog somewhere.

and then its time for wine, and conversation, and dinner, and then tea and shortbread.

so this is my week. seeking and celebrating structure and diligence. in a delightful environment.