Lots of studying

'Sometimes I sits and thinks; sometimes I just sits,' demonstrated here by Jeremy Fisher at Tatton Park

I'm now on to week three of my FutureLearn course, and it's proving very interesting. It is aimed at complete beginners, so some of what we've covered is stuff I already knew, but it never hurts to be reminded.

We have looked at some useful ways to get started on a story - for instance, writing 'Emily said that', and then putting down two or three sentences. Take out 'Emily said that', and you have the beginnings of something. Another suggestion is to begin with 'I remember...' and simply see what comes to mind. Final exercise of last week was to put the radio on and take whatever I heard first as the starting point for a 500-word story. I got a snippet from The Archers: look out for a novel about pig-farming from me soon!

The other bit of studying I've done is a day at our local Buddhist centre, where I sat in on a couple of teachings on 'mindfulness for modern life' and took part in some guided meditations. Mindfulness is, of course, very trendy at the moment, but there's so much more to it than simply learning to live in the moment. Fascinating stuff - and lovely food!