Today we celebrated the Winter Solstice.  Yes, yes, I know that technically it was on Saturday, but I was working, so shhh, the kids don’t know that.  It was TODAY, okay?

As you may have guessed, we have a programme, and here it is:

1. Watch the sun rise at Sunrise Beach.  Yes, this was early.  And cloudy.  So we climbed on the seats instead, and yelled a bit, because there was a campervan that looked all tucked up right near us.  I suspect free campers at MY beach access.  Hippies.

2.  Go out for breakfast at Bistro C (which looks onto Noosa Main Beach).  This was much more my style.

3.  Wear something yellow.  I wore a hair clip of Coco’s as a brooch.  And I forced certain family members to wear fake sunflowers in their hair for a few minutes. That counts.  Never let it be said I don’t go all out for this stuff.

4.  Listen to our Solstice CD, which has contains classic songs like “You Are My Sunshine”.  We all sighed with relief when it was finished.  All thirteen tracks.  Who thought of this tradition?

5.  Bake sunflower seed biccies and decorate the house with plastic sunflowers.  Box up said biccies and give them out to unsuspecting others, because frankly, they are a bit shit.

6.  Watch the sun set.  The highlight.  Hands down.

This year we had an added bonus of sharing a lovely lunch cooked by one of my gorgeous friends who reports that she “loves cooking and entertaining”.  So clearly, she is a complete idiot, but man she can cook.  We had delish food, wine, more than a few laughs and two beautiful surprise guests.

The winter solstice has well and truly ended here.  Everyone is abed- the kids exhausted, and Nath with what could quite possibly be a terminal case of Man-flu, leaving me with some repeats of Black Adder and a Hot Toddy.  Winter, generally you suck, but today, you weren’t all bad.  The 23degrees didn’t

Roll on Summer, roll on.

Do you celebrate the solstice (because it means Summer is on its way)?

…From The Ashers xx

Last week, My Friend John called me to tell me that my friend, his wife, could be dying.  He said that things weren’t really going well, and that she might not pull through.  He also said that he might be wrong.  So I thought maybe he might be the boy who cried wolf.  I hoped he was.

I packed a bag, booked a flight and organised the kids, but with a sense of unreality.  My friend couldn’t die.  She was a machine.  She did chemo and chemo and chemo again, and she was always fine.  She killed cancer when it came up.  She engrafted stem cells.  She was a legend at this stuff.  There was no way some stupid little virus could kill her.

It wasn’t until I got in the car, with the wide open road stretching before me, that I knew it was true.  My friend of so long was dying, and there was not one single thing I could do.

All of a sudden it seemed vitally important to savour the world.  I drove with the windows down so I could feel the air and smell the world.  I had the music pumped with bops and pops that sang of happiness and light.  I tried to drink in all the sights of the land as I whizzed by.  Because I knew this was the last time for a while I would be able to see and hear and smell and feel and touch things properly, and clearly.  I knew what would come next.  Haze and fog and dull.

And the sad.  So much sad.

The sun started to set and it became imperative to get pictures, even as I sped along toward the thing I dreaded most, for this was the last day of the sun with Hayley in it.

And after a while the sun set.  And she was gone.