Beware all who enter…

I live in a house filled with disease. Ever since my eldest started nursery she has brought one bug after another into our house with such frequency we should have a cross painted on the door to ward off visitors. The brave people who do actually manage to brave the lurgies and kindly come and help me out for the day(kind, kind people ) leave contaminated and within a couple of days are coughing and sniffing with the rest of us only dispelling the germs in time to come and catch the next batch.

But we have managed the first half term. Well sort of, as my little one is currently stretched out on the sofa and I need to ring up the nursery again and tell them she won’t be attending the last day of the half-term, but overall we have survived. An achievement of sorts. Just the next twenty years or so to get everyone through school… piece of cake.

I’m sure it won’t surprise you to know my stories aren’t usually rife with disease, so this link is a bit of a stretch but I’m going for the stomachache angle. I’m still tinkering away at the first chapter of Held in the Balance. I would love to throw myself in full force but I’m still in editing mode for Braving Madness and I know if I don’t get on with that now I never will. Still, this snippet is at Lydia’s engagement ball and starts with Lydia’s father toasting the happy couple.

He lifted an elegant crystal glass ceiling-wards and the light from the chandeliers turned the champagne into the palest honey, catching the carved facets and making his hands impossibly large. “Ladies and gentlemen, will you all join me in wishing the happy couple a hearty congratulations on their engagement this evening. To the happy couple.”

The toast rippled across the ballroom, a mixture of sincerity, envy and downright apathy from those only interested in the free champagne flowing so freely through the evening they should be swimming in the stuff. She’d drunk enough herself and her stomach churned with bubbles and the inevitability of her future sank like a stone to the bottom.