claytoncast

As anyone who knows me well will tell you, I love shopping. There have been corporate jobs I have done with actors where a retail call has actually been built into the schedule. With any business trip abroad I allow time in my schedule for me to browse the airport shops. I feel a sense of unfulfillment if I am boarding the plane without an extra package added to my hand luggage.  I was brought up in a shop. My grandparents ran the village shop where we lived. Actually there were two shops. A general store which served everything from tampax to teabags and opened at seven every morning in order to catch the miners coming back from their night shift and people leaving for the start of a day at work in the town nearby. At seven every evening the door to the general shop was closed and the door to the off-licence was opened. Here my grandfather would dispense draught ale from a set of pumps to people who would bring jugs and bottles across the village green. Evidently at the age of...

I’m very lucky in the fact that my job has allowed me to travel all over the world. Quite often I stay on for a day to look at the sites of a particular place. Other than our big chill out summer holiday, when Rich and I go away in spring and autumn we tend to go somewhere where we can explore rather than just laze about.  So it’s a little surprising that as our closest neighbour in terms of capital cities, I’ve hardly ever spent any time in Paris. We spent a Thursday afternoon there are about eight years ago en route to a boating holiday in the South of France. What should have been six hours of sightseeing was rather curtailed as my mother decided to be admitted to hospital the previous evening and we spent most of the time looking for locations from which to ring home and find out how she was doing, and to see if we could continue the rest of our holiday in the South of France. So when three jobs presented themselves very early this year in Paris, it seemed more than natural t...

Well here we are at the end of the second week of 2011. This week has proved slightly duller than last week. The early promise of the new year doesn't seem to have developed into anything particularly exciting and there were several days this week which were a match for the weather - grey and dull. I made a trip up to Yorkshire on Tuesday to see my mother and also in another vain attempt twist secure some funding from Rotherham social services for part of her care which I currently pay for myself. Cue for a visit from a woman trained in the slightly patronising breathy tones of the social worker who continued to irritate me for approximately 30 min before I told her that I didn't think this meeting was working and it was probably best that she left. My mother doesn't want them in the house. Apart from the slightly undignified questions of "what can you do yourself Mrs Clayton", my mother finds them intrusive and the indignities to which she is subject by their q...

I get very superstitious about the first few days of a new year. I rather think in some sort of pagan primeval way that the course of the rest of the year will be determined by the events of the first week or so. If that is indeed the case then I probably have little cause to worry as this week has been a nice mixture of work, socialising, and surprises. Monday, which was the last day of no congestion charge prompted me to persuade Rich to go into town and have a mooch around the shops. He had a surfeit of Marks and Spencer vouchers to spend and I needed to get an external monitor connector for my flash new macbook air,my Christmas present from Rich and on which, incidentally, I am typing this weeks blog. One of the things Rich has learnt from me over the years is how to shop. It wouldn't be his activity of choice, but when he wants to he is rather good at it and we had a great afternoon pushing our way through the sales, taking the extreme rudeness of a sales assistant in HMV on t...

So here it is, my first blog of 2011. I suppose at this time of year one should be looking forward but I really do have to mention Christmas. It now seems as far away as ever, and yet this year is the happiest of memories. I remember as a child how all the preparation and anticipation of the big day seemed to take forever and yet the day went by in a flash. For the last two years we've had something to look forward to after Christmas as we've been on holiday. Last year we went off to New York and had a brilliant time. This year we were given a holiday cottage from our friends Tim and Mandy down in Swanage and we headed off there for the New Year. It's not a part of the country I was familiar with but it's absolutely beautiful. Swanage is where Enid Blyton lived for a large part of her life, and funnily enough she seemed to be the main inspiration for our holiday activities. Friday morning saw a walk along the cliff tops, the Anvil point Lighthouse, the ruined castl...