If you find yourself in the wrong story...

I haven't been very attentive of late. I'm so in awe of my friend Tania Kindersley who posts lovely, elegant missives every day on her blog. Let me excuse myself by saying, it's been awfully hot in Los Angeles -- over one hundred degrees in Laurel Canyon and even hotter where Jelly lives in the San Fernando Valley -- and tonight is the first night the air conditioning is off and the doors are open and I can hear the crickets and the tree frogs (people tell me they aren't tree frogs but I'm a romantic) and the faint barking of dogs in the distance, a cool breeze blowing through. I'm at my desk with the dogs underneath, putting off packing because I fly to England tomorrow to see my Mamma, back Monday. La belle Monica and her burly husband will be at the house to look after the spotteds and Thistle. And I've been busy with work. In my other life I'm the co-chair of the Britannia Awards for BAFTA Los Angeles, and my business is ramping up because Awards season is already in full swing. I love my clients. I do what I love. I am not complaining. But I haven't been this busy in a very, very long time.

Of course (and you'd expect not less from me) the love life is in shambles. I think the "it's complicated" setting on Facebook is amusing. It's rather droll, don't you think? My relationship isn't just complicated, it's a full blown hot mess of a situation, up and down and on and off, and completely like something out of a Mexican soap opera. It seems that I am drawn to "complex" men.  My father will be smiling down at me from heaven, where he, too, will be surrounded by dogs, and winking. Yes, complex men are the death of me. And when I say death, I would say that my whole existence seems to be in the balance.  Is it too much to ask for an easy, quiet, happy life? I don't know. Apparently, I'm not making the right choices. So, bring out your castanets, your push-up bras, your arched brows, and support the teatro.

Today was of particular challenge because I think I hit a wall that I'm not sure I'm going beyond. I posted this on my Instagram (because posting words on Instagram gets me through the day)

Alert the media: I'm leaving.

Hollywood is a good lover, but it's not a permanent relationship. It can dance, it can sing, it can hold you in its embrace, it can gaze deep into your eyes and tell you of its yearning, but it's moving on to the next any moment.

I need Great Britain. I need big old oak and beech trees, and green grass and the feel of the soft chalk and clay underneath. I need my Mamma's face, and Sunday lunch, and powder-dusted damsons, and bracken that hasn't yet turned brown, and deer in the morning, and woodpeckers and the sound of cuckoos and pigeons, and the smell of the leaf-mold.  I like sleeping giants under green hills, and secret passageways, and rhubarb. Peardrops, lemon bon-bons, sausages sizzling in the pan on the Aga, my father's musty old books, ramblers in cagoules, Basildon Bond and The Valiant Trooper.

At least for the weekend.



I want to be soothed, and pulled into Britain's big, strong arms, and reminded of my lovely country, and of what's important, and that my bones will one day turn to chalk that other women will walk upon, listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams and Vera Lynn and Kate Bush, and thinking of Hardy and Housman and Woolf and the shipping forecast.

Pack my trunk, I'm coming home.