The end of my sojourn in the country is coming to end. Let’s call it an Artist Residency & Recovery. After five weeks of fairly hectic travelling in France, Scotland and northern England, it was an unexpected joy to land in a little house near Auray for a couple of weeks of quiet rest and creative work.

The weather has finally cracked today and it’s such a pleasure to have some humidity in the air and the temperature below 28. This house was a blessing in the heat, for even on the consecutive days that were as hot Satan’s underpants, inside didn’t get above 26. But the mornings are long and lovely, so most days have begun with a walk in the forest that’s starts at the end of the street. Green and dense despite the lack of rain, the paths meander past creeks and fields and tiny villages and the occasional neolithic stone circle. As the morning sun hits the trees, the birds flit about and the air is filled with the almost edible sweet scent of pine, mingled with the actually edible scent of wild blackberries. Some days the walk has been through the forest to the boulangerie and home again with a warm baguette in my hand.

As walking always does, these promenades generate all kinds of creative ideas, clarity on questions floating around my head and focus for the day ahead. It would seem that the bigger the walk, the better the ideas. After one of my longer walks I came back and wrote the music for a full song. The words are yet to crystallise, but they’ll come. Upon returning from my walk, I take coffee and breakfast slowly on the veranda and watch the birds skipping about the garden in the shade of the trees.

From mid-morning onwards, I have a steady schedule of music practice (fiddle, piano and singing), followed by some songwriting and then some admin and PR work (writing applications and working on some business strategy tasks), and the other little things on my list: learning to knit a pattern that is way too hard for a beginner, trying to draw every day (I’m not a good drawer and am trying to get better) and of course, making a simple but delicious meals.

Have I made any progress, you ask? Well, adding evidence to the theory that a little practice every day is the best way to improve, I can heartily reply in the affirmative.

On the fiddle (which I picked up last year because it’s small and you get to play the melody) I am very excited to report that my pinkie finger is now useful. Instead of flailing around unpredictably like it’s been day-drinking on an empty stomach, it is now able to play notes when requested, mostly in tune and in time. There’s still work to be done, but I was not expecting to get from zero to workable in two weeks.

Creatively speaking, I’ve written the music for two songs, finished the chords for a tune I wrote a few weeks earlier, made some progress on lyrics for another song, and done some research for on an exciting new project I’m working on. Now that I write that list, it’s bigger than I thought.

I have also worked consistently on my napping skills, managing to practice for half an hour nearly every day. This may sound trite, but I have a tendency to start doing something creative at 9:30pm which means I don’t go to bed until midnight. Then I wake up at 7-ish because it’s fully light and a beautiful time of the day, so by the time mid-afternoon arrives, I’m feeling a little weary. The nap is the perfect energy boost to liven up the second half of the day and I wholeheartedly believe that napping is a much healthier option than more coffee.

Tomorrow I’m off on the road again, feeling rested and revived and with a robust list of ideas on life, creative work and pleasure to add to over the next month and crank into action when I get home.