Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 4th January 2026

Hello, and a very Happy New Year to you all. I really hope that your end-of-year break was everything you hoped it would be, that you had time to rest, recuperate, eat lovely food, and hang out with people you love. And that you spent your last Sunday before the full force of 2026 kicks in feeling good about Monday morning and back to school.

I suspect that for many of you reading this, that is not the reality of your last couple of weeks. Some of you will have worked all the way through. Some of you will have had difficult things crop up, family relationships to negotiate, things thrown at you by the universe that you just weren’t expecting or which floored you.

Full disclosure, I find Christmas and New Year incredibly hard, and this has been a particularly tricky one. This is historically a tough time for me. I was first detained under the Mental Health Act one Boxing Day back in the 1990s, and it’s never been a comfortable time. I’m finding the dark particularly difficult this year (I know I’m not alone in this), and I’ve felt quite untethered.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some heart sing moments.

My Christmas and end-of-year swims.

Buying my friend Sharon the same book that she bought me.

Receiving this coaster from John Nicoll.

Trying to work out what day it was just before and after New Year, and realising it was Friday when I thought it was Saturday, and I’d gained a day

Spotting parakeets on my bird feeder.

Exploring and then dumping a whole range of ‘shoulds and oughts’ for 2026, that I just won’t be doing … although ask me next month about my experiment not to watch any television on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. I have this crazy notion that it will free me up to do some amazing stuff and that I’ll definitely be fluent in Greek by March.

So, Monday for me is a bit of a relief. Ok, so I haven’t done the 101 things I’d planned to do to enhance your experience of Gloriously Ordinary Lives (sorry and all that), but today enforces a back-to-work rhythm and routine that (keeping everything crossed) will help my head no end.

And yet, for some of you, the last two weeks might have been bliss, and coming back to work full of dread.

So that’s the thing, all this Gloriously Ordinary Lives stuff really is in the eye of the beholder.

To lighten the mood a tad, I’ll leave you with a classic example of where one person’s heart sing is another person’s nightmare.

In our attempt to put the jigsaw of our complicated little family together so it works for Ciaran and The Girl and a little bit for me and for John and his family, we ended up at a Toby Carvery on the Sunday before Christmas. It was my first experience, and I wish I could have taken a photo of the expression on the face of the lovely woman who was serving us, when I asked her to explain how things worked.

‘You’ve never been to a Toby Carvery?’

‘No!’

‘What never?’

‘No, sorry!’

She carefully talked us through the process and then walked away shaking her head, while we dissolved in the first belly laugh of what had been a tough weekend.

However your Monday morning feels, I look forward to helping you make and keep things Gloriously Ordinary this year.

PS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode 14 is here. You'll hear that I am absolutely thrilled to introduce you all to the lovely ⁠⁠⁠Marianne Selby-Boothroyd⁠⁠⁠, who's joining the Gloriously Ordinary Lives team... that's right, the Gloriously Ordinary Lives team! How exciting is that? Have a listen, and we'd love to hear what you think!