Post the Fifty-first (in which our heroine returns to the blogosphere)

Well, folks, it's been a while.  Six months, actually.  I find that quite alarming, to be honest with you.  A) because I never intended to abandon the blog for that long and B) because it feels more like six weeks.  The time, how she flies, eh?

Anyway, I feel a bit of an explanation is probably required.  Bear with me here; t's not going to be easy.  There may be snots and tears.  You may end up feeling quite uncomfortable.  But I've always been an extremely low-bullshit kind of person and I feel that it would be disingenuous of me to just kind of gloss over the fact that I disappeared for six months and pretend it never happened.  A lot of you know me personally and will already know the story anyway.  But, for those of you who don't; my marriage ended.  I'm not going to go into the nitty gritty of how and why and whatnot, but suffice it to say that it was not the most pleasant experience of my life to date.  And, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the major side effects to marital breakdown is loss of appetite.  Not really conducive to a food blog, as you might imagine.  So, I went to ground for a while.  I moved home.  I drank far too much.  I stayed in far too much, and then I went out far too much.  I lost a stone.  I call it the "Ditched Diet".  It's very effective, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend it.

And then, little by little, I started to feel a bit better.  Don't get me wrong, I still have my moments where I go "How the hell did this happen?", but gradually I started to feel human again.  I had counselling.  I realised that I didn't want to come out of this experience a worse person than when I went in.  I still have no idea where I'm going or what I'm doing long-term, but I know that blogging was something that gave me a lot of pleasure, and I've had a lot of lovely comments from people over the past six months saying that they missed the blog and hoped I'd come back to it, so here I am.  And if nothing else, it'll force me to cook again, thus appeasing my family somewhat, as they've been woefully disappointed at the lack of kitchen action since I moved home, God love them.

Just as long as I don't put that stone back on...

Recipes, sarcasm and stream-of-consciousness musings will all resume from tomorrow.  Thanks for reading, folks.