Pip: Widow plus woofs — where the boiler gets fixed the day before you turn it off, the hospital scanner breaks mid-appointment, and someone's dog still manages to be the emotional highlight of the week.
Mara: sophistewart's recent posts cover a lot of ground: a run of domestic calamities tied to a tender anniversary, the body's quiet rebellion against the passage of time, a short trip away that turns into a meditation on home, and the strange discipline of learning to pause.
Pip: Let's start with the home front — and what a front it's been.
When everything goes wrong at once
Mara: The anchor post here is "Arghs and anniversaries," and it opens on a week where misfortune arrived in convoy — a broken scanner, a smashed mug, an unwanted brushstroke on a finished painting.
Pip: The mug is the one that lands. Tony gave it to her over twenty years ago, the Flake logo faded to almost nothing, and it flew out of her hand and shattered. That's not a bad week — that's a bad week with teeth.
Mara: She frames it with characteristic dryness: "I must have upset the Hoo again hence the crappy week." The Hoo being the house spirit she'd been talking to on a friend's advice, to help the sale along.
Pip: Spiritual house-selling advice dispensed over white wine — no sugar bowls required, apparently.
Mara: And despite all of it, the week ends on the terrace, looking up at Tony's star. Eight years on, she writes that waking from a vivid dream of him, "for a second or two I didn't want to let him go."
Pip: The other posts in this stretch show the same texture — "Atmospheric additions" has the boiler finally working just as the season turns, and "Mellow fruitfulness" catches a house viewing on a rare sunny day, a finished snake pot, and a cautious tingle of optimism. "Scheduling the unscheduled" and "Alone time and the art of Englishness" both circle the same question: what does a week look like when you stop filling every hour?
Mara: In "Scheduling the unscheduled," Katherine Hepburn gets a wall — "If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun" — right after an impulse aquarium purchase that definitely wasn't in the planner.
Pip: Next door to all that domesticity is the body, which has been filing its own complaints.
The body keeps its own calendar
Mara: "Intentional rejuvenations" opens with the Flower Moon in Scorpio and a prompt to set intentions — and ends with Denis in tears over a Jack Russell puppy called Capone, which is arguably the most effective rejuvenation on offer.
Pip: The quote that earns its place: "There's no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face." Bernard Williams said it; Capone proved it.
Mara: What this means in practice is that the whole elaborate plan — the 600-kilometre drive, the sister as co-pilot, the handoff via Marina — was less about astrology and entirely about knowing someone needed bringing back to life.
Pip: "Bottoms up, get busy" is where the body files its first formal complaint — a fall on a freshly mopped floor, a bruised derriere, and an ovarian cyst named Olive. "Eyeballing the age" follows up: a party that ran until three, a mini trampoline rediscovered, and the slow realisation that recovery takes longer now.
Mara: "Potty predictions and birthday pups" closes the loop — Sherman turns five, the tarot readers agree something is shifting, and the terracotta pots are now, apparently, selling. She writes: "I was rather chuffed on being told I was an artist."
Pip: From cysts to ceramics — the body and the creative life running on parallel tracks. Speaking of tracks, she did briefly leave hers.
A short road out and the pull back home
Mara: "Where the foot falls" is the travel post, and it's grounded in a telling quote: "Home, the spot of earth supremely blest, a dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest."
Pip: Robert Montgomery wrote that. She earned it by coming back to a hovel — unwashed dogs, empty water bowls, Mo still in a soiled nappy — courtesy of nephew Louis on dog-sitting duty.
Mara: The upshot is that the trip itself was genuinely lovely: a tagine, a six-kilometre reservoir walk, a local market, a château. New boots were a mistake on the walk; flip-flops corrected the error the next morning.
Pip: Forty-five minutes down the autoroute and the landscape shifts completely — fields, woodland, all three mountain ranges visible at once. Not far, but far enough.
Mara: "New phones and new faces" covers different territory — a broken mobile, a patient technician in Carcassonne, a wedding, and a sewing circle she nearly walked straight back out of. The thread connecting them is the same: getting out, meeting people, finding that strangers become friends faster than expected.
Pip: The pause, it turns out, is harder to arrange than a road trip.
Learning to stop
Mara: "Turtledoves, tats and tough-talking" gives us the quote: "Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past." The new ink is a Fire Horse with a Scorpio tail — chosen, she's clear, for herself and not for Denis.
Pip: Getting a tattoo as an act of self-determination is one thing. Stopping mid-terrace coffee to resist writing a to-do list is apparently considerably harder.
Mara: "A Pause in Conversation" is where that difficulty gets its plainest expression. She pulls over on an empty country road, sits in the car, and just breathes — and notes that between running Dog Hollow and everything since Tony died, she has spent thirty-odd years in what she calls "lit mode."
Pip: The switch, briefly, turned off. Whether it stays off is another matter entirely.
Mara: Broken mugs, ovarian cysts, impulse aquariums, and a puppy named Capone — and underneath all of it, the slow work of figuring out what a life looks like when you finally let it breathe.
Pip: Same terrace, same star, same woofers taking up the bed. Next time, we'll see what the aquarium's become.
Widow plus woofs 