I cannot believe November is nearly over. How is that possible? This past week has both been hellishly slow and passed by in a blur, largely because I was asleep most days when I wasn't at work, aside from when I should have been asleep at which time I was wide awake and primarily in pain, but that's another story. At least I made it through to Thursday in one piece, and my day off on Friday.

After the fabulous time at Chiltern Kills last weekend, this week has been somewhat of an anticlimax. Work, work and more work pretty much sums things up. Put what I hope are the finishing touches in the apprenticeship portfolio, wrote some formula, ate too much rubbish, and generally felt like I could sleep forever. But hey. Booked tickets for the tour of Operation Mincemeat next year, so it’s not all bad, right?

That is another week over, and it's possibly the first time in a long time that I feel able to breathe. Having been informed about ten days before Christmas that I was due to be made redundant, I have just been offered a new role, again about ten days before I was due to finish the old one. A relief - yes.

Published by Penguin on the 10th February 2025 Callie Kazumi is a British-Japanese writer who started work on her first book after being gifted Stephen King's On Writing by her father. She lives in London with her husband and their Bichon Frisé, Betsy. Cuckoo is her debut novel. It was excellent reading, as the plot just got worse and worse. Was Claire going mad with all these revelations, or was her fiancé a terrible egg?