JANUARY

I'm out having a walk in the freezing wind, in the country lanes, with my friend Donatella and her little black Poodle, Lola. The wind is whipping our hair around our faces. Neither of us are wearing hats and its cold.  Donatella has had her hair cut recently and now it is short and funky and suits her dynamic energy. Mine is still a little long and straggly and I wonder if its time to do the same. But my energy is quieter than Donatella's and I don't think I would carry it off as well.

My partner is in America and hers is in Russia. We talk about work, I am back at college for a few hours a week upgrading my computer skills and I am finding it hard, also my work as a PA which is hardly high-pressured but definitely challenging at the moment. I am really enjoying working with my newest boss, I like him and there is a good vibe between us but everything else is fading away, things that I feel passionate about are sliding, in earning a living I feel I no longer have time for anything else.

But is that really true? Sometimes life is draining if you allow it to be, at other times sheer positive energy pulls you along and you manage to cram all sorts in and still barely touch the edges.

Lola is wrenching on her lead and a car is coming down the track towards us.

'My ears are starting to hurt!' I shout above the noise of wind and the car and Lola's whimpering. We go back to the warmth of Donatella's house and have coffee.

We talk about asking the universe for what we want and for the need for the appropriate action to be taken in order to achieve this. In other words the work involved. We talk about the 7 deadly sins and in particular sloth and a joint friend of ours who seems to epitomise this - or is it depression? Or maybe his ideals are just different to our own. We talk about stretching time to fit in as much as we want or need to do. And we talk about success and failure and the moving forward from dreams that may not have worked out and have become stale.

Donatella was once a pop-star, she had success and fame but then just as quickly she lost it all, as well as her then partner. She didn't imagine she would ever recover from losing either of those two things, but she did.  She found another route to success and happiness and she also met the love of her life. She now buys and runs her own uniquely styled boutique hotels. She is good at it and she has found an outlet for her intense creativity.

She pulls out a Ferrari magazine from the shelf in her library and shows me an article about a hugely successful Chinese artist and his belief that anything we do, no matter what, is using creativity and as long as you pour your soul into your work, your creativity has a suitable outlet. Its that old thing about 'its not what you do but the way that you do it' and that we may not all get what we want or in the form that we think want it. The article is interesting but secretly I am hanging onto my own dreams.

We have coffee and tiny squares of Stollen that are dusted with icing-sugar, left-overs from Christmas. I start thinking about how I can stretch time.

Donatella's partner phones her from Heathrow, as I am leaving, to say she is on her way home and I feel the energy fizz in the air around us. 

I head off into the afternoon, lots on my mind, thoughts pulling me in different directions. As soon as I get into the house I fire up my laptop. I've got work to do.

I'm going to show the universe all about how to stretch time.