Nourish your body & your soul

Well today I am not going to spout any feel good hippie hugging eat lots of unprocessed food palaver – I am going to talk about nourishing your mind and body with great chocolate and better wine. As we know, all good things should be in moderation; too much of a good thing can be bad for you. And this is true if we are talking about things like bread or pasta (dreaded carbohydrates) but the same can never be applied to wine and chocolate.

For Kelvin, chocolate is essential to his wellbeing. It is mind altering, mood shifting and comforting when you are under pressure. You can try to savour it by letting it sit on your tongue and slowly melt or you can crunch it quickly and let the sticky richness swell in your mouth before swallowing. It is nirvana to the fragile and battered soul.

I have this memory etched in my brain; it is of one perfect afternoon years ago now. I was living in my flash Khandallah house (see below) in Wellington. It really was a funky beautiful house and I do miss it on occasion – but back to that perfect afternoon.  It was a Saturday in summer – and summer in Wellington is not like summer here; often the wind can be cool and the temperatures can hover around 23 – 25 and get down to 15ish at night. On this day, the sun was shining through to big plate glass windows into my lounge room. I had a brand new lounge set (still have it, much battered, tattered and torn by feral kids now) and my housework was complete. My house was tidy, I had the stereo playing Jewel, I had a trashy romance novel to read and I had a wine cellar. Oh yes, a wine cellar. Not only that; it had wine in it.


So here I am 2PM on a Sat afternoon, nowhere to be nobody to entertain but myself and a lovely cold glass of sav blanc in my hand. I remember sitting on the couch, looking out of the window and just thinking how blissfully happy I was just then in that moment. I don’t even think that it lasted long – at some point Kelvin would have asked me where something was, my brother would have walked in and sniggered at my listening choices and I would have had to get off my bum and traipse down to the cellar for another bottle – but those few brief moments were truly bliss for the busy soul.

These days I love the social aspect of wine; I love sitting with good friends and talking, laughing and generally solving the worlds problems. People truly underestimate the value of a how cathartic good girlfriends can be. We need to know that other people understand how hard our busy lives are and how challenging parenthood really is. It has taken me years to find my groove here, and I have to say I am loving everything right now.

Life is never perfect is it? Bee is filled with angst and self doubt, Alex is a delicious soul who isn’t learning as fast as some of his peers and Kelvin has spent most of the past four years lurching from one stressful work crisis to another and inevitably taking some of the angst out on his family. But when you can sit outside on a summer evening and laugh like a loon with good friends whilst your kids did what you did as a child (eg PLAY instead of being glued to the television) then life is more than bearable; its bloody good.