Hello, welcome to All Things Bright & Good.
I’m Judy and I live on the top floor of a mill building by a river in Somerset.
I launched All Things Bright & Good in the autumn of 2014, as a lifestyle blog to complement my blog Work from Home Wisdom.
The idea was that Bright & Good would be the ideal place for the opportunities coming in to work with brands that didn’t fit easily into the home working niche.
My beautiful logo was designed by the super-talented Catherine Lewis, who also runs Balmology, making organic balms and skincare that get rave reviews from beauty experts.
Ironically only two months after the launch my mother broke her hip and my life became increasingly full of matters far from bright and good.
By the New Year it was obvious there wasn’t time to run two blogs. I had no choice but to continue updating Work from Home Wisdom, which was already well-established, and put Bright & Good on the back burner.
For more than two years most of my time and energy went into running every aspect of my parents’ lives. Then my mother died, and my father had to move into residential care. It was time for a change, although the enormous archives of Work from Home Wisdom are still available online.
I went back to All Things Bright & Good. My original strapline was ‘a lovely life for less’. The aim of the blog was to show how to enjoy a fulfilling and creative life with less stuff, less stress, less waste and less money.
Back then if anyone had predicted the current state of European and world politics, I’d have dismissed them as crazy. But we’ve ended up in a situation where life all too often seems unpredictable and bleak.
Not to be all woo-woo about it, but I believe that our best – our only – response in these times is to live the best life we possibly can, to remain positive and optimistic. Not to be ground down by world or personal events but to stay hopeful for a fair and prosperous future.
So All Things Bright & Good now has a new focus – as a place to discover the delight in the everyday. Noticing and appreciating the little things in ordinary life kept me sane during very difficult times.
Things like a spray of lemony perfume,
listening to rain beating on the window,
savouring every mouthful of my favourite coffee cake,
the feel of clean sheets,
talking to an understanding friend,
applying bright red nail polish to my toes!
And from time to time we’ll take a considered look at some of those ‘bigger’ issues, in the hope of defusing some of their charge and making them easier to handle.
But now, let’s go and find the delight in the everyday…