Happy imperfect NEW YEAR

A rural idyll, new friends and a dramatic rescue – it was an action-packed start to the New Year

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Packing away the decorations, Maggie let out a little sigh of relief. That, in turn, made her feel guilty. She loved having the family for Christmas, honestly she did, but trying to make everything perfect was exhausting.

Great-Aunt Annie’s need to talk non-stop about her ailments and young Tommy rampaging around with a laser gun were totally incompatible. Then there had been the challenge of cooking a vegan dinner alongside the turkey, with her teenage granddaughter Chloe watching suspiciously, in case something should contaminate her nut roast.

‘Stop working so hard, Mum,’ Mark had said. ‘You can’t please all of the people, all of time.’ Yet somehow, she couldn’t stop trying.

It was probably down to her late mother. Even now, her overly critical voice rang in her ears, ‘You’re so slapdash, Maggie. No one loves a sloppy child.’

Thinking about it could still reduce Maggie to a gibbering wreck, so she told herself to stop – and start looking forward to her New Year minibreak.

She’d booked herself into an olde-worlde village, two hours away. She wasn’t crazy about going to places alone since her divorce, but her mother always told her ‘travel broadens the mind and heaven knows yours needs it’.

A few days later, she pulled up outside The Rosebush Arms, a beamed building that looked so ancient, she half expected to see Henry VIII swaggering out after a few pints of mead.

The pub was on one side of a market square, where there was also a row of shops, a church and a bridge over a gleaming river. ‘Like a complete jigsaw,’ Maggie thought. ‘Picture-perfect.’

Perfection – that word again. People said it didn’t exist, but right now, in Chittleworth-on-Water, that was rather hard to believe.