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Dear old friends and new friends.  Happy December the first.  The opening of Advent and the beginning of winter.  

How are you?  Are you fearing the month ahead? Daunted? Overwhelmed? Excited?  Moved? Is this a Christmas without a loved one?  I’m interested, truly, so let me know.  Sharing and connecting really does help.  

Thank you to Diane for her poem recommendation, Robert Frost’s beautiful ‘The Road Not Taken’.  What road shall we choose not to take in 2026?  The road of fear? Of fecklessness? Of fickleness?  Or the road of grace? Of morale courage? Of kindness?  Of patience?  

We can choose how we live our lives.  I can choose to not find fault in others; I can choose to practice patience, even though it doesn’t come naturally to me.  Each day, and each moment within the day, is a fresh now.  We can choose never to lie and always to apologise if we do or if we are unkind.  We don’t have a set character: we are free each day to form a new, better shape.  

Thank you for joining me, so subscribe if you like what I do, and do get in touch: gretellem@yahoo.com.

Tomorrow we go à Londres! 🤗 

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Gretel le Maître likes to look for the beauty and curiosities in life, one day at a time. She shares with you snippets from books about history, art and literature and regularly takes you on adventures to new locations, to explore churches, cathedrals and architecture.

Gretel invites you to accompany her as she navigates the world a day at a time; the podcast is unscripted, it’s ad-free.

Gretel loves the world and history, architecture, literature and people. And so is determined to walk this path with light footsteps and with humour and warmth. Let’s treasure up the beautiful things and ponder them in our hearts.

Top 10 in Global Rankings according to Listen Notes.

Previous guests include historian Tom Holland; Actor Enzo Cilenti; Art historian Philip Mould; Composer Matthew Coleridge; Vicar Angela Tilby; Author Bijan Omrani; Dorset garden hedgehog family, the Venerable Bede and other guests.

Future guests (all being well) are Tom Holland, John Simpson, David Willem, Simon Jenkins, Philippa Langley and Katie Channon.

Your daily dose of calm. Unpolished and unscripted but no ads and no requests for anything but your company. Trying to make the world a gentler place with literature, history and nature. Please don’t expect to find a polished product. The output is lower tier but the authenticity is hopefully as good as it gets. 🦔

Love Gretel 🌝