Try solo, mindful eating

Evenings are whittled away at long, solitary dinners, where I feast on garden-fresh, nourishing food at candle-lit tables, listening to the rain patter and marvelling at just how dark it gets in the countryside. As I’m on my own, my dinner entertainment consists of The Woman In White, an engrossing Victorian mystery novel by Wilkie Collins, a contemporary of Charles Dickens.

While the novel is as bingeable as anything in Netflix’s top ten, it doesn’t distract me from eating, and I find myself naturally eating slowly and – excuse the buzzword – mindfully. I’m actually tasting my food. (It certainly doesn’t hurt that everything is worthy of my full attention – I’m still dreaming about the last of the summer’s marmande tomatoes and the impossibly creamy buffalo milk gelato.)

Be asleep by 10pm

I’m in bed by 10pm every night, dressed in a cobweb thin white night dress (look, you’ve got to dress the part). On all but one occasion, I sleep amazingly well – hardly a surprise after days of fresh air, no alcohol and no blinding blue light to disrupt my melatonin production.

Stress-relieving mini-break ideas: “Why I went on an old-fashioned convalescence holiday”