Right now I covet her boots. Those boots, the black boots she wears as she goes about her duties as the cop in charge of Happy Valley…a valley that is beautiful, but not so very happy, populated as it is with folk–mostly young ones –living lives of drug-addled desperation. I have spent hours on line trying to find the exact boots that my new hero, Sarah Lancashire, as the no-nonsense, middle-aged police sergeant, Catherine Cawood, wears to work in Calderdale, nestled in west Yorkshire.

It is Calderdale that gives us the ironic name, Happy Valley, something the local police call their town because of drug problems there. “Happy Valley,” you must know by now, is the newest offering on Netflix and was the most talked-about show in Great Britain when it first aired in April, 2014.

It is now one of the most talked-about shows this side of the pond and with good reason. It is so very, very good. Or to use their word over there, brilliant. This six-episode BBC production, written by Sally Wainwright who also writes “Last Tango in Halifax,” had over six million Brits tuning in and biting their nails each week, and now, lucky us, we can binge watch it to our hearts content and bite our nails, too.

The main character, Catherine, is a 47-year old grandmother, raising her dead daughter’s child, a responsibility she shouldered at great cost to her marriage and relationship with her surviving son. Lanchashire in the starring role will be familiar to us as Miss Audrey, in “The Paradise” and as Caroline in “Last Tango in Halifax.”

Catherine is raising 8-year old Ryan with the help of her sister, a recovering heroin addict, Clare, played by Siobhan Finneran. What I love best about the character Clare, besides the fact that she spends her time volunteering in a homeless mission, gardening in the allotment, and preparing meals for her sister and nephew, is that she is played by the same woman who gave us that awful O’Brien on “Downton Abbey.”

In this role, she is sweet and supportive, loving and sometimes at a loss, and I am thrilled to have a reason to really like her—the character and the actress–after all the torment O’Brien put us through.

The plot of “Happy Valley” centers around Catherine and her life eight years after the suicide  of her daughter. She gets up every day and does a difficult and physical job, and she does it as a strong woman, not the caricature of the strong woman we are often treated to in the US entertainment industry.

She is kind, funny, and a good cop. She can also knock open a door with her shoulder and runs after a drug-selling ice cream truck, which of course she doesn’t catch, but she looks like she might, were she a bit younger. She pulls smart aleck smack-heads out of their cars by the fronts of their jackets, young males bigger than she.

And we believe it, believe it all, because this is not a jiggly kind of cop show, because Sarah Lancashire as Catherine is substantial and fierce in her fleece jersey and hi-vis vest. Then she goes home, worn out, and reads to her grandson, and we believe that, too. She carries the show on many levels, because, ultimately, it is her character’s story. She gives us Catherine in a package we want to receive.

In a strong but nuanced performance she shows us how Catherine moves through her day with competence and good humor, and we see with the subtlest of expressions the grief she still carries and the obsession that burns for Tommy Lee Royce, the man she blames for his part in her daughter’s death.

And we we understand it, or want to, because we care about her now, and we feel a little like Clare, making pizzas while holding our breath, hoping Catherine can keep it together when she discovers that Royce is now out of prison.  Even so, this is no stoic repressed cop.  Catherine is all business.  Yet, when life’s events overtake her, she cries, and freely,  and she is a more compelling character because of it.  She cries as she should, as we all would.

Many reviews of “Happy Valley” refer to Catherine as a flawed woman. Too easy, I think. Catherine as Wainwright has written her and Lancashire portrays her is this–deeply human, a person suffering and persevering.

Heroic. 

In pain.

But living.

Committed, ultimately,  to doing the right thing.

I’d like to think that Catherine Cawood is out there keeping me safe. And I’d like to know where she got her boots.

Here we are at the dead end of summer. Never mind that summer isn’t officially over until sometime in mid-September. It is over for most of us when school starts up.

And cruelly, school began for some of us in the first week of August.

Just as the Queen is heading to Balmoral for her summer vacation with lovely hikes in the highland hills, teachers and children here are heading back to classrooms and smart boards and lunch money and those odd little pouches of milk.

August was the month of swim lessons when I was a child, not that I ever mastered the sport. Lessons began after the pool had closed for the day and I remember long rides home wrapped in a soggy towel, lips blue and teeth chattering from the sudden coolness of evening.

When did we make the back-to-school switch to early August from after Labor Day? Is there any chance of going back? I need just one month more.

Toward that cranky end, let me share with you some things I discovered this summer to help us all make little changes in our lives or perhaps see the world differently. The new school year is a great time to turn over just one more leaf before the dark days of January when we make resolutions in earnest.

Dr. Robb Rutledge of University College London says that the secret of happiness is really quite simple.

Lower your expectations.

He and his research team have discovered that our day-to-day wellbeing does not reflect how well things are going, but whether things are going better than expected.

Then, being scientists who are compelled to do what scientists do, they wrote a complicated mathematical equation that can accurately predict people’s happiness.

It makes some sense, really. Remember the old saw, “he who expects nothing is never disappointed?” It’s sort of like that.

New school years, new resolutions are fine and dandy, but perhaps we will have a happier time of it if we just sit back and let it happen, calm-like and wise.

And this. New research, and, of course—a new product–is on the market in Great Britain promising the fountain of youth in an attractive little jar. It seems that a Bill Kenny, from Croghan Hill, Ireland has launched new skincare products made from peat bogs found on his property. The thinking goes like this.

If the peat in these bogs can beautifully preserve the skin of a 9000 year-old body, why couldn’t it stop our skin aging dead in its tracks?

Why, there is no reason, no reason at all.

I have seen bodies mummified in peat bogs and I can tell you they look fabulous. Creepy, but fabulous. Their skin is almost frozen in time, with laugh lines and little furrowed brows, and they are burnished to a lovely hue.

An analysis of the material in Mr. Kenny’s peat bogs has been shown to contain high levels of antioxidants and antiseptics. He even tells his own story from childhood when he severely burned his hand and his mother thrust it into a peat bog, where, miraculously the pain ceased and his hand was restored to health, almost at once.

His product line is called Ogra, and the 100% peat face and body mask sells for a mere $66.00. I don’t know if it is available in the US yet, but when it is, I am getting some. Kenny’s bog is only fourteen acres and how long can it last, once the secret is out?

Now I know you may think I have given with one hand and taken with the other here, what with that early talk about low expectations. But honestly. While we are going about our day, expecting very little and achieving happiness in the process, there is no reason why we can’t look good while we are doing it.

We are over the moon in our clan because we have welcomed a new addition, Little Miss Lillian. It has been almost seventeen years since we have had a baby around and we just about worn that one out.

He drives now, when he can get the keys and frankly, he has taken a lot of the fun with him. Once they are that kind of mobile, good luck pinning them down after that, and it is a sad day, and there is nothing to do but pack up the Legos, bundle up the colored markers, corral the balls and frisbees and contemplate your decline and eventual demise.

But this new baby, why she can hardly move at all except for her little newborn reflexes—rooting, grasping, startling and the like–so she is apt to stay where we put her for a long time. And that’s just fine with us.

Little Lil is barely a month old and spent the Fourth of July as the main attraction on her grandparents’ sofa. She and her parents–whom we love but are a bit old hat—made the trip home for her first unveiling for the extended family. She must have gotten a bit carsick and by way of greeting she upchucked impressively as soon as they walked in the door. Her evening went downhill from there.

So she was catching up on her beauty sleep on the sofa when we arrived and I wish you could have seen it, all these adults, just sitting on the edge of their chairs and standing over her, never taking their eyes off her sweet little face and all that hair.  For this child was born with some hair. So much that a few days after she was born she had reached up and grabbed a fistful, and didn’t know how to let go until her father, hearing her cries, came to the rescue and pried her fingers loose.

Her mother says she has good dreams, and it must be so, because as we all gazed upon her transfixed, her little nose would scrunch up, she would smile and gurgle, while she dreamed and dreamed and dreamed.

It took some doing, exhausted as she was, but someone, I think her Great Aunt Judi, woke her up. It wasn’t me. We then passed her around like a nice loaf of rye and she was warm like new bread, and smelled divine. The men weren’t in the queue to hold her, because come on, let’s get our priorities straight, but even when they were talking about manly things, the didn’t look at each other but kept their eyes on her.

Because babies are mesmerizing. There are all sorts of theories on this, psychological, anthropological, but why sully a perfectly good story of my sweet little great niece with all that smarty-pants stuff. Babies are mesmerizing because they are ours, they are us.

We have decided, for example, that she looks like my niece, Katie, but only from the eyes up. She looks like Katie because when she was a baby, she had lots of hair, too, and dark eyes, and a wrinkly forehead, just like Lil. I can’t tell you the amount of time we have spent discussing this. As I am sure the relatives on the other side of the family are equally convinced she looks like them.

After hearing the hair pulling story, which is really cute and is destined to be her first family story to follow her the rest of her life, my mother said, “well, I think she might just be something else.” Which means, a character, high-spirited, engaging, all sorts of good things. A funny little girl.

But of course, we don’t know anything yet. Don’t know who she really looks like, because she will look like herself, with glimpses of all of us, here and there, but only in this feature or that, or in fleeting moods across her face. What we are doing, I suppose, is daydreaming about her as a new little person, and thinking about her in our lives and what we might do together, Christmases and birthdays, and summer afternoons blowing bubbles in the backyard.

We are studying her face to learn her, this tiny thing who we will protect, defend and cherish. We are fierce, already, in our love for her. She’s ours. As simple as and sudden as that. Asleep on the couch with a headful of hair.