So, last night there was a bit of a storm here. When I say ‘bit of a storm’, I mean, of course ‘fuck-buggery – who pissed the god of weather off?’. Thunder, for over an hour and a half, which seemed to consist of not one but two rather angry storm systems circling around the witchery, one directly overhead, one rumbling off into the distance over the nearby forest. Rain so aggressive that this morning we are literally cut off – the many routes away from the witchery are all flooded, and we are really quite relieved that our house is on something of a rise in an otherwise very flat little area – up the lane, several houses have been flooded out, and the bottom of our garden shows a clear tideline where the water came in the night. Frankly, I’m glad I’m not a chicken – the chooks’ house is only about a foot or so off the ground, and there was a lot of water about last night… The irony? The witchling slept through it all, even the window-rattlingly loud thunder directly overhead. I had her snuggled up against me, thinking that any minute the wailing would commence, and I waited, and I waited, and… it just didn’t. No accounting for some people, is there?

One slight concern is that the mains water connection we had installed (remind me to moan about that, incidentally – we have an ongoing battle with the contractor we used [we owe them about £2500, but haven't paid because the work hasn't been done to regulation standards] and with South-West Water, which has mysteriously volunteered to adopt some of the pipework as their own, for reasons which remain both unknown and disturbingly nepotism-like) is right in the path of the normal flood route. This area floods a lot, whenever there is persistent rain. So, er, all the time, then. The drains aren’t even vaguely coping, and the water is running straight down the road.

In fact, not just straight down the road, but right off with the road:

 Interesting, non? Yes folks – so wet was the night, and so crappy the road surface, that the whole thing has been badly eroded. And of course our water meter is right about there. Keep your fingers crossed that the connection survives, eh?

In other news, I shall shortly be posting pictures of Quercus’s Grand Erection. (Sorry. I had to say that. You know how it is.) Yes – the extension. Not finished, but coming along. Last night reminded us that one of the rooflights is still leaking rather badly; unfortunately the bit one needs to get at in order to lather sealant all over the place requires a level of dexterity something akin to Nimble Fingers the Nimble, From Nimble Town. And that only on an extra-specially nimble day. So, for now, the time-honoured solution: a tarp.

Also, tarps on the woodpile – at the moment, we are burning wood which is decidedly damp, which is basically a really bad idea as it clogs your chim-chiminee up with lots of nasty tar. Oops. We wanted to put up a wood-framed woodstore this summer, but what with one thing and another, the project has yet to be started, and the extension is still on the go. The irritating thing is that of course, because we are thinking of doing something, the planning regs have recently changed, meaning that now, if we want the woodshed to be a lean-to construction, against the side of the house, we have to use materials which match the original house. Or so we are told by a halfwit planning officer. We have to apply for planning permission, and pay £130 or so, if we want the outside facing of the woodstore to be anything other than a pretty close match to the rest of the house, i.e. cob and thatch. Bear in mind that if we only needed listed building consent, the application would be free.

Now, you might think that living in a listed building, and thus having to apply for listed building consent, theoretically, if you change a light fitting, might mean that the fact that we were pretty much going to have to do something in-keeping for the woodshed, because otherwise, the conservation officers can make you undo whatever you’ve done. But no – planning permission is required as well, just to make extra-super-specially sure that we do something appropriate. The irony of this, she said, sitting in a room with cement-based plaster and a uPVC window fitted at the back of the house, is not lost on us. It sucks, it does. It sucks large hairy things through very small spaces. It’s either going to mean relocating said woodstore so we can get away with doing things the way we want to, or making laths and an earth plaster up. At the moment, we’re inclining towards the latter; we both enjoy buggering about with large quantities of mud, be it as clay and pottering or as cob and house-buildering, and speaking as the owners of three tonnes of lime plaster, somehow knocking up some earth plaster and buggering about with some of ye olde lathes seems quite fitting.

Today is…

lunch with a good friend, eating home-made scones (leek and chive, since you ask) while discussing secondhand finds at children’s clothing sales;

bringing home two large bags of windfall apples (Russets and cookers);

finding pumpkins for sale outside the village post office, and, most unusually for me, getting both a good-shaped round chap with a nice shade of bright orange to boot (why oh why can I never manage to grow pumpkins, as an aside? Three years in and virtually nothing to show as yet);

listening to Quercus using a planer to make rough-sawn timber into smooth bathroom shelving;

wondering at the witchling sleeping for three and a bit hours yesterday (as daytime snoozes), and thus far having managed over two hours today;

managing an hour’s work on my thesis corrections, and nearing the end of the minor bits and bobs (though there are still some bigger things to do, sadly – how on earth I’ll get through these without imploding I have yet to work out, but I am operating on a ‘do not consider what is not immediately in front of you THIS SECOND’ footing at the moment);

buying woollen dreadlocks from the lovely Crazy Momma (don’t judge me – it was the colours! They made me do it!);

realising that, actually, I could make said dreadlocks, and will be having a go shortly, just as soon as I track down some nicely coloured roving;

watching the hedges in the lanes near the witchery being cut back, revealing views we haven’t seen since last autumn;

breathing out.

So far today, the witchling has slept for a massive hour and twenty minutes. She woke up at about 6.45, having spent the hour or so from four until five wide awake and not wanting to settle; this, we think, is because she spent about six hours of yesterday, as in during the day, asleep, which is most unusual for her, despite being what all the bastard literature tells one one’s baby needs at this age. Two two- to three-hour naps, they say, helpfully. My arse, I reply, ruefully. She is now grumpy, surprisingly, but doesn’t want to go to sleep – we have just had a forty-five minute debate about whether or not she should be asleep, ending in my bringing her back downstairs again. It is now too late to take her out for a walk as we are awaiting a delivery between four and six, and she has pretty much missed the nap boat, as far as I can see.

This morning, we went to see a cranio-whatsit practitioner up the road. It is really quite expensive. I am bloody hoping it helps. I had thought it was doing – we saw him for an initial assessment last Thursday, and the witchling slept more for the following three days, even managing a four-hour stint one night, which is virtually unheard of these days. However, today, while she has been reasonably even-tempered, she is just not having any of this ‘sleeping for more than an hour in one go’ malarky, and remains obdurate to the bitter (in my case) end.

Sometimes, this is quite hard work, you know.

Anyway, let us all keep our lovely little fingers crossed very firmly about the cranio chap. God knows, I can’t think of much else to try, though I am considering the dairy connection, or possible lack thereof, in my spare moments (because of course, in between baby-wrangling, PhD-correction-doing, DIY advising, and ordinary household bollocks and whatnot, I am overwhelmed with free time. Oh yes.). As you may have gathered, I am not my usual sunny self today (!). I am quite worried about getting my sodding, sodding PhD corrections done in time; I have until December 17 if I want to make the winter graduation, and if I miss that, I’m looking at next July. At the moment, I am still wading through the minor corrections my external examiner has picked up – this is both long-winded and VERY FUCKING ANNOYING, because, as a gender specialist, she has told me, amongst many, many other things, to change every instance of ‘man’ to ‘person’. So, one cannot now say ‘the importance of something to mankind’. No. One has instead to say something like ‘humankind’. BECAUSE WE’RE ALL SO FUCKING PARANOID ABOUT OUR GENDERS, dammit. It pisses me off. Also, her first language is not English, and she is asking me to change a few things from being GOOD ENGLISH to BAD. This rankles slightly. Am I hiding it well? Yes? Oh good. I thought so.

This self-indulgent rant brought to you courtesy of lost child benefit reference numbers, a reduction in caffeine, and four hours’ sleep last night.

Thankyouverymuch – I’m here all week.

For as long as I have known him, I have been slightly in awe of Quercus’s ability to eat. Man, he can really eat. Vast quantities of potatoes – mashed, boiled, or roasted, the quantities don’t vary – together with sausages which are only in single figures because they are sold in eights, and bowls of ice-cream piled genuinely high enough to make most ice-cream vans look amateurish – these are images from Quercus’s childhood which continue to hold true in his adult life.

And because of his prodigious appetite and catholic tastes, I have never made a big deal out of the very few things that he doesn’t like to eat.

Except.

Except.

Except for the fact that it has always been slightly boggling to me that Quercus, man of pudding, man of afters, man of ice-cream sundaes, does not like custard. DOES NOT LIKE CUSTARD. So, apple pie and… NOT CUSTARD. Apple crumble and… NOT CUSTARD. Stewed rhubarb and – yep, you’ve guessed it – NOT CUSTARD. I mean, I know there is a place in this world for cream and the varieties thereof which are frequently found in the west country (where cream is clotted, largely), but still – custard! Glorious, yellowy, vanillaishly deliciously custard. Or not, if you are Quercus.

Consider, then, my surprise when he revealed today, after we have been together for nearly a decade, enjoying what I believed to be a relationship based on mutual trust and honesty, that he likes doughnuts filled with custard! (As an aside, I didn’t even know that doughnut came other than with jam, or with bits missing in the middle.) NOT JUST CUSTARD, previously rejected as a heinous substance unfit for human consumption and causing the most intense expressions of disgust in one person of my acquaintance, but COLD CUSTARD.

Clearly, a new era has just dawned. There will be no allowances made from this day onwards. Custard it is. Custard it shall remain.

You were only twenty when I met you, and once you’d got past the terror invoked by a short person with a lot of blonde hair and a speech rate of thirty words per second, we got on quite well, really, quite quickly. I bought you a Horace Silver CD as a birthday present after I’d missed your birthday party, and some time soon thereafter we were as one, living in each other’s pocket from the very start. Here we are, quite some time later, and we have a daughter, two insane cats, some chooks and a chaotic little house that is stuffed to the gunnels with our plans, our dreams, and, frankly, rather a lot of mess (just who is it that keeps breaking in at night, making a disaster area of our entire house, creating shedloads of washing-up, and then silently departing, I ask?), and I couldn’t imagine a better partner for what my life has become.

Happy birthday, Quercus.

We have two cats, furry familiars who between them notch up eight legs, forty (forty!) claws, and more whiskers than is strictly proper. I probably haven’t introduced them properly, but they are Pyewacket, a black female cat aged about two or so, and Wixon, a black male who’s not long turned one. They came to us from the Cats’ Protection League, and we are delighted with their progress, particularly the wacket cat, who is virtually unrecognisable from the shy, cringing creature who arrived last November and promptly hid behind the television for the next few days.

However, while they are very lovely in many, many ways, recently, Wixon’s behaviour has started to become a problem. See, he was a tiny kitty, a veritable pusskin, when he arrived at only fourteen weeks of age, and we loved him, oh we did. We petted him, and we played with him, and we strokeded him, and so on until it was just sickening. And he purred. And purred. And purred. And purred so much that the vet had to make him sniff white spirit to stop him purring in order to listen to his heart. It was interesting. Not even vets get Wix down.

But… he’s always been a bit inclined to the old nipping. And recently it’s got rather worse. It was funny, at one point, when he used to stalk Quercus during the nightly expedition to shut up the chooks, not least because the way this happened went thus: Wixon hides underneath a dumpy bag which is currently covering up our cooker as it gently rots in the garden. Only trouble is that Wixon doesn’t realise that he is rather larger than he once was, and his tail sticks out, completely, obviously, and lavishly – he has a proper brush of a tail, and is altogether quite a foxy gentleman. So, then, he’d launch himself – surprise! shock! horror! – at Quercus’s legs as he walked past, making contact at roughly knee height, except, ah, yes, um, not that surprising, really, given the tail evidence. Anyway, the long and short of it is that he’s progressed from being a bit bitey to being really quite bloody bitey indeed. He walked over to me the other morning as I was about to feed him, waited until I wasn’t looking and calmly nipped me in the middle of one calf. And he waves his paws as if to grab one’s legs far too frequently for my liking. The worry is, of course, that he will decide that the witchling is far game as she blithely waves some part of her anatomy in his direction, and leap on her. Eeek. Doesn’t bear thinking about.

So, any ideas, o wise internets? Cat-training? More time spent with him? (I should add that he does get attention, and, whenever he’ll permit it without getting all frenetic and bitey, stroking and general furriness. He doesn’t get played with as much as he once did, though, and the two cats don’t seem to get on as well as they once did, either – they used to sleep curled up together on a sofa, but now Pye often growls at him as he comes in without even waiting for his usual string of transgressions.)

It is absolutely pissing it down, and the light of day never really arrived this morning – clouds, slight fog, and persistent rain is what it’s all about today. Fortunately the rain held off for the weekend’s rendering endeavours, so we now have what looks pleasingly like a proper building going on out there. I keep meaning to post a few pictures, but every time I sit down to do it, I either forget, run out of time, or encounter some sort of horrible Photobucket/iPhoto catastrophe which I always intend to sort ‘next time… or… later… or…’. You get the picture. (Or not, as it were.)

Anyway.

I think we are going to take the witchling to see a cranio-sacral therapist. Well, I say ‘think’; I mean ‘yes we fucking are because seriously: sleep, I needs it’. (And if any of you out there are feeling your little fingers just itching to type the words ‘harden your heart’, or ‘let her cry’, or indeed anything which isn’t a version of ‘poor you – have a cup of virtual tea and a chocolate biscuit’, then please restrain yourself. Sleep-deprived I may be, but I am still not up for letting her cry, and I still don’t believe that a four-month-old baby is manipulating me. Here endeth the sermon.) It turns out that a good friend of mine has a partner who, as well as being a gas-fitter and qualified plumber, is also a Reiki master and cranio-sacral practitioner. Heh. Who knew? So, if all goes to plan, Wednesday will see me piling into the car with the witchling and heading over to visit, passing perilously close to a rare breeds centre en route (I covet more chickens, despite knowing that e has two Aruacanas with our names on them; they are as yet too small to go in with our chooks, largely because they would simply walk through the larger-guage chicken wire that we use) and probably chanting ‘remember you can’t afford it’ throughout the entire drive. (That sort of chant covers most things at the moment, I find; largely, if it has a price-tag, I can’t afford it.)

See, the thing is that I am notoriously crap at deciding when That Day has arrived. You may recall such indecisiveness from the ongoing comedy-horror that way my FIVE-YEAR PhD study. Barely a day passed without me saying ‘that’s it! I am categorically quitting! I am SO DONE WITH THIS! It is a life of woe, mixed with a little misery, with just a hint of SORROW AND EXTREME POVERTY thrown in for good measure!’ Yet I stuck with it, kicking and screaming from time to time nonetheless. The reason for that was not that I am a persistent kinda gal with determination and [insert lots of other feisty-sounding adjectives here, please], but that I find it really, really, really hard to call time on things I find difficult or challenging in some way. Thus, despite the lack of sleep and the fact that I am wandering around most of the time in a gentle shade of fog, the thing that’s made me consider doing something differently in terms of baby-wrangling is not my own feeling about it, but the fact that I think the witchling is not getting enough sleep either, and that explains a fair quantity of her not-feeling-very-happyness. (And yes, that should be a ‘y’ in the middle, there, because it’s not ‘happiness’ I mean, but happy-ness. All clear? Right. Carry on, then.) So, we will try cranio-sacral therapy, putting to one side my experiences with the slightly crumbunctiuos therapissed I encountered when pregnant. Let’s hope it helps. It would be really nice to rediscover what the inside of my eyelids looks like.

Sometimes, despite the little voice in my head which questions everything I do, say, think, or even be, I think I am quite a strong woman. Most days, I feel an utter pillock, lurching from one dilemma to the next with little preparation and far too much prevarication, but just occasionally, I find myself looking back at a period in my life and thinking ‘gosh. Really?’. I think this might be one of those times, at some point in the future. I now look back on the time, the horrid, awful, terrifying time, when my mother was dying and I am astonished at the way I managed to keep going. Not in a Mother Theresa way, but just keep-on-keeping-on, sort of thing. I had just turned twenty-two when my mother died (my birthday is late November, and she died on December 14); I look at final-year students at the university where I work, and they look so young to me now, like little more than children. I suppose that having children of one’s own puts things in perspective somehow, and I find myself thinking about these things, particularly in the quiet (or not!) hours of the night when I am awake with the witchling.

Last night was a bit better, somehow, or at least it was different – the witchling woke at about ten, had a quick feed, went back to sleep, but woke again about twenty minutes later. I reached for some camomilla at that point, thinking that there must be something actually causing this waking, but by the time I’d made it back up the stairs, spoon in hand, she was virtually back asleep, with a little sort-of-perhaps-maybe crying which didn’t appear to require anything from me at all. I now begin to wonder if I am reacting too quickly at night – I know that she makes noises in her sleep, but I wonder now if some of the cries I have heard, and had myself upright in two seconds for, previously would actually have been self-resolving if I’d not made a big deal of it. I dunno.

And under it all, when I am not so tired that I am actually tearful, I know that this too shall pass, as Turquoise Lisa puts it, and probably all too quickly – already, the witchling has moved from ‘tiny baby’ to 3 – 6 months in clothing sizes, and things which once seemed roughly akin to giant when compared with her are now rapidly being outgrown. I think I need to learn to listen to myself a bit more – to stop trying to find a ‘cure’ for things that cannot be cured (‘you have a severe case of… Baby!’), and to believe that I can trust my own judgment without needing to research everything. See, this is what bloody years of being a student does to you…

Anyway. Enough of all this emotional bollocks.

In other news, Quercus is outside putting external render over a layer of Heraklith boarding today; thus far, it is not pissing it down, which, as well as being something of a miracle given that it’s Devon and October, means the work is going relatively well and he hasn’t yet achieved Giant Drowned Stoat Appearance, an unavoidable transition in any building work we undertake, in my experience. Who knows – soon, we may even have a back door without a large hole in it where it had rotted away on the old extension! Whatever next, I ask.

Somehow, we appear to have gathered the world’s supply of carrots. If you find yourself in a supermarket, bemoaning the hideous rise in prices of food recently, and your attention is drawn in particular to a lack of carrots, we are at the root of it (ha). Our fridge is stuffed full of the little orange blighters, and there is even an expat-style gathering happening in the cupboard; the overcrowding was not helped by the arrival of Quercus’s mother, who came armed with – yes, you’ve guessed it – a shedload of home-grown carrots. However, she did help in that she also brought apples, and in my way of thinking, carrots + apples = cake. So…

Carroty-Appley Cakey Thing*
Take…
Three large carrots, peeled if not organic, and grated either way
Three large apples (I used one Bramley and two of-uncertain-origin fallers), grated
A mug of dark brown sugar
Two mugs of self-raising wholemeal flour
Two eggs (as ever, free-range; thank you ladies)
½ mug of sunflower oil
¼ mug of sunflower seeds
Large (and I do mean large) sprinkle of cinnamon

Be the getting of a large bowl. Stick the listing of the thingses into the large bowl. Mix. Sling into a tin (I used the ubiquitous orange silicone loaf moulds – how I love them) and bake at about 180°c for about, well, as long as it takes for the knife to come out unrevolting. Whip out when touchable, cool, and scoff. Or, if you are me, whip out when very fucking hot indeed and eat indecent quantities despite the apparent risk of indigestion.

* See? My eloquent titling remains unchanged.

I think we have an answer, Watson – the teeth game is afoot. I realised last night that the witchling, despite waking up approximately every twenty minutes for most of the night, was genuinely trying her best to sleep. This morning, a cautious rootle in her mouth revealed a white bump on the front of her lower gum. She is dribbling for England, has developed a slight cough, and, yesterday, had a mild temperature in the evening. Case closed, methinks. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s exactly fun, buggering about at such frequent midnight intervals, but at least there appears to be a reason other than bloody-mindedness (something I have always struggled to attribute to a four-month-old child, anyway). Pass the camomile.

Thanks to all of you who suggested cranio-sacral therapy. I am pondering it. See, trouble is, I’m slightly biased against it – I went to see a cranio chap when I was pregnant, having been told how marvellous they were for SPD symptoms. The chappy, he was useless – he had me lying flat on my back, which, at thirty-four weeks pregnant, was not wildly comfortable, and he had no idea why I should have felt faint at that point. Well, er, perhaps because such a position puts the weight of the baby on several major arteries into one’s heart, or something similar…? I think that, and having worked in a shop where various alternative health practitioners were available (which meant also seeing how hit-and-miss many of their approaches were) and were clearly insane, means I’m a bit cautious, shall we say. I’m thinking about it again, though, in light of the recommendations.

For now, sleep. If possible.

So, we’ve decided to try some new tactics with the witchling and our current sleep deficit. In about three weeks, Quercus will be taking a month of unpaid leave from his job, hoping to break the back of the work left to do on the extension. In the lead-up to this time, we’re going to try to get the witchling sleeping more in her cot, by our bed, and less on one of us. We’re hoping that the softly, softly approach will pay off; neither of us is willing to leave her to cry (call us fools if you like; we don’t really care, and, frankly and quite wankily, I feel we have to do what our hearts tell us to some extent – how can something which feels so very wrong be the right thing?), but today Quercus succeeded in getting her to sleep for nearly an hour in the cot, having rocked her to sleep. This is progress from her only falling asleep while I feed her, so I am heartened, despite all the ‘useful’ advice that Quercus’s mother, who came to visit this weekend, gave us about ‘having to sort out this night-time stuff’. (An aside: what is it that makes the parent/child relationship so tricky when one has the temerity to increase one’s own numbers and reproduce?) And yes, I am still plagued with self-doubt – I can never quite decide if it is selfish to want some time to myself during the evenings, or if it’s a necessary part of being a mother, in order to still be me. If that makes sense. Part of me thinks that the witchling will be this little, this tiny, this full of needs on an immediate and intense scale, for so short a time that I should just go with it, and if she is with me twenty-four hours a day, then so be it. But then, Quercus and I decided to have a child because we wanted to add to our family, and our family began with just us, him and me, being together, so surely it’s important to continue making time for our relationship as partners, as well as parents, too?

In other news, we went to a NCT sale we went to yesterday, which means that we now have clothes for probably most of the next six months for a grand total of £22. £22. I mean – ! That’s only slightly more than a week’s child allowance. And there is rather a lot of velvetness involved, which is, of course, a good thing. And, of course, having the witchling about is clearly a good excuse for the knitting of very tiny pretty hats, and the purchase of ridiculously pretty wool (in affordably small quantities). Like this:

I still can’t knit in circles, though, dammit. Well, in truth, I haven’t really tried. I keep muttering things about double-pointed needles and whatnot, but I haven’t actually sat down and tried. However, this winter… I will, I will, I will, to quote the lovely Mrs. Doyle. The witchling and I spent a happy half-hour in the lane outside the witchery this afternoon, picking the last of the blackberries. The weekend weather has been gorgeous – bright sunshine, and, despite chillier evenings, warmth more fitted to late August. About time, I think, on the quiet, given the wash-out summer we had.

Oh, and while I’m thinking about it, do you, dear and much-esteemed reader, think it would be useful if I were to use categories and tags for writing here? So that recipes, for example, would be easier to find than they were at my old place? I’m seriously considering it, and I’m hoping to work out how to PDF the archives I’ve got, and stick ‘em up somewhere in my no-matter-how-long-I-stare-at-the-fucker-it-still-won’t-go-bold-for-headings sidebar.

Oh goddy goddy god. I am having one of those days. Last night, I got about three hours’ sleep, and today I find I have a splitting headache, very little patience, and an overwhelming sense of, well, overwhelmingness. You know how it is – the very times when you need the most strength are the times when you feel weakest, or something slightly less dramatic. See, the witchling has yet to hit that time when sleep is easy and straightforward. I wrote about this once previously, on my other blog, and lots of people suggested lots of things, which was lovely, but mostly, I just feel plagued by constant self-doubt. Am I doing things wrong? Is there something obvious which I’m missing, which, if corrected, would make for simple sleep, even if only for three hours at a time? Has something changed, other than the witchling’s age? When she was about eight weeks old, she was, I thought, beginning to get something of a pattern. C, who was very supportive with the witchling when we were staying with her and my father while the building work here at the witchery meant that it made more sense for us to jump ship temporarily, took the witchling in to sleep in their room for a few nights, bringing her in to me for feeding when she woke in the night; she settled reasonably easily, and soon woke only twice a night, once at two, and again at five. That is now a distant memory, as is sleep in blocks of more than, well, anything from forty-five minutes to two hours. And yes, I know there are lots of people out there for whom the leave-them-to-cry-or-they’ll-never-settle thing works, but for me, the crying, it is not worth it. All that happens is that she gets very distressed, and Quercus and I simply can’t stand it. It also takes far longer to settle her down again afterwards, and given that I am running on empty, sleep-wise, the idea of actually getting less sleep is quite scary. Anyway, this morning we went to see Cathy, a homeopath friend of mine, who has given us some pulsatilla and some camomilla to try with the witchling, and suggests that we move her cot, from being virtually attached to the side of the bed, into what will be her room. The witchery is so tiny that having both doors open would mean a certain degree of distance without any chance that I would miss a sound in the night, but perhaps a bit more space might help her to sleep for longer. I alternate between thinking that I am being hideously selfish (‘what did you expect? you’ve had a baby – live with it!’), and thinking that having more than three hours a night of sleep would help me to be more on the ball during the day, which could only be a good thing. Mostly, I cope surprisingly well, but three hours gets to be a bit of an uphill struggle after a bit, and more sleep would definitely not hurt her, I am thinking.

Ohhh.

Ramble, ramble.

In other news, my father remains, well, my father. We haven’t spoken again since his ‘aren’t I generous; I’m not after you right now’ call of the other day. I am trying to work out what to do longer-term about the way that I relate to him. I don’t want to pass on all this shit to the witchling. Part of me thinks it would be horrid for her not to have a relationship with him, but at the same time, a) he’s not going to come and visit any time soon because he is, of course, far too busy doing things with his new family to bother about us (and yes, I do know how bitter and twisted that sounds; sorry – blame the sleep deprivation, along with a certain degree of ‘but it’s true!’ness), and b) would she really be missing out, given the way that he has treated me? It’s a tricky one to call, and I don’t really seem to be able to make a decision.

In still other news, flapjack. Ohhh, flapjack – friend of my soul. That is what. This emotional bollocks is all well and good, but flapjack is clearly more important. As are pictures of the witchling in a hat wot I knitted her the other day; I will be posting these as soon as time permits, and, dear reader, feel free to make pleasingly flattering comments about how sweet she looks. Oh, and while I’m thinking vaguely about flapjack, I think what I shall do about the recipes I had posted on my last blog is to PDF the entries (so they’re not Google-able, or something), and post them here too. Or something. Does that make sense? I don’t want to lose the history I had built up in my previous incarnation, but I do want to keep the freedom of my new online home. Oh yes.

Well, some things good, some things less-so. My father rang last night to let me know that he and C, his new wife, have had an offer accepted on a house they like. The house is on the market for £380,000 (the same as C’s house in Kent, in fact), and their offer was £350,000, which was accepted by the (probably very sensible) owner in less than an hour. O joy, o thrills, o delight complete – this, he tells me, in a tone of benevolent generosity which clearly, in his view, warranted much grovelling on part of recalcitrant daughter (insert King Lear quote here), means that, while he does want the money back, of course, he probably won’t have to ‘push me too hard’ for it, for now. Oddly, I don’t feel quite the degree of gratitude that this announcement was supposed to bring forth, probably because it changes nothing. Whether he pushes me hard or not, we still haven’t got it, and when he went on to tell me that he now has a cash buyer on the horizon, interested in his house at £295,000, perhaps it is not surprising to hear that I felt a renewed sense of ‘it’s not fair!’ness that he wants it back at all, bearing in mind his statement not so many weeks back that it was ‘gone’. Of course, a budget of £600,000 is really not enough… Excuse me while my bitterness seeps out there – it happens from time to time. (How do you think we got all those stains on the carpet?)

Anyway, there you go. Such is life, or something. Blue Witch asked in the comments on my last post whether or not I thought this might precipitate an irreconcilable breakdown in our relationship, and I have been thinking about that quite a bit in the last few days. Thing is, I just don’t know. I feel at the moment that we have already reached that point, at least in some ways – I note, with a sort of wry amusement tinged with a fear that I only seem to feel when confronted with the withdrawal of a parental affection about which I am ambivalent at the best of times (so why the fear, I ask myself, but I don’t seem to be able to answer that one), that he is now calling me by my full name, rather than the shortening he has used for years. I don’t know if he even knows he is doing it. He is also now ‘Dad’ in cards, it seems, rather than the ‘Pa’ he has been since I was about ten. Again, not sure if it’s conscious, but it seems to me… significant. I think the thing is that whether or not our relationship breaks down completely is, to a large extent, up to him at this point. I can only do what we can reasonably manage; paying him the £13,000 isn’t really an option, although of course we could work something out for paying him back monthly, I suppose. But the only way that we’re going to come through this is if he learns that he can’t just say anything to me and expect me to take it, and if he learns to treat me at least to some degree as an adult. And I can’t see that happening, any more than I can imagine his conversations losing some of the slightly cringey ‘Isn’t C wonderful? She painted an entire wall, all on her own! She’s so versatile, and talented’ness which has peppered our phonecalls since he met her. Not that I mind that he thinks that, you understand; far from it – I wanted him to meet someone new, to have a life of his own. But when it’s tempered by the fact that he seems to have nothing good to say of my mother, that’s rather different. ‘C prepared a picnic for us. Of course, your mother would never have done that; she was always too disorganised’, and so on. It makes my blood boil. If we’re going to get picky about it, there is no question that my mother was a more unusual woman than C. For ‘unusual’, read ‘talented’. I really don’t want to be the person who thinks that, but the achievements for which C receives such praise are as nothing to my mother’s accomplishments, which didn’t get much praise during her lifetime, and now appear to have disappeared completely from his memory, and while C is astonishing for, say, being able to do simultaneous equations (which, admittedly, must involve a form of witchcraft far surpassing my own talents in that area), the completion of my PhD garnered me a perfunctory ‘well fancy that’ sort of response. I dunno. It’s all so achingly predictable, innit? I sound like a jealous teenager, and I am so angry with him for putting me in that role, for bringing out all this crap, and for his total failure to see that anything he ever does might be, say, questionable.

So. Have we a future together? Frankly, the jury is out on that one. And they’re taking a long lunch. On expenses.

(Please do realise that I say all of the following knowing how incredibly fortunate we are to be in the situation where we can afford to own a house AT ALL, let alone one as nice as the witchery (for all its damp and work-neededness), and that I am very aware that this might make me sound like an ungrateful arsehole. I don’t think I’m an arsehole, but then do people ever think they are? Oh, and also, this is quite long. Because my head is full of it all, and I want to get it out, so to speak.)

So here’s the thing.

When we bought the witchery, just over three years ago, Quercus (as he shall now be known) and I were pretty hard-up. We were in the incredibly fortunate situation of Quercus having had a large sum of money left to him by his much-loved Grandma, and that meant that our first house had been owned outright, an unusual situation for people of twenty-five, but in terms of income, we were trotting along roughly fifty pence above the breadline – I was doing my PhD full-time while working for the university as a note-taker for disabled students, which was well-paid but not consistent, and Quercus was working for the local electricity board and earning about eleven thousand pounds a year. We raised the money necessary to step up from a two-bedroom terrace house in the middle of a village (a very pretty house, and one we loved really quite a lot, except for the presence of Mr. and Ms. Horrendous, our ghastly, mid-week-parties-until-2.00-a.m. neighbours) to the witchery, a tiny detached cottage with no near neighbours, by including any savings we had, saving like mad once we knew we were going to have to sell our first house (because of the neighbours – once we’d realised that any neighbours could potentially piss us off that much, there was never much chance we’d stay beyond the time it took to do the place up and get it back on the market), taking out the biggest mortgage our ridiculous and inconsistent income could reasonably support, never going out, and, unfortunately, borrowing thirteen thousand pounds from my father.

At the time, I had ten thousand pounds in an ISA; most of this arrived as part of an insurance settlement which my parents were given after a really quite awful road accident when I was in my first year at university as an undergraduate; bizarrely, because I took a lot of time off, returning home for weeks at a time to look after them as they recovered from broken arms, legs, shoulders and whatnot, our solicitor was able to get me a large lump sum of attendant’s care-type fees. I always felt quite wrong about accepting this money, as if it somehow meant I had only looked after my parents because of the financial recompense, but, realising the sense of it, I took it, of course, putting it in a savings account and forgetting about it for several years, as if time could disinfect it, cleanse it of the unpleasant circumstances under which it arrived. Obviously, all that money went into the house-purchase, and Quercus and I were left with pretty much no savings, which was fine – we had the house, and we expected to work bloody hard to do it up, returning it to some shadow of its former, er, glory. (‘Glory’ seems a bit extreme, given that it’s a teensy little house which probably housed farm labourers in previous years, but you know what I mean.)

Anyway, the agreement with my father, which, I should add, he suggested in the first place, was that we would borrow thirteen thousand pounds from him, to be repaid either when we sold the witchery (which we estimated would be somewhere between five and ten years later), or when our financial circumstances had improved considerably. He said he wasn’t in a hurry to have it back, and was happy to lend on that footing. He also saw the house before we offered to buy it; I wanted him to realise that it needed a lot doing, and would take both time and money to finish.

Fast-forward three years. In the intervening time, Quercus and I have both changed jobs, he to a better-paid, but not vastly-so, admin thingy which pays the bills but bores him immensely, and me to working full-time for the university at which I’ve been doing my PhD. Our situation is thus: once we realised we were going to have a baby, we saved like mad to ensure that I could take the full year offered for maternity leave without needing to do things like taking a break on the mortgage payments, or getting silly with credit cards. I had built up some savings again as soon as I started working (each month I still feel they’ve got it all wrong somehow, and will some day want all that money back; being a PhD student for years and years has made me really appreciate having proper money, as has having a childhood filled with bailiffs, county-court judgments and constant awareness of paternal debt), trying really quite hard to dig myself out of the debt I had accrued while doing my MA (about two and a half thousand, or so) and build up a safety net which had disappeared with our house-move. So, having a baby wasn’t something we lurched into without any thought, nor, I don’t think, was it something we did recklessly, in terms of our finances. We knew that we would shortly be replacing the old and really quite buggered extension on our house, and that this would mean borrowing more money (this time from Quercus’s mother), but we had worked out a budget, and we felt, if not happy, comfortable with the financial times coming our way.

These three years have also seen my father become something like the man he was before my mother died (not in the road accident, but, for new readers, from breast cancer when I was in my final year of university, which was, and continues to be, incredibly shit – I miss her every day, and I think I always will – my grief reached a plateau about three years ago, but it never goes, really). Well, he was always that same man, but he began to want more out of life than ringing me up every night, worrying about what I was doing, and generally disapproving of my choices. (Did I mention that when Quercus and I decided, after we’d been together for six years, that perhaps getting married would be a nice idea, he said we should be sure to do it when he was on holiday, as he couldn’t in good conscience come when he disapproved of our relationship? Despite the fact we were clearly happy, settled, and, er, going to stay together?) Anyway, after he’d pissed about with one or two other candidates and generally behaved in a slightly bewildering, and, to me, immoral fashion for a few years*, he met his now-wife, who was just separating from her husband at the time, and was clearly in need of a confidante. They began seeing each other, and despite reservations, decided to marry. The upshot, which is quite a shortened version, is that they have now relocated, leaving two houses still to sell, and are renting in a new area while they house-hunt. They both think they are hard-up. To clarify: he has, as a pension, more than I earn working full-time in a reasonably-paid job, and he owns outright a house on the market for £350,000. She, meanwhile, owns another house outright, this one on for £450,000; she also gets about £2000 a month in child support from her ex-husband. The house they are renting costs them £500 a month, and my father has let his house for £700 a month.

And here comes the punch-line.

My father now wants back the £13,000 he lent us. Because they are ‘pushed’. Because they ‘need’ to buy a house. Because ‘it was only ever a loan; how did we think we were going to pay it back?’ We ‘must have known he would want it back some time’. Despite his having said, when I was visiting him some two months ago, that he ‘wouldn’t be looking for the money back, and considered it gone’. Because I ‘chose to give up a good job to have a baby; that was my choice, of course, but I should have thought about where it would leave me financially, really, shouldn’t I?’. Never mind the fact that Quercus and I worked all this out in advance; never mind the fact that we believed him when he said he didn’t want the money back any time soon; never mind the fact that they have two houses which are worth far more than they need to spend to buy another house for them in their new area; never mind the fact that it is sheer IMPATIENCE, sheer ‘the world according to us’ness, that makes them move areas, abandoning two perfectly acceptable houses in favour of a rented one they don’t like.

As you can possibly tell, I am quite frustrated.

I have explained several times that we haven’t got the money, can’t get the money, don’t really see why we should have to, like this, bearing in mind his recent comments on its being ‘gone’. I have also pointed out that, when he said he was getting married again, he was aware that moving into one house with his new wife would probably mean that the inheritance he had always said would be coming my way would probably be absorbed into this new house, and that he didn’t want that to happen, and would take steps to ensure it wasn’t. I don’t care about the inheritance. I never have done. I always just wanted him to be happy, to have someone for himself, to have a proper life again rather than the half-shadow life he led after my mother died. But I didn’t mean that at the expense of having to go back to work when my daughter is a few months old in order to support a larger mortgage raised solely to finance his whims. I didn’t mean that at the expense of selling the one thing my mother left to me, a Steinway piano which he effectively forced me to rent to someone when he arbitrarily announced he could no longer ‘store it’ for me. (This last announcement, of course, came after months of trying to get me to sell the piano, completely ignoring the fact that it was my mother’s piano, and that for that very reason, I would sooner chew my arm off than part with it.)

I have reached a peak of frustration with him. He doesn’t seem able to understand AT ALL why I am upset. He implies I am being unreasonable, that we have behaved irresponsibly financially in the choices we have made regarding the timing of our daughter’s birth. He says it was a bad idea that we have children, or, rather, he doesn’t argue when I suggest this is what he thinks. (I should add, as I am clearly on a roll, that he also implies that the witchling is a bad baby – she doesn’t ‘behave’ as she should, i.e. doesn’t yet sleep through an entire night at four months, and, heavens forbid, she cries – saints preserve us. I am not taking a firm enough hand, clearly; she should be left in her cot to cry herself to sleep, and if she gets frightened, angry, or just upset, so be it. Clearly. Because of course that will ‘fix’ her. She is a problem child, after all. [/sarcasm]) And meanwhile, we are trying to finish an extension which Quercus has done, with the help of Lovely David, on his own; we are adjusting to life with a new baby; I was finishing my PhD; we are economising right, left, and centre to make sure we have enough money despite food costing half an arm more than it did a year ago (Quercus will shortly be listing his beloved Citröen CX on eBay, for example), and we are doing all this on half-pay for me, and Quercus’s not-extravagant pay. We planned this; that bit is fine. We expected money to be tight, but not too tight. And now we are supposed to just throw all that to one side, and prioritise my father’s whims by extending our mortgage or handing over any savings we have to him, to finance his house-move.

Two words: fuck off.

* I don’t mean ‘immoral’ as in ‘ooh, you’re not sleeping together out of wedlock, are you?’ way, but in an ‘I can’t believe you treat people like that’ sort of way.

Bums the first: the witchling woke up at about 4.30, and basically didn’t go back to sleep because she appeared to be uncomfortable in some way. I’m not sure what that way was, of course, but there was something not right – every time she drifted off, it lasted about fifteen minutes or so, and then she was awake again, and not very happy about it. Not in a screaming-the-place-down way; more a ‘please make this go away! I would really like to sleep now!’. This, coupled with a similar experience the night before (with the difference that that was 3.30), means I am a bit flat today.

Bums the second: one of our newly-installed rooflights is leaking. The water has run down from one corner and all along the new plaster. I really hope nothing dreadful is going on there; to be honest, at the moment, it feels like we are running on empty and have very few resources to draw on, both mental and financial.

Bums the third: I keep realising anew that next May should see me return to work, leaving the witchling… well, I don’t quite know where. It’s playing on my mind already; for so long, I have wanted to find That Thing That I Am Supposed To Do, For Work, instead of This Thing, Which Will Do For Now, and this has made that sense of something being not quite right all the stronger. I don’t know how I will manage to work this one out, if indeed I will, but I realise that I probably need rather more sleep than I am currently managing in order to work anything out at all, as demonstrated by the rather moronic hit-and-miss experiences I am having with CSS at present.

Bums the fourth: I may be hacked off about work, but times it by about a thousand and you have the current work-related emotions of, er, that person of the male gender who is as yet unnamed in this forum.

Bums the fifth: there is really a lot left to do on the extension. The external walls desperately need the Heraklith boarding which will finish them off, as well as a coat or two of render; the bathroom needs tiling; the floor needs grouting throughout; the wiring needs finishing off; the attic space needs boxing in properly; the airing cupboard needs… er… to exist; we need something beyond a scout-hut-style kitchen, with, preferably, more than one cupboard, and a cooker which doesn’t consist of two rings, an oven which stops one (I can never remember which) of the rings working, and a grill which stops both working; the roof needs flashing adding; the windows need catches fitting; the backdoor has a hole in it for the cats to get in and out, and doesn’t even nearly fit as it’s the old backdoor, and rotten as a pear. And that’s before I even think about what’s left on the house as a whole. The windows need work, fairly urgently. The render is cracked, and, being cement-based, doesn’t allow the cob beneath to breathe, which means the house is still damp, despite our being fervent window-openers, and despite the presence of the (All Hail!) woodstove (though the latter does help, very much so).

Bums the sixth: it’s over two weeks since my viva, and I haven’t even looked at the corrections I have to do. My deadline for these, if I want to make the winter graduation ceremony (not that I intend to go, but I would like to get this finished before Christmas), is December 15. That sounds like ages, until you think I haven’t managed to read the examiners’ report yet, and I’ve had it for fifteen days.

You know sometimes, when you just think, ‘arghhhhh’? Well, I suppose this may just be one of those days.