You know, my father didn’t even manage to send me a birthday card. I know it’s probably stupid, and at the very least something I should just get over, deal with and move on from, but he hadn’t even remembered that yesterday was my birthday. When I spoke to him on Wednesday and mentioned that Quercus had taken the following day off so that we could do something nice together, he shamefacedly admitted that he’d thought my birthday was Friday. I suppose at least he hadn’t forgotten altogether; however, here we are, Friday, and no card. He takes far more trouble over presents and support for his newly acquired stepdaughters than he does, or ever has done, for me.

It’s stupid to feel upset by it. I know this. What did I expect? It’s not as if I even feel that particular birthdays are wildly significant (18, 21, etc.), but I know that, for most people, 30 is something of a whatsit – you know, a milestone, or whatever. And I suppose for me it is too, even if I’m not desperately reaching out for the wrinkle cream while bemoaning the loss of my twenties – I have found myself thinking a lot of my mother in the week leading up to my birthday, not least because this time eight years ago saw me sitting on her bed in the hospice where she would die two weeks later, having a very subdued birthday lunch with her and trying to fight off the certainty that all was not well, and that, despite the doctors’ assurances, this would not turn out to be simply respite care designed to give her a boost. If my father feels any of this, he keeps it well-hidden.

He said in jocular tones that at least he bought me a present. I’m just going to give in to the inner teenager here for a mo, so please do excuse me: he came to visit two weeks ago, largely, despite his giving the impression that he was doing me a massive favour, because he was a) bored due to being in Kent alone while C and her daughters were back in the frozen North and he stayed behind to take care of some house-sale-related stuff, and b) to drop off some things he said I’d neglected to take with me when I cleared my stuff out of what used to be home. (That took two trips, one with a van while heavily pregnant, because the stuff ‘simply must be cleared now, and I’ve got it all ready so nothing will be overlooked’. Oh, except the entire contents of the attic and various cupboards. Oh, and half the fucking house, because I haven’t bothered to spend even half a day in preparation for this all-important clearing session. Sense the bitterness there? Oops.) He brought with him a broach which he’d bought en route. Now, two things, here: one – I never wear broaches. Two – it was clearly a chance buy, rather than a thought-out gift, and it’s tacky, frankly. He hadn’t wrapped it, and handed it over saying that he’d just happened to find it when he stopped. Maybe it’s sweet that he thought of me, and I am just an ungrateful troll. I don’t know. I just wish that, for once, he could take a few minutes to think about what I actually like, who I actually am, what I wear and what I think.

As I sit here, quietly ploughing my way through a rather lovely bar of ginger chocolate courtesy of Quercus (and Kernow Chocolate, of course), I know that I am very lucky. I have a husband who loves me intensely, absolutely, ridiculously, ‘a stupid amount’, as he told me in my birthday card yesterday. He is my best friend, my very own floor show, my companion, my first port of call for ideas, discussion, entertainment and humour. (Also, my mother loved him the first time she met him, which is always a nice feeling, particularly as they only overlapped for a year.) I also have a glorious daughter who is fit and healthy, ridiculously pretty, and learning and changing all the time, taking in her surroundings and deciding what she likes, what she dislikes, how things Should Be Done. Then there are my friends. I am lucky enough to have several close friends, the sort I know I could ring really late at night just because. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends, and I know that I am fortunate enough to have chosen very well in at least half a dozen instances. The cats are a constant source of delight, despite their nightly shrewicides (isn’t that a fabulous word? I stole it unashamedly from Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, Quercus’s current reading matter) and despite our constant feeling that Pye is in fact rather brighter than your average human being, and could, should she so choose, simply transport herself wither and thither without the need for boring details like movement or catflaps. (This would explain how she manages to come across our building-site garden and into the sitting room without getting mud either on her or on any surface, while Wixon only has to look through the catflap to be entirely covered in some disgusting substance or other. And don’t even get me started on the paw marks he leaves everywhere.) The house, while far from finished, feels like home. Not forever-home, but for-now-home, certainly. It is warm, cheery, chaotic, a complete and utter mess, but still it is our haven from the rest of the world, and when we shut the door, it feels as if no-one can touch us, should we prefer them not to. These are the things which matter. These are the people who matter. This is what I must focus on.

It’s my birthday today – I have somehow achieved a mighty thirty years on this planet, and I’m having quite a delightful day. Quercus and I have just been for tea and buns with the witchling at a very nice seaside town, and I have got four bars of chocolate to eat, a chocolate button cake, some handknitted socks from Cortes Island (my spiritual home, if so pretentious a phrase can be overlooked in light of it being my birffles), a red flexible trug bucket thingy, a copy of the Green Parent magazine, tons of candles, a book about knitting socks, some magic needles and some gorgeous wool, a pink felt hat and, very excitingly, a copy of Tales from the Green Valley. It is all most exciting. Oh, and Quercus made me breakfast, which involved grilled tomatoes and poached eggs. Lo, it was good. And on Saturday, we are going to the Yarner Trust‘s Christmas craft fair – I am so excited I can barely speak; in fact, in a bizarre Freudian typing slip, the first attempt at that sentence ended ‘I can barely squeak’.

Happy twenty-seventh of November, folks.

Why do wellies only fall over as one kicks them off when one has a large basket of wood in one’s arms, and are managing to stay upright only because of some sort of divine justice which – just to keep you guessing – does not find the concept of seeing one flat on one’s proverbial in the mud amusing this time?

Why does one only unplug the phone when one has forgotten one is waiting for some blighter to ring one back about something?

Why, of the entire kitchen floor, is the bit in front of the washing machine, i.e. right where the washing falls when one ineptly fumbles about at it in semi-darkness due to not having lighting sorted yet, the very grubbiest, despite attempts to clean it?

Why does Posset, an adventurous Buff Sussex chicken who appears to have been Scott of the Antarctic in a previous life, insist on escaping when I am in the middle of changing a grumpy witchling’s nappy?

So, in the spirit of a picture speaks a thousand whatsits and all that, here is a pictorial round-up of recent happenings here at the witchery. N.b. exciting line of washing which includes the world’s sweetest sock collection, together with a ridiculously over-the-top blanket which I made the witchling a few weeks ago as it became clear that cotton numbers just don’t cut it in a house with unheated bedrooms. Also, just as a quick reminder, QUERCUS BUILT THAT ENTIRE EXTENSION. Yes folks: everything you can see under the slate roof was built by Quercus (except the bits Lovely David did, but for present morale-boosting purposes, let us draw the proverbial veil over that). The shots of the various stages of plastering give some idea of the difference between harling coats and the final finish, I hope; it’s a long r to h but hopefully we’re beginning to get there. Also, note two pictures of gorgeous November weather hereabouts, included to remind me that there is more to life than thesis, nappies, and DIY, despite one’s constant sentiments to the contrary.

I saw my examiner yesterday, and it transpires that I have got to think about Foucauldian discourse. Foucauldian discourse. Oh, the woe of it. I really loathe critical theory, and Foucault is right at the top of my Titanic list. Along with Barthes. I hate Barthes. Bastard. Anyway, I have four main things to do to my wretched thesis (may it burn in hell): sorting out the introduction to include the references to Foucault, revising a section on spiritualism in relation to gender roles in the nineteenth century, inserting a bit about the crossover between magic and theatricality, and getting shot of anything which basically says that the remit of my thesis is not to decide whether or not these phenomena (the magic that I write about) were real, fraudulent, sincere or whatever, because my examiners feel that I don’t need to justify myself in that way provided I set up the Foucauldian discourse bit in the right manner.

Arses.

ARSES.

Anyway. This all relates, of course, to the witchling’s sleep, or lack thereof. I had my viva on September 18; I thought at that point that I would manage the corrections in the next few weeks, yet here I am, two months on, and still going. However, since I last posted here, the new tack that Quercus and I have been trying does appear – fingers crossed, touch wood, go to gaol and don’t pass go (or something) – to have helped. The witchling is asleep as I write this, although having had some immunisations this morning, we are not expecting the easiest of days; last night she slept from 6.30 to about 2.00 without really much of anything – she is teething and dribbly, and woke at about 8.00 briefly, but a quick bout of something herbal seemed to help and she went back to the land of nod. At 2.00, I fed her, and she then slept again until about 5.00, when more herbal teethingness was needed. This is a VAST improvement on recent weeks, especially bearing in mind the teething thing. Of course, the daft thing is that I am all paranoid about not putting her in her own room until she is six months old, which will be December 1, but at the moment she is effectively in her own room already as I am sleeping, har-di-bloody-har, on the floor in her room while she is in ours in her bedside cot, and Quercus is in the attic. So, shortly, I think it might be time for musical beds again. I think if we move her cot into her little room, and have both doors open at night, we might begin the transition back to – gasp! – actually sleeping in our bed – shock! horror! – together, with the witchling in her room. I wouldn’t have minded continuing to co-sleep if we had actually been co-sleeping, you see; as it was, there was only the co- bit, and no sleep, which isn’t quite what I had in mind, to be frank.

So, that’s all good, and I am learning to get past the guilt I feel about not co-sleeping, which is, clearly, quite ridiculous given that it was making us all ratty and generally rather unpleasant. The guilt, that is, not the getting past it.

In other news, it appears that I am quite good at finishing lime plaster off. I shall have to post some pictures shortly; we have rendered one wall at the back of the new extension, and today Quercus is starting to tile the bathroom. This will be Herculean in nature, as we are using those poncy little stone tiles which look like feta cheese; so lovely in a catalogue, yet so dauntingly hellish when you’re surrounded by the little blisters as far as the eye can see, and they are both ridiculously tiny and staggeringly heavy.

Onwards and sideways, or something.

[This is long, and dull, and sleep-addled, and written mainly for my own benefit. Read on at your own risk, and if you find it dull, sleep-addled, and mainly for my own benefit, well, you were warned.]

I’m notoriously shit at knowing when enough is enough, at accepting that there are limits, at deciding a thing once and for all and bloody well sticking with it. If you’re in any doubt about the shitness of my abilities in this respect, see, for proof, the many, many times I decided that I’d had it with doing a PhD, and would stop all this nonsense forthwith before the ol’ brain became any more addled by the whole thinking malarky. See what I mean? Yes. Indecisive, and not very good at knowing when to stop.

Last night, I reached the point where truly, I felt I’d reached That Point. That point where sleep became the absolute priority. That point where I could no longer find just a little bit more to hand over, that extra few minutes of attention and nurture, that constant reassurance. Sleep for me has become something of a mythical beast. I hear that others do it; I hear that it’s not unheard of for it to happen for hours at a time. I even hear that babies do it. Other people’s babies, of course. Not ours. No. Not ours. Well, not for more than a couple of hours. (As I type that, that ‘couple of hours’, I am already beating myself up, thinking ‘ah, but it could be worse – I have read of people whose babies sleep less than that at two, yet they maintain a gentle, nurturing approach throughout the night, somehow finding it within them to maintain constancy while only getting two hours’ sleep a night; this, in some way, means I am a failure as a parent, and am clearly not trying hard enough.’ See? I have a very well-developed inner critic, who is at least in part responsible for the continual academic woe which has dogged my adult life.)

Well.

I took the witchling to see the cranial osteopath yesterday. It was our fourth appointment, and it’s costing us £30 a go, having cost £50 for the initial ‘can I help’ assessment. So, not cheap. The osteopath pronounced yesterday’s session to be the most useful yet, saying that a positive change had definitely taken place, and adding that he thought a breakthrough imminent. He also said he thought that we might have an easier night of it as a result. I should add that the previous few nights had been pretty hellish, frankly. The witchling has been waking every hour and a half or so, sometimes more often, and then having about two hours or more wide awake, somewhere between midnight and four in the morning, before wailing herself inside out (I think at least partly because she is simply cross that I don’t get up and entertain her) and going back to sleep until about 6.00. She is then awake, largely, and up for the day at seven-ish. During the day, we are lucky if she sleeps for more than an hour without needing some sort of persuasion; sometimes it’s a question of turning her over, sometimes of feeding, but normally she needs something to continue sleeping.

Last night was woeful.

She went to bed at 6.45. So far, so good. She slept until 9.30. Then she woke again at 10, 11, 12, 1 and was awake from 1 until about 3, when I crawled into the extension (where Quercus has been sleeping, the newly-created attic being the only place in which one cannot hear the midnight wailing sessions; I’ve always felt that one of us needs to be sleeping in order to keep the house running, and Quercus has a lot on his plate with the extension-buildingness) and Quercus asked, as he does every time, if there was anything he could do, or if I needed help. This time, before my brain had chance to kick in with the über-mama, my mouth wailed ‘yesssssssssssIneeeeeeedtosleeeeeeeeeeeeeep!’. So, for the first time ever, Quercus took over while I went and slept. We had a long talk about what we’ve been doing, first, and we agreed that things can’t continue like this. I am constantly tired. I am pretty miserable, truth be told. I don’t think it’s post-natal depression, but simple, old-fashioned exhaustion. I haven’t had more than three hours’ unbroken sleep for the best part of five months. Mostly, I don’t get more than two hours, let alone three. I often get about five hours as a total in any given night, and I rarely get chance to catch up (catch up! ha!) during the day, partly because there isn’t chance and partly because I need some time to myself to switch off, or to do other things (thesis, anyone?), and the only time I get the chance is during the witchling’s brief daytime snoozes. It’s just not working.

I feel so selfish for saying this. I feel that I should instinctively know what to do in order to achieve the nighttime harmony of which I have read. I also feel stupid for having read books and believed them. I’ve mentioned attachment parenting before; well, I still feel that much of it is true, and laudable, but for us at least, the nighttime bit is just complete bollocks. The witchling isn’t in pain, or wet, or cold, or hungry. She is just awake. And my instinct, and Quercus’s, is that she is, frankly, trying it on, at least to some extent. And the result, because, thanks to the bastard books I have read, I am completely paranoid about ‘breaking her trust’, is that I sit there and suck it up, night after night, quietly despairing and resolving to do something differently if only I can have four hours of sleep, quiet, uninterrupted sleep. I’m not asking the world, I tell myself. I am happy to get up and feed her twice, three times. But every hour? I can’t keep this up.

Tonight, I am taking the first stint. Then, at 2.00 or so, Quercus and I are doing a shift-change. I’m hoping that when she realises that we mean this, and that food is not constantly on offer (and I don’t think that she can need feeding that often now, surely…?), she will realise that buggering about is for the daytime, not the night. So I’m clear: there will be no formula feeding, let me be clear on that. I have no intention of altering that path; we haven’t just spent the last five months breastfeeding her exclusively to give that up in favour of something that is profoundly inferior just because sleep is an issue. I also don’t believe that weaning is the key; she isn’t hungry in the night, but bored, I think, and very used to the fact that if she wakes and feels a bit fussy, I will catch her up and turn myself inside out trying to get her to go back to sleep. So, please don’t suggest that I should start feeding her ‘proper’ food, or giving her a dummy, or a bottle of formula. While I may regret some of the reading I have done, I can’t, and won’t, argue with the studies which show clearly that breastmilk is the best option for babies up to six months or so, and the witchling shows no sign that food is the problem here: she is putting weight on, has done so consistently, and often declines to feed if I offer it during these nighttime battles.

I am, of course, busy beating myself up about this choice, but at the same time, it almost doesn’t feel like a choice. I don’t want to wish this time away. I want to enjoy being a mother. I love my little daughter so much that it actually aches, and I hate to think of anything which might upset her. But at the same time, I am doing this at the constant sacrifice of myself to an extent which I just can’t keep up. To be the parent I want to be, I need to be able to think of things to do with her, to take her out, to talk to her and enjoy the time we spend together. I can’t continue dreading bedtime, going to bed later and later because I fear the start of the next round. I can’t function like this. I’m in a fog, and life feels pretty bleak. Something must change.

You know how I mentioned eating hot chocolate straight from the tub? Well, this is better. (And I never thought I’d type those words. Oh no.) Some time ago I bought a copy of ‘The Enchanted Broccoli Forest‘ by Mollie Katzen. Oh, the puddings. Oh, the enchilladas. Oh, the general eatingness of it all. And measured out in cups. I likes me some measuring cups, not least because it means one can give in to one’s natural inner greediness by substituting mugs of normal (or indeed larger than normal) stature, claiming ‘ah, but it says cup’ and adjusting the chocolate quantities accordingly while maintaining a look of childlike innocence. Oops. Did I just type that out loud? Anyway. To get back to the point. There is this pudding. It is of a chocolate nature. It is also of a beats-chocolate-mousse nature, which in my view makes it clearly the product of witchcraft. Obviously, I likes me some witchcraft too, so this is a very good recipe indeed. And it goes like this:

Chocolate Pudding*
Get hold of…
1 cup of dark chocolate chips (I used an entire bar of dark chocolate instead; think it was about 250g);
4 tbsp dark brown sugar;
2 cups of milk (I used soya);
3 tbsp cornflour;
Splosh of vanilla.

(Think this is about right, but haven’t got the recipe in front of me, and as the entire kitchen is currently coated in sawdust because Quercus is making an attic door, I’m not about to brave its depths.)

Then…
Melt the chocolate in with the (soya) milk and sugar. When it’s thoroughly combined, pour half the hot mixture on to the cornflour, and mix the buggery out of it before returning it to the rest of the chockiness. Mix very thoroughly over a gentle heat, and yes, there will be lumps, and yes, you will need to beat the fuck out of them in order to disperse them. A smooth finish is essential to this little number, and it thickens quite rapidly once you add the cornflour to the mixture. Whack the vanilla in, and pour it all into a tin. Katzen suggests covering with something to keep air out; I couldn’t be bothered, and it was fine. Chill the bally lot for at least two hours, during which time some sort of miracle occurs and the thing achieves a sort of Nutella-like consistency. It is sublime.

We have also discovered that optional, go-faster-stripe-style things can be added for differing sorts of sublimity; for example, milk chocolate and orange bits, a drop of rose or geranium oil (for that all-important Turkish Delight option), or even a good whop of ground coffee. Ah, the unalloyed bliss of it all.

In other news, we spent this afternoon trekking from one soggy part of deepest, darkest Devon to another. Cheriton Fitzpaine, to be precise (you couldn’t make these names up, could you?), wherein dwells the very lovely Chris Brookman. Mr. Brookman runs the so-green-it’s-practically-emerald Back to Earth, a natural building company through which, fortunately for us, he is happy to provide an advisory service for average eejits, i.e. us. We have returned clutching two large vats of limewash, which, for the uninitiated, is a sort of breathable paint which one whacks on top of lime plaster in order to keep the building breathing and thus, hopefully, not suffering from manky, manky damp. Say it with me: NOT SUFFERING FROM MANKY, MANKY DAMP. Let us hope not, anyway. Quercus has put a first (harling) coat of lime on the entire extension, and we are on to the pretty coat now. A mysterious contraption made of tarps and odd bits of wood has appeared over one side of the building in an attempt to keep the bastard rain off the lovely surface of the new lime render while it goes orf; poor Quercus had to re-render the wall he’d started because of rain damage when he and Lovely David couldn’t find a way to get the bastard tarps to stay in place. Fortunately, we now know that I can get quite a nice finish on lime plaster with the aid of a small but serviceable sponge, so it looks like I’ll be doing the finishing, which is quite nice, bearing in mind my love of all things pottery-clay-related.

In short, yay.

* Buy a copy of the Enchanted Broc Forest, if only for the gorgeousness of the entire concept – the front cover is blissful, as are the illustrations throughout.

I have been reduced to eating hot chocolate out of the tin over the last few days; things sleepwise have not been helped by the start of (I think) teething. What I thought was teething before? I was wrong. I think. This is worse. Last night I got about three or four hours of (interrupted) sleep. I feel like a zombie. (The usual disclaimer applies, here, by the way – leaving the witchling to cry just isn’t on the cards.) I have this ongoing battle with myself, as a parent – I read books about parenting when I was pregnant, and it seemed to me that attachment parenting was the way forward. Now, AP involves basically listening to your instincts and responding to your child’s cry as a means of communication, rather than of manipulation, because at the end of the day you’re dealing with a very little human being who probably hasn’t worked out how to manipulate at the age of x days. I still feel that this is true; I don’t think the witchling wakes up, as she did last night, every couple of hours with a bloody long burst from 2 – 4.30 to piss me off, nor do I think she does it out of bloodymindedness. I could be wrong. I probably am. At the moment, I feel I’m probably wrong about most things which don’t involve the consumption of chocolate. The point is, most of the AP books say how peaceful and lovely parenting will be if you only follow their suggestions. Ha. And also, ho.

I try to find reasons all the time. Could it be dairy things that I’m eating (though I eat very little dairy as I don’t get on well with milk products myself)? Could it be teeth? Could she be overtired (yes, certainly)? Could it be something that cranial osteopathy will fix (ye gods I hope so, at £30 a go, bearing in mind that this month our entire household income was £700, and we’ve just switched to capital repayments on our previously-interest-only mortgage)? Am I picking her up too much? Not enough?

See? I can analyse. Oh yes. Analysis is not the problem. What, I think, is the problem is that I have read, heard, been offered, ignored and otherwise encountered so many different schools of thought about childcare that I’m not even sure what my own instincts are at the moment, not least because of the sleep deprivation (see earlier comments). My heart tells me that I am not picking her up too much but that she needs to be carried a lot; my heart tells me that it’s the right thing, certainly, to still breastfeed her, and that shuffling her off into her own room would only add a lot of walking about in the middle of the night, probably while a bit cold, to my list of woe. My heart also tells me that nearly everyone I know who offers advice, often when I’ve not asked, thinks I’m barking mad for not booting her into another room, switching to formula feeding and as for co-sleeping, well, don’t even go there. I’ve had a bellyful of ‘well I don’t know how I managed with Quercus because I didn’t do all this [insert nearly audible sniff] reading, yet here he is’ from my mother-in-law, and I have (thus far) resisted the temptation to say ‘and aren’t you a model of a parent-child relationship now’. But I don’t know how much longer I can resist.

I’m also worried about my thesis. Yes, I passed my viva. Woo, and also yay. But – and this is a big but – I have corrections, some of which involve rewrites (though my examiners called these ‘minor’). Reading the examiners’ report, I don’t know where to begin on the things which aren’t ‘move that comma over there’. They talk about the need to explain the way I ‘conceptualise my research methodology in terms of critical historiography’, to which, clearly, the only possible response, after the inevitable ‘what on earth do you actually mean?’ can be ‘arse’. At the moment, the witchling is sleeping, normally in two stints, roughly an hour to ninety minutes during the day (this, instead of what health visitors tell me should be four to six hours). That isn’t really much time in terms of conceptualising anything beyond a cup of tea and a sit-down. I need to get this done and re-submitted by early December in order to graduate in January; if I don’t make that deadline, firstly I need to get an extension agreed with the Graduate School, and secondly I won’t graduate, i.e. I won’t be officially a doctor, until next July. The knock-on effect of that is that I can’t then set up the website I want to try my hand at, proclaiming my PhD status by linking to the British Library entry for my thesis and taking on academic proofreading and copy-editing work. See, I want to find a way to work from home. More and more, I dread going back to work (that’s a whole other entry, but still… might as well get all the woeses out while I have chance). Not because I loathe the job, but because it’s just not who I am. It never has been. I mean – I. T. Services? I very much think not. It’s lovely in lots of ways – people are nice, job is easy, has creative bits, and involves, sometimes, one’s brain. Oh, and of course they actually pay me. But it’s also forty hours a week out of the house, away from home, doing a job which ultimately is a reasonably obvious alternative to the academic job I thought I wanted when I started my PhD, but is little beyond that. I don’t really want to do it. I want to write. I want to read other people’s writing. I want to use my brain. And I want to do it as organised by myself.

(In the meantime, however, I am thinking of setting up an etsy shop. In a former life, I used to make jewellery. I even sold it, on eBay and at craft fairs. I still have some, and I still have the equipment to make more. I also quite fancy starting that off as a way to [eventually] sell pots; though I’ve not yet had chance to post pictures here, I do love me some potting, and I do miss making pots regularly while the witchling is too little to make night-classes an option.)

In short, a very disorganised, very combobulated (and yes, that is a word, thank you very much), slightly bewildered ‘waaaaah’.

Thank you, and good night.

D’you know, I’m feeling all nostalgic. Sometimes autumn gets me that way (though are we into winter now, officially? Still looks autumnal round here, with lots of trees green), and having a big project underway seems to make the temptation greater as you can look at pictures of your progress and think ‘ye gods, we lived with that?’ etc. So, I thought now might be a good time to remind ourselves how far we’ve come in this little cob house of ours, warmed by the woodstove’s cheery glow, sleeping under a hedgehog roof, looking out at a blanket of stars in the darkness of the night sky. The work we are doing here has a long way still to go – there is external render to remove and sort out (what we were told was a house which had ‘always been looked after’ turned out to be a house where the twenty-five-foot well was covered only with rotten wood and about half an inch of cement, after all, and let us not speak of the uPVC window fitted at the back of the house, all in the best possible taste, of course), and the plaster inside still means that gaffer tape is pretty much structural to our ceilings, but hey – but streuth, Quercus, and Lovely David, have wrought Big Changes Which Warrant Capitals in other areas. We moved here in 2005, and the extension, which houses our bathroom and kitchen, looked like this:

Note frost inside windows.  

Note the mould, caused by the aforementioned damp. Did I mention the damp? Yes? Thought so. Note also the fabric-like ceiling, which was an uninsulated sheet of tin with some sodden marine ply on the inside. 

We did do our best, of course, with what we had; we knew when we moved here that we couldn’t really sort things out until we had more money, and had successfully completed at least three bank raids. Er, I mean, of course, until I’d got a job which paid more than four peanuts and a few grubby buttons. Which PhD study tends to prevent. Or at least slow down. So, we painted things jolly colours and Quercus built the very lovely Driftwood Larder, made completely from reclaimed timber which a local woodyard was going to chuck out. (As an aside, he now wants to get rid of the DWL, relegating it to shed storage or something; I just can’t bring myself to! I can’t! Not my lovely cupboard, complete with built-in herb storage on the side! No! I just won’t! And he can’t make me. Or something equally mature.) So then we had this as a compromise, for a while: 

But that was the best we could do, really, and even that took rather a lot of effort to keep up – the mould came back in a matter of weeks, and the floor was so damp, so perpetually, that the floor tiles all lifted up in about a month. (They were the quick-fix sticky-downy sort, you see.) And we’d always known that the extension would end up having to come down. Particularly when the roof started to leak in three places. And that’s before we even get started on the water supply happenings – remember the well? With its bacteria? And its excess nitrates? And its aluminium? And its tendency to run out in summer because it wasn’t really that deep, in well terms? Oh, happy days. How we laughed. 

Also, I should add that size-wise, our extension was not what it could have been. Two sets of kitchen units, with about two feet between them – getting past someone required a level of familiarity which limited you to members of your own family, shall we say. The entire kitchen and bathroom was housed in a structure of about twelve feet square, with the kitchen being L-shaped and the bathroom, well, roughly the size of a (small) postage stamp. Again, how we laughed. 

So now, what we have is work in progress. A work about double the size, I should add, and with rooflights! and more than one (falling out) window! and without a floor that you could fall through into a large, dank, wet, water-filled hole! and with water which isn’t tea-coloured! See? All mod cons. I’ll take some proper pictures of the outside tomorrow, but for now, let’s just say it’s a vast improvement. And soon, we may even have power in the house again… (It’s been an electricky day – the power has been moved from one side of the house to the tother, and Lovely David is, as I write, tying in to the existing electrics. It’s been sort of on-off, on-off…)

Inside, though:

(Note cat in foreground; so rapid is she that the Wacket cat has never yet been photographed. OK, slight exaggeration. But she only gets photographed when she chooses.) The bathroom is also something of an improvement, but for now, I will content myself with the smugness of the kitchen. (Let’s face it – this is already both photo-heavy and of little interest to the outside world; I will save being a bathroom bore for tomorrow.)

Somehow, about a pound of mushrooms has appeared in our fridge. No, I don’t mean the sort that appear when you clean your fridge as rarely as we do (although that thought does make me think I should probably check for that sort too), but that somewhere along the way, the lines of communication broke down and both Quercus and I bought mushrooms this week. So, having got past the delights of saying ‘shrooms shrooms shrooms’ incessantly, I turned my little brain to the task of working out what to do with the little blighters. And lo! there was mushroom pie. It goes thusly:

Mushroom Pie
Ingredients

Two onions (I used red, as they are what Quercus’s mother grew for us this year, us being short of space because of our extension woes);

An entire clove of garlic (and  at this point I would like to say ‘woo’, and possibly also ‘yay’, about the garlic peely-thingy we have recently acquired – it is silicone and funkier than a very funky thing indeed) (And I mean that in UK English terms, not US);

Splosh of olive oil for the frying of the above;

More mushrooms than you can shake a big, thorny stick at;

Sprig of thyme, fistful of parsley, sprinkle of oregano;

Splash of milk;

Stock cube (I used Kallo organic something-or-other);

About four large spoonfuls of ground almonds;

About four large spoonfuls of wholemeal flour (there - you thought I’d gone senile when I typed the same thing to start with, didn’t you?);

Quick burst of red wine;

Spot of paprika;

Spot of ground nutmeg.

Also, a shitload of pastry, made however you fancy it, but particularly nice if including herbs, chopped walnuts and about half a ton of black pepper.

Then…
Sling pastry into the required pot/mould/pie-dish – I used the ubiquitous orange silicone bread moulds, just because I am without fear – and blind-bake the crust for about twenty minutes at 200°c. While that’s doing, get on with the filling, which goes something like this: pile everything in a pan and cook the hell out of it. Or, for the more refined, fry up the onions, garlic, mushrooms and herbs first, then stick in all the rest of it, poking it from time to time, until it’s nice and gloopy, at which point attempt to cover up any lumps in the sauce caused by indecent haste when adding the flour to thicken by shoving them firmly under a bit of onion. Just saying you could, of course. Not that I did. Whack the lot in the pie-case, sticking a nice lid on it, preferably with pastry leaves because where would we be without pastry leaves, and pop in the oven at about 200°c for a half-hour or so.

Munchmunchmunch.

In other news, Quercus is doing the scratch coat of lime render today. He did the hurling at the weekend, and it went really well apart from the near-total loss of his fingertips, lime being a right bastard for burning you. It looks good, though. The render, that is. Not the fingers. The fingers look buggered, frankly. But hey – they’ll grow back. Or something. Er…