Well, here we are in proper winter weather. All that cruddy warm nonsense of last week has departed, and we have decent frost out there. Which would be all very well were it not for the fact that it has slightly buggered a bit of our lime rendering. (Lime doesn’t like frost, you see – when hard frost comes along before lime has had chance to go off properly, the frost sort of insinuates itself in between the particules and generally buggers about with them, leaving you with a sort of powdery finish which is not at all desirable in something normally, er, rock solid.) (But then I suppose attempting to render one’s house in the middle of the coldest time of the year isn’t perhaps the most sensible thing to do, now is it? Though quite typical, come to think of it) (Enough with the parentheses already.)

So. We’ve had the stove lit for over a week, continuously burning, and in that time it has cooked several stews, a couple of soups and two large Christmas puddings, to say nothing of innumerable pots of tea and whatnot. (Quercus bought me the best tea cosy as one of my Chrimbly presents – it is a knitted sheep [for some reason, I typed that initially as 'knittig'] with curly wool and the most engaging sticky-uppy ears – if you fancy the sound of that, get yourself along to a Ringtons sharpish, or have a gander at the Knitter Critter website for more on the rather pleasing ethical side of said excellent tea cosy.) It is most smug-making, getting by-products from the stove, not least because the wood we burn came to us free. Well, the only price was trudging through a variety of squishous Devon fields to retrieve it, put it that way, from its owners, who didn’t want it and were delighted when we took it away, coupled with the cost of fuel for the chainsaw and a great deal of time spent chopping, stacking and storing it once back at the witchery (and let us not speak of our ongoing woe regarding wood storage; we are hoping to put in a listed building consent application soon, which would sort out our woes, but clearly if I speak of this in too much detail, the god of planning will hear, and take vengeance in some hideous and unthought-of – but probably involving drains – manner).

Anyway, I haven’t really got much to say at the moment, partly because I am still slightly shell-shocked at having finished my PhD (the powers that be at the university tell me that my doctorate will be processed on January 7), and partly because, to be honest, life is good at the moment. Which means little to moan about. And I have always found that ranting brings forth the verbose in me, while life-is-goodness = sitting and quietly gloating. You know how it is. That is not to say that I won’t find things to say, of course – I mean, here I am, quietly saying ‘oooh – look at all that chocolate I’ve been given for Chrimbly’, yet still I manage to ramble for, er, 516 words, according to the natty little (why didn’t I type my thesis in WordPress?) widget-whatsit on the right of the screen. So not hiaiting, but do forgive me if I’m unbearably smug at the moment. Oh, and how about a questions and answers session? i.e. leave me questions in my comments thingy and I’ll answer them. Ask me anything. No, really – go on. Within reason. Or not. Or something.

In which the witchling was more interested, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the wrapping paper around her leg warmers than in the things themselves (note wrapping made from previous and very substantial printed versions of thesis – finally! I burn it!), Quercus and I decorated our entire house with holly and ivy, and we discovered the delights of jewel biscuits (thank you Lisa – our tree is decorated entirely with these) and dark solstice cake (Doc, I blame you for our rapid expansion).

As the year draws to a close, I hold my tiny daughter, marvelling at the blonde hair which has suddenly appeared, and attempting (futilely) to avoid her newly-arrived chomping teeth. We wander through the quiet house, the lights down low and the woodstove throwing a gentle glow across the floor; I note with satisfaction the forms of two cats, reclining and resplendent, drunk on warmth, too lazy to reach for the knitting which lies tantalisingly out of easy clawing. (Leg warmers for the tiny daughter, since you ask – my first attempt at double-pointed needles, and, thus far, a success, I am amazed to discover.) In the kitchen Quercus cooks dinner – tonight, root veg mash with sausages and my favourite, sprouts – while the ancient radio offers a comfortable selection of carols. ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, ‘Gabriel’s Message’. That sort of thing. A large and rather ungainly Christmas tree leans, at a jaunty angle, against the dark red of the cob wall, which, once an external wall, has yet to be rendered. There is a solstice cake in the oven, and a large bowl of mincemeat on the windowsill. Outside it is raining lightly, and the chickens are in bed for the night, still squabbling amongst themselves over who is queen of the roost. (What that says about the sexuality of our rooster I dread to think.)

Tomorrow there are presents to be wrapped (I wish I could post photos of two things, but it would ruin the surprise; also, our camera, with seasonal good will, has died – the shutter won’t open: is this terminal, I wonder?), and pies to be made. A tree to be decorated, and a wreath to finish. General clawing to avoid, and, of course, those tiny teeth to be stared at in amazement.

I love midwinter.

Right – another quick query for the be-chickened amongst you. On Thursday we took delivery of two new chooks – they look rather like this – courtesy of the ever-delightful e as a birthing present (they were hatched at about the same time as the witchling, who, between you, me and the rest of th’inter, I often call Chicklet). We kept them in the run, wired in but with access to the chicken house, for the whole of Friday, with our other chooks out and about in the free-range bit (no house access, but a feeder and drinker outside, and regular checks courtesy of moi), so they could see each other but not engage in mortal combat, and come the evening, I had great fun chasing near-shadow-coloured chooks around the garden when they escaped put all the hens to bed in a calm and collected fashion, having spent half an hour crawling around in the run, trying to encourage the Araucanas back into the damn house, having bonded most agreeably with the new arrivals myself. (That last bit? About the bonding? Complete porkies. The poor creatures are terrified of me; I suppose I am used to our others, with whom we’ve spent a lot of time, while these birds flap about as soon as I get near them.)

Anyway, they spent yesterday all together in the run (we aren’t letting the new arrivals out into the wider chicken area yet, because we want to make sure they know where home is, so to speak), because we had to go out and didn’t want to just let them out and hope for the best; I don’t know that it went very well. The Araucanas made it in at night, and were sitting on the floor of the henhouse when Quercus went to shut them up in the evening; this morning, I’ve let our old hands out, but the Araucanas won’t even shift into the run from the house. Any attempt to encourage them just gets them distressed, and, as Quercus is out on an emergency Chrimbly shopping run (every year he says he’ll be more organised, and every year, somehow, it fails; I tell him that I don’t mind what he gets me but it cuts no ice – I even offer suggestions when asked, yet still, here he is, panicking again, bless his little holey socks), I’m flying solo on handling them. For now, I’ve left them in the house, armed with some feed and a separate drink of water, and our other chooks are out pecking around in their free-range bit. But I don’t know what to do – is there any way to encourage the Araucanas out? Or should I just wait a bit? It doesn’t look like the others are accepting them particularly well, and I think there are small drops of blood (!) on one of the shelfy-sitty-bits in the house, which doesn’t bode well. I also need to find a way to get the Araucanas out into the run today as I want to clean the house out; any suggestions on how to do so without terrifying the poor birds would be most appreciated. My first thought was just to catch them and move them bodily, but they are very flappy, and to catch them I have to have the big door of the henhouse open, which scares me somewhat – the last thing I want is for them to actually escape!

Hens. What can you do with ‘em? (No. Really. What?)

Good lord. D’you know what, folks? I’ve finished my PhD. As in submitted, viva’d, resubmitted and passed. Passed. Ended. Submitted. Finished the whole thing, and nothing left to do on it.

It’s very strange.

I feel sort of… odd, really. I’ve been working on that thing for five years, three years nominally full-time (let’s not mention the fact that I was working twenty-two hours a week during that period) and two years part-time once I started working full-time. When I started it, I was in such a different place in my life – I finished my MA in 2003, and much to my delight (and surprise) I found myself with a distinction, which rather made up for the fact that my first degree ended in a 2:1; after my mother died, my grade average, unsurprisingly, plummeted from a comfortable first to a low second, and I only managed to turn it around in the last few months of my third year. I knew it was all quite acceptable, and all quite happy-making and so on, but it always irked me to think that if my mother could see me, she’d see a 2:1 and feel it had been her fault somehow, which was ludicrous (of both me and her. Er…), but I couldn’t stop thinking it. So then I rolled into the PhD programme, largely because I was offered funding by my department and I realised that, actually, a PhD might be within reach, in terms of my ability. Very strange to find myself here, three houses on, married, with a daughter who I love to distraction, two cats who drive me insane but are very lovely, a flock of hens and more mud than you can shake a large stick at. Oh, and a doctorate.

I should probably do something with that, shouldn’t I? Could I possibly be one of the world’s better-qualified slackers, I wonder?

This evening, Quercus had one of those makes-you-question-our-society-and-indeed-humanity moments. Coming back from Exeter, he was overtaken in a thirty limit by someone who pulled in so sharply that he thought they were going to clip the front of his car. Instinctively, he hooted them. The car, a taxi, braked very hard, stopping so sharply in front of him that Quercus locked up the wheels on his car as he too braked. I should add that Quercus, while reasonably warlike when I met him at twenty, is, and always has been, a very sensible driver – he doesn’t overreact, and nor does he seek out trouble.

Anyway, the taxi driver then drove at ten miles an hour for the rest of the stretch of road they were on, braking excessively, while his passenger leaned out of the back window, hurling abuse and throwing cigarettes at Quercus. After that, they reached a roundabout, and things appeared to revert to normal – the taxi pulled away normally from the lights that start the A30 out of Exeter, and Quercus thought they were done.

Not so.

Having driven, oh, say, five miles, normally, and some distance ahead of Quercus, the taxi then pulled into a layby, only to pull out immediately behind Quercus, so close that once again he thought he was going to get shunted. The taxi then dodged in and out behind him and in front of him, swerving aggressively as if to shunt him from the side and force him off the road, for the next four miles, before following Quercus off at the exit one takes to get to the Witchery. Quercus had still done nothing – hadn’t reacted, beyond slowing down when the taxi pulled out behind him, in a bid to get him to overtake, and leave him alone.

The taxi followed him off the A30 and round a roundabout, along another thirty limit (completely in the opposite direction from where we live; Quercus, by this stage, was very worried that the driver would follow him home, particularly as he is currently sporting a ‘For Sale’ sign, complete with our phone number, in the back of his very distinctive car) for a couple of miles, before disappearing when Quercus put his foot down as the thirty limit ended. Quercus drove around for a few miles, again nowhere near the Witchery, and then came home, armed with the registration number, and called the police. Who say they will look into it and get back to us. Hmmm. We’ll see, I suppose; my experience of the police in things like this is not fantastic. It scares me to think that one has always to keep one’s eyes on the floor, ignoring people who break speed limits and drive like maniacs because they might just target YOU this time, and there appears to be nothing that reasonable people can do about it.

Gawd. How many just-this-last-hurdle encounters is it possible to have with one PhD? I appear to be on yet another will-I-won’t-I mission re submission – if I manage to get my revisions approved by next Friday, I might make the winter graduations; if not, it’ll be next summer. To be honest, at this stage, I don’t really care about graduations; clearly, graduation ceremonies themselves were invented as the academic staff’s revenge on all those gruesome bloody students they had to endure through the teaching year – it is safe to say that I’m not in a hurry to attend, particularly given the really rather ridiculous hats that they get you to wear for PhD graduations. Anyway. Naturally, Nearly Always Absent Supervisor is, er, absent, although he has promised to read my revisions while on the train to wherever it is he’s going next, and hopefully this might mean comments back from him tomorrow. (At which point I will probably wish I’d never asked, and just burn the bastard thing.)

In other news, I am making the witchling a stocking. It is brown velvet, quilted with cream thread, and has a rather natty Kaffe Fassett fabric turnover at the top, for added, er, snazziness. Or something. Of course, at present, it is also a figment of my imagination, but just as soon as the sodding, arseing, fecking thesis fucks well and truly off (do such things ever come to pass? Even the thought seems too good to be true), there’ll be no stopping me. No. Oh, except for the fact that my sewing machine seems to be suffering from delusions of grandeur, and constantly seems about to start a new life as an armoured vehicle – this can make things like threading the needle a bit tricky, to say nothing of its newly-developed tendency to eject, quite forcibly, its bobbin. I seem to have this effect on mechanical things; I recently managed to break a washing machine, sixty miles away, just by thinking about it.

Right. Dinner calls.

Hmm.

Right.

First off, I should say that we are talking rhetorically here. Theoretically. As the title suggests. So, you know, consider this one of those friend-of-a-friend-who-doesn’t-really-exist-type deals. No real people, no. None. None of those.

So here’s the question.

Imagine you knew someone who worked for a government department. Quite a large, and, in the right circles, high-profile department, which has been in the news regularly for various failings and shortcomings. Again, take ‘the news’ here to mean a certain area of the news, which isn’t necessarily front-page of the tabloids or whatever.

And then imagine that the person had had a series of really good ideas for ways in which various of the incredibly long-winded, long-drawn-out, time-inefficient processes which are central to this department’s work might be shortened, improved, automated.

And then imagine that this person not only had the ideas, but knew how to implement them, and had a good understanding of the various software packages needed to create such improvements. And a proven track record of doing Officially Clever Things, the sort of Things which resulted once in a temporary promotion for a certain project.

And then imagine that this person can’t get anyone to support the ideas, despite them being Really Good, and very much needed. That the department is so entrenched in its long-winded ways that it appears to see anything new as something of a threat, to be discouraged and put down as wayward thinking that dares to step outside of a job description. That that attitude has been encountered at manager level, and at higher manager level. Even though there is a team of people, an entire team, which has been working on a far shittier version of this idea for the last four months, so far without success, full-time. That the person is beginning to really despair, and to feel deeply under-valued. And that the person is currently spending literally all of their working day sitting at a computer with no work to do. And that despite having nothing to do, and despite having told their manager that they have nothing to do, and having asked for work, they are told they can’t work on any ideas to improve the business processes.

And I should stress once more that this is a government department. Funded by taxpayers. Which is regularly criticised for wasting funds. And that this person is not the only person who sits, day in, day out, with nothing to do. Literally nothing. And that this person is prevented from doing anything constructive at all, and has recently been told, at a performance review, that he must just ‘look busy’.

What would you do?

Well, Posset, the Buff Sussex hen, is still moulty-looking, but otherwise in good cheer, I think. She has spent the weekend staging random escape attempts, and looks most miffed now, having discovered some new wire which prevents her egress. Yesterday I really thought Wixon, now a boisterous fourteen-month cat instead of the ridiculously fluffly little kitten we rescued last November, was going to have a go at her – she is looking rather diminished since losing featherage here and there – but I shouldn’t have worried: one squawk from a slightly manky-looking hen and Wixon, slayer of bears, dragons and giant monsters*, turned tail and ran. He is so pathetic. But of course I’d rather have him that way, where hens are concerned.

In other news, the only problem with wood-fired heating being your only source of heat is that you have, in our case, to arse around traipsing up the garden (normally in the pitch black, for an added sense of adventure) clasping a basket which is large enough to be fucking heavy when full, but small enough for its contents to disappear up the chimney with woeful rapidity, wearing someone else’s wellies (normally too large or just that bit too small, so that your feet either rub or freeze), and sliding around on the heavy frost that is appearing most nights at the moment. Then you have to exercise a few skills of which a contortionist might be proud – our ad-hoc wood shelter (built because we need to sort out listed building consent, and possibly planning permission, for the more permanent solution we have in mind – a lean-to on the opposite side of the witchery from the new extension, with a timber frame, an earth plaster finish and probably a slate roof) is a rather unusual shape, and, frankly, looks like a drunk erected it in the middle of the night, with one hand tied behind his back, in a howling gale. But hey – if it works, don’t knock it. No, really – don’t knock it: it might fall down.

And mincemeat. Now. This year. Chrimbly and all that. Hum. On a Baby Belling cooker, which works thusly: oven on – only the small ring works. Grill on – neither ring works. On occasion, the larger ring has been known to trip the circuits in the extension, and a few weeks back the bottom element of the oven just spontaneously crapped out, only to return somewhat sheepishly some time later. So, this could prove quite a challenge to my baking skills, and lordy, I do like to bake. (Baking is my general tactic for avoiding feelings of misery of any sort – it works so well, and at the end of it, not only has one been productive, but one gets to pig down the fruits of one’s labours.) This year, as I’m still PhDing (will it never end?), I’m having to be a bit restrained in the ol’ kitchen intentions. I think I’m going to make Doc Witch‘s solstice cake, and I’d really like to make some more damson mincemeat (based on Delia’s recipe, I just added shedloads of damsons left over from making damson brandy; it certainly had something of a kick, shall we say), and some of Turquoise Lisa‘s gorgeous jewel biscuits. Oh, and probably an apple and mincemeat pie or seven. Oh, and we’re thinking of taking the veggie route for our Chrimbly feast this year – neither of us is particularly attached to the poultry version, and both Quercus and I feel a little shifty eating someone who might just be Posset’s great neice seven times removed. So, mushroom pie? The omnipresent nut loaf? Suggestions, anyone?

* This may in fact be a lie.

For the be-chickened of you out there, a quick question. One of our Buff Sussexes is moulting; she is looking quite sorry for herself in terms of feather loss, but otherwise seems happy enough. We use red mite powder regularly in their house, and haven’t noticed the others exhibiting signs of anything beyond the normal chicken lunacy; any suggestions?

Why did I write my thesis in Word? It has just spontaneously reformatted bits and pieces of my footnotes (there are about seven hundred of them, I should add) so that random titles are now not in italics.

I could weep.

So here’s the thing. I drive a 1999-registered car, which is lovely, and which has suited me very well since I bought it in 2002. I loves it, I does. But – and this is a rather damning but – it is too old a model to have such things as Isofix moorings. Isofix, for the uninitiated, is a sort of natty, built-in-to-the-car-when-it’s-made affair used for bolting in seats of the kiddywink variety. Of course, Quercus drives the Nutster Mobile, also known as a Citroën CX, and that too predates Isofix by some years. Rather more years, in fact.

So, we were planning to sell the CX because it goes wrong and we don’t know how to fix it and because it’s super-hideous to run (25 mpg, anyone?) though a delightful drive and faster than shit off a shovel; now it seems we are going to sell both cars so that we can get summat with this Isofix malarky.

Now we get to the really interesting bit.

The car that I have hit upon as a workable alternative for me is a Renault Laguna. (Not quite the linked one, I hasten to add – we’re talking about my spending £1200 here, plus the £500 or so that my current car is worth. Such money gets you something like a five-year-old with 90,000 miles +.) (Please don’t tell me about your friend, the one with the Laguna, which needed not one but three clutches by the time it had done fourteen miles; I am aware of their, er, reliability reputation, but I still can’t argue with five NCAP stars, and yes, I am aware of the limitations of NCAP tests, and that they only got the fifth star because of an intelligent seatbelt warning, whatever that may be.) And of course, the aged parent drives a Laguna, in its ridiculously-named estate incarnation (that, ladies and gentlemen, is a ‘Sport Tourer’. Yes. I shit you not). I want a hatchback, and a diesel at that. I mentioned this to the AP in a general discussion about the forthcoming changes (one which was a bit sticky anyway, because of course any mention of money is generally A Bad Plan, in case it leads on to the topic of his wanting back the £13k that he lent us on the never-never, and clearly wanting to change my car must mean I have money to burn… Ho), and he went away and cogitated, and has now decided that it would be most sensible, and generous to boot, of him to sell me his Laguna, which he has been muttering about changing for about four years, at what he considers a knock-down price – £1700. Which is probably what he’d get on the open market for it, as a private sale, I think. It’s got a few things wrong with it (nothing big, but irritating); it’s got a few dents and dings; it’s done over 100,000 miles. It’s also an estate. Which I don’t want.

How to back out of this without giving offense, if that’s possible?

This weekend Lovely David popped over to continue sorting out our electrics. Soon, we may have lighting – actual lighting! – in our kitchen; lovely though the fairylights are, they don’t half make gloss-painting difficult in the evenings. Or, indeed, any time past about four o’ clock. While he was here, we talked over the options for how we’re going to heat the new kitchen and bathroom. It’s been really quite cold here in Devon in the last week, and yesterday morning a random thermometer reckoned the outdoor temperature was minus six, which is really quite fresh indeed. In the house, we have the loveliness of the stove, which defeats pretty much any cold weather, replacing it with a sense of tropical well-being which has one reaching idly for a glass of Malibu and perhaps some SPF40. However, the extension, while much warmer than either our old kitchen/bathroom building of woe or the outdoors, is still rather parky, truth be told, now that we’re into Proper Winter (as proper as we get in the UK, anyway) and we have a gaping hole in the backdoor because the catflap died the death in the demolition project.

However, all is not lost. The majority of the necessary pipework is in place for us to add a back-boiler to our woodstove, which lives at the other end of the house, thus giving us hot water and two radiators, one in each bedroom, to boot; Quercus and I were both dubious as to whether or not our stove could power that much, but Lovely David points out, quite rightly, that the stove barely lifts a finger for the heat we need for the main house, so could clearly manage to work a little harder, provide heat all over the shop, without breaking a sweat. How exciting, thinks I. Imagine – wood-fired water. (There is something so wrong, wronger than a wrong thing indeed, about the idea of fire and water together in a sentence like that. But I like it.) So, over Chrimbly, it looks as if Lovely David will be joining us for mince pies, a spot of Doc Witch‘s gorgeous-sounding Solstice Cake, the odd sprout, and, ah yes, a good deal of plumbing. Quercus and I will have to channel out the cob walls in the original house to make way for plumbing pipes through into the extension, and we’ll have to come up with some radiators to fit upstairs, while Lovely David will be, suitably plied with mulled wine and perhaps the odd homicide-inducing carol, safely ensconced in the attic, doing, er, plumberly things. My, we know how to enjoy ourselves, don’t we?

In other news, the witchling looks about ready to start trying ‘proper’ food. I am dead chuffed to find that we have managed six months of exclusive breastfeeding; I really wanted this to be the pattern for us, and once we got past the initial learning curve of inserting breast A into mouth B, it’s really been very easy, I’m happy to say, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything differently now. I quite like the idea of giving her large chunks of vegetables and fruit and whatnot to gnaw on; she’s been taking a careful interest in this eating business for about the last three weeks or so, watching plates, knives and forks moving around, and reaching out quite ambitiously to grab glasses of water whenever possible. (Let us draw a veil over the time she grabbed her grandma’s glass of red wine, shoving it towards her tiny open mouth with a rapidity which spoke of paper bags, park benches and illicit Jack Daniels in years to come.) I’m both excited and saddened by this, if I’m honest – she still seems so little to me, yet every day she is growing, learning, and becoming capable, and she seems ready for the next bit of adventure, so I am trying to simply feel glad that breastfeeding her has worked so well for us.

One other thing. I haven’t had a drink, as in alcohol, since the month I became pregnant. I have read bits and pieces about drinking versus not drinking when breastfeeding, and wondered if anyone out there has tuppence-worth to add to the debate…?