Or at least, so I am told. I have no idea where this week has gone; surely yesterday was Monday, yet somehow, five days have elapsed and it’s Friday again. Five first-thing-in-the-morning feeds, five shared bagels, five mid-morning cups of camomile tea, five standing-up-while-holding-Mama’s-hand sessions, five Mama-attempts-to-create-the-perfect-baby-snack no-sugar cookies, and five now-she’s-asleep-I-really-should-put-her-down moments. At least.

And talking of the quickness with which time flies, which we weren’t, exactly where has the year gone since the witchling arrived? Surely last week I was still pregnant…? Yet somehow, the buttercups in the field across the lane are out again – and especially glorious this year; I keep meaning to put up a pic because they look so fab – and it’s nearly June, and the weather is warming, and they’re harvesting the fields around Earthenhouse, and… and… and the tiny daughter will be one on Monday. June 1st. Monday. MONDAY. How? How is this possible? 

I’ve been thinking a lot as her birthday approaches. It’s such a time of changes for us. Quercus will be working part-time from next Thursday so that he can look after the witchling while I go back to work for five mornings a week (which is of course the most enormous change in itself). This weekend, while Quercus continues to recover from his horrible throat infection thingy, we are painting the kitchen; from drab bare plaster and a decidedly work-in-progress look, we’re going to move to crimson distemper on one wall (breathable for the cob wall we’ve lime-rendered) and cream one the others. We’ve got a plan for the kitchen Quercus is going to build, and we think we know where the wood – oak, obviously, given his, er, name – is coming from. We’ve planted things in the garden, albeit in the only tiny corner which isn’t covered in building chaos, and they’re coming up – beans, courgettes, taters and some herbs, as well as the Jerusalem artichokes which, let’s face it, are going to come up whether we like it or not (they have actually grown through the spoil heap, which is nearly solid clay, which is about ten feet thick above where they were planted the year before last).

Things are changing, growing.

Especially the tiny daughter. She is delighting in more and more flavours and textures – everything from fish, fruits, baked beans to velvet and wooden spoons! – and her favourite thing du jour is to stand up while holding on to a thumb or two; she isn’t very interested in crawling, but clearly wants to walk. Her hair is growing apace; very fine, very fair, from a distance nearly invisible, but the curls remind me of my mother, and we wonder if it’s from her or from Quercus (whose hair is… a little wild). She laughs when I throw her up in the air, and she giggles as we dance an impromptu tango across the kitchen. She talks to herself as she settles down to sleep, and she sleeps for increasingly long periods, prompting me to savour the midnight feeds, at whatever time they happen. How is it that things can be so happy, and yet still remind one of the transience of life? 

Anyway, let us not allow the morbid to prevail; of course, at least part of what I’m thinking at the moment is gloat-worthy, as I survey the haul of presents which we’ve got lined up for the tiny daughter – the corduroy owl I made back in the darkness of the winter, a stacking wooden lighthouse, a pull-along Fresian cow (wooden again), possibly a knitted vest (if I finish in time!), and, possibly best of all, a set of wooden animals which Quercus has made for her, consisting of an elephant, a warthog and a, well, er, a Moomin. They are delightful; I drew him some simple silhouettes and he cut, sanded and waxed them (using a beeswax-based balm I made a few weeks back; I’ve been meaning to post the recipe, come to think of it, as it’s the good stuff (best hissed in a drug baron voice, that last bit), and works well on everything from post-shave soreness to, well, yes, your everyday wooden animal needs).  So, all that’s left is for me to decide on which sort of cake says ‘I’m one today!’ best. Any suggestions, anyone? Preferably of a non-dairy nature?

Quercus has acute laryingitis, and has been holed up in the caravan for the last few days. (Have I mentioned the caravan before? I’m not sure. Well, it’s a bit like the house, in some ways – thinner walls, but similar issues with the need for redecoration, and an interesting tendency to develop soil in one corner. How? Who knows.) The total arse about this, apart from my being denied the pleasure of his company, is that we had a DIY bonanza on the cards for this weekend, it being a bank holiday here in the sunny (ho) UK.

Hang on. ‘DIY bonanza’? When exactly did life come to encompass such harbingers of doom? And, what is more, to include them as things to regard with a degree of zealous enthusiasm once reserved for genuine fun?

Moving on…

So, yes, the plan was to finish sanding the plasterwork in the kitchen and the bathroom, and to stuff a goodly quantity of going-off-so-quite-stodgy plaster into the gap between the ceiling and the lime wall, and then, to paint. TO PAINT. I mean – that’s the sort of thing that makes those rooms sound dangerously like finished habitation, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong – we are still living with the entire contents of a do-it-yourself store in the kitchen (we have no dining table, but we do have a table saw, a mitre saw and an SDS drill; points for anyone who knows what SDS stands for), and the ‘kitchen’, as in the work-space, is, well, scout-hut-like: we have a long worktop cannibalised from the last kitchen and held up by an unholy marriage of boarding, gaffer tape and good will. On top of that, there is the very unlovely Baby Belling cooker (the one I normally berate in recipes), and the things which won’t fit in our one cupboard (the driftwood larder which lived in our old extension lives on, by god!). It’s not exactly slick, shall we say (unless you are talking about chemical spillages, in which case, yes). 

And we had even got Quercus’s mother to come and help us with either baby entertainment or DIY stuff. It was all fixed. We were going to limp one step closer to finishing. Oh, and I was going to catch up on some sleep; after that night of sleeping from 7.30 until 6.30, the witchling reverted to a few nights of utter bedlam, which means I’m sort of like the last man on the Titanic at the moment: still standing, but utterly fucked. Hey-ho. There’s always next weekend. 

Bastard laryngitis.

That should really have capitals, as Unconditional Parenting* is actually the name of a book I’ve been reading, courtesy of Turquoise Lisa, who has very kindly lent it to me. I’m not normally one given to long analyses of parenting – genuinely, I have no idea what I’m doing from one minute to the next, and my ‘parenting approach’, if I could be said to have one, is to do what seems best at the time. Other people, however, appear to actually think things through – the very idea! – and to ponder, in more rational and coherent fashion than my own, what makes a good parent, and what helps a child the most. The idea behind unconditional parenting is, from what I understand of it (and of course, as ever, my understanding is based on a half-hour here and ten minutes there, which, coupled with reasonably copious bags under the eyes, does not necessarily make for the best interpretation, but still – on we go), that by accepting one’s child without reservation, i.e. without attempting to carry out a careful dance between coercion, rewards and constant negotiation, one stands a better chance of producing a thoughtful, helpful, confident and self-reliant human being.

I’d heard about this book on various of the attachment parenting forums I read from time to time, and to be honest, after having had my doubts about attachment parenting during the very, very sleep-deprived early months of the witchling’s life, I’d pretty much resolved not to read the book, largely because once I’ve read about something, if I consider it possible that the point of view advanced therein might be correct, I find it very hard to dismiss it and attempt an alternative approach. Which is a very long-winded way of saying that I was worried I might agree with it, find it nigh-on impossible to carry out, and spend decades beating myself up about it. But gradually the sleep improved, even if we still have interesting times from time to time, and while I would love love love to get more uninterrupted sleep than I often manage, I still believe that the way we are doing things is the best way for us.**

`Anyway, it seems that unconditional parenting is a natural sort of extension of the attachment philosophy in that it is based on communication between parent and child, and on respecting the child as a person, rather than a project to be fixed in various ways; so far, I’m enjoying what I’ve read. Alfie Kohn, the author, reckons that ‘conventional approaches to parenting such as punishments (including “time-outs”), rewards (including positive reinforcement), and other forms of control teach children that they are loved only when they please us or impress us’ (back cover). He talks of ‘authoritarian’ parents who ‘are more strict and demanding than they are accepting and encouraging’ (50), who ‘rarely offer explanations or justifications for the rules they impose’, expecting rather ‘absolute obedience’ from children who will ‘comply with authority [rather than] think for themselves or express their opinions’. Later in the same chapter, he tells of the long-term results of such an approach:

Lay-down-the-law parenting may produce kids who seem to be so well-behaved as to be the envy of the neighbors [sic]. Often, however, they’ve just learned to be sneakier about their misbehaviour … They seem to be perfect, but they’re actually leading a ‘double life,’ as one therapist put it: ‘Because our parents insisted on exercising control over our lives, we created one life that they knew about, and one that remained a secret from them.’ Such children may be at risk for various psychological problems down the line. Also, they may be terrified of, and permanently alienated from, the people who treat them this way.

Forgive the lengthy quote (and the pissy academic background which made me want to indent it), but this has really made me think. Now, I know that my relationship with my own parents was a bit… well, dodgy, to be frank, but Kohn has made me think about the way in which it was dodgy. That double life thing? I appear to be a textbook case. I was seemingly bright and well-behaved at school, but out of it, not so much. I had boyfriends fifteen years my senior (the most notable being a violent drunkard aged thirty-two when I was fifteen), I smoked a lot of pot, I had quite a sideline in stealing to order going. I was arrested three times by the time I was sixteen, and narrowly avoided a criminal record – only my age and my ‘personal circumstances’ managed to ensure a caution rather than a charge. I got bullied at school, and I reacted by removing myself from the situation entirely – I just didn’t go. My days were spent often with the aforementioned boyfriends, and often in pubs and clubs.

So, how did that come about? My mother was very laid-back in her parenting – we were very good friends, and, probably because of the trust I now see that this engendered, she knew pretty much everything there was to know about me. Of course, she didn’t know the extent of my double life as she was still a part of The Parents, which also included my father. My father was very authoritarian. At 14, I wasn’t allowed to sleep at friends’ houses without a big hoo-ha about it, and when he caught me going to a teenage disco one night (he called to check up on me; we’d already gone out, and my friend’s mother hadn’t realised I wasn’t supposed to go), he turned up an hour later to haul me out, having been right through my room, examining each and every one of my things while he was at it, and subsequently reminding me that my room wasn’t my room, but part of his house.  

When he talks about my mother now, he clearly believes her to have been slack; he thinks she left the discipline to him, and that he had to make up for her laissez-faire approach with extra strictness. (God only knows what he thought I would otherwise do.) Having been on the receiving end, this wasn’t how it seemed at the time: his rules seemed arbitrary, designed to thwart for no reason other than because he could. The power relations were never fair, after all – he had all the cards, and yet he still seemed to feel the need to remind me of this more often than I felt my behaviour warranted. My mother, however, didn’t even really have to get me to do things her way; rather, it was more that I would have felt it almost rude to have upset her, to have caused her concern. She was simply too nice to piss around. She welcomed my friends – during college (16 – 18 in the UK), when my father was largely absent, living part-time with a girlfriend in London, many of them spent copious quantities of time at my house, and indeed one of them lived with us for six months. She didn’t freak out when I did things about which she was unsure, even when I admitted to having a smoking habit, but gave me time to figure out for myself that it wasn’t a good plan (having made it quite clear what she thought, that is – she didn’t just leave me to it). She encouraged me towards things she thought would work for me, even when they weren’t things she herself would have chosen – Law A-level, for example, wasn’t really her idea of fun, but she could see that it would work for the sort of brain I appeared to have. 

All this is not to say that I didn’t get on with my father at all; on the contrary, he and I sometimes had a lot of fun together, and he can be great entertainment. Things improved in terms of his strictness after he left my mother for a woman only two years older than my brother; he lived with her for about a year, and perhaps at that point he realised that laying down the law simply didn’t hold water when you’d done something which didn’t exactly speak of high moral standards. (And yes, I am bitter. Hiding it well, though, right?) At this point, he would often volunteer to pick me up a pack of cigarettes on his way home from work. All the old rules went out of the window, though I can’t say that I felt wholly better for it, because in place of the uncertainty I’d previously, er, enjoyed was a new one: I felt constantly that he didn’t really want to see me, largely because he’d make plans and then drop me at the last minute if a better offer came along. 

I feel I’m probably giving an overly harsh impression of my father. Today, I can see that he likes to think that his way worked out really well, because look at how well his daughter turned out. Or something. But to be honest, I can’t really say that his approach is what made me the person I am now, or, rather, I suppose it might be, but not quite in the way he means. We are in frequent contact, though regular readers will know that that contact is not without its ups and downs, and certainly not without conflict. The thing is, to this day, I am not sure of his affection; if I do things of which he disapproves, he simply withdraws the light of his countenance, something which I simply could not imagine doing when I look at my tiny daughter. I’m sure the day will come when she’ll piss me right royally off, but to leave her to it? Just to wander off without telling her why I think what I think? Why I worry that what she’s doing is the wrong thing? Nope – doesn’t seem likely. When I told my father I was going to get married (after Quercus and I had been together for, oh, six years), he told me I’d better do it while he was on holiday because he didn’t want to come. When I told him I was pregnant, he just didn’t really speak of it, or ask about it, until I was recovering from giving birth. My stepmother told me ‘he’s just worried about you’, but that wasn’t how it translated to me; to me, it was ‘you’re doing something I don’t like/am not sure about, so rather than telling you how I feel, I’m off’. It’s a pattern with which I’m familiar, and I’m buggered if I’m going to do it with my own daughter. 

So, in short, yes, I think it’s difficult to avoid using coercion, and even more difficult not to use rewards or the positive reinforcement Kohn talks of in the book, but I can see the point. To start with, I thought it was a bit odd, frankly, to say that telling children things like ‘well done’ when they’ve been well-behaved, say, around the supermarket is a bad thing, but thinking it through, I suppose the implication is that the way they’ve behaved is worthy of comment, rather than just The Way Things Are. It’s implying that their normal standard isn’t that good. Or that’s my interpretation of it. And, while I find it a bit on the extreme end to say that telling a child you love it when it does something nice means, to the child, that you don’t love it when it doesn’t do that thing, I can see what he’s driving at. If the alternative genuinely is the parenting I experienced from my father, the unconditional approach has got to be worth a try. 

</navel-gazing>

* Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishment to Love and Reason (New York: Atria Books, 2005).
** Which is not to say that It Is The Best Way; it’s just what works for us, and horses for courses and all that.

As promised in the comments on the whole weekly-menu-planning shame, here is the recipe for the cheese and lentil bake. Frankly, it is heaven on a plate.

Lentil & Cheese Bake
Get mits on…
8 oz lentils (red work best, though the ‘possibly beans’ of the title refers to an experiment tomorrow)
About ¾ pint of water/stock
4 oz mature cheddar (don’t get fooled with the plasticky cheap cheese – you’d need approximately your own body weight of it to get any sort of flavour)
A very large onion indeed
A good ol’ handful of herbs
A large egg (or two Araucana ones, in our case)
A good ol’ sprinkling of garlic powder, or about five cloves of fresh

Then…
First up, boil kettle because attempting to boil that quantity of water on the hob? Lunacy. Sling lentils in with water (or stock if you’re feeling lavish) and boil to buggery (approx. ten to fifteen minutes). Meanwhile, fry up the onion in a spot of, well, whatever oleaginous compound comes first to hand. Sling in the herbs and garlic and sniff, deeply, reverently. Attempt to keep hands out of pan. Fail. Burn fingers ever-so-slightly. Chuck lentils in with onions et al, and grate the cheese in; let it cool down a tad, then in go the eggs, et voila! Entire gloopy mass into a shallow tin, something like an inch deep and maybe eight inches square, and whack in the oven at about 180°c for about twenty minutes. (Or half of eternity if using our oven.)

Tomorrow, I shall be attempting this one with beans instead of lentils, largely because I can. I’m mad, me.

The good:

For the first time ever, the witchling slept through the night last night. This is even better than it might otherwise have been, as we have been having Interesting Times, sleep-wise, in the last few weeks; the night before last, we got about four hours, and she was awake from 4.00 until about 6.30, with four previous wakings between 7.00 (when she went to bed; it took her about ninety minutes to get to sleep, with lots of up-and-down-stairs for us before that) and 2.00. I don’t know if it’s teething, or nappy rash, or frustration that she wants so to be able to move freely and can’t quite manage it yet (she is now able to stand quite confidently for about ten minutes, though walking – as I look around our chaotic, DIY-in-progress house – is, thankfully, some distance off, I think); whatever it is/was, it wasn’t easy, and Quercus and I had had a few nights of shiftwork, where one of us (me, in this case) sloped off to sleep in the caravan at the end of the garden for a few hours, in order to function during the day. I hate doing that, and I hate being tearful and emotional all the time due to the lack of sleep; just as I was getting to despair, she went and slept from 7.30 until 6.30. Who’d'a thunk it?

We are continuing to eat better, and to eat earlier. Our evening meal had slipped back to 8.30 or so, due largely to its being prepared after the witchling had settled for the night. Now, I am trying to get at least the legwork of cooking done during the afternoon, so that dinner is cooking while we’re in the bath with her; it makes for an easier, earlier, more relaxed feast, and means that I can contemplate going to bed at 9.30 without feeling gargantuan. I likes that.

Pyewacket has taken to sleeping on top of the fridge, curled up on our woolly-sheep tea-cosy.

The bad:

Yesterday, for the third time, Liquorice, our Barnevelder hen, managed to escape somehow. I don’t know where the hole she used is – Quercus and I have looked all around the hedges several times, down on hands and knees, and blocked up any holes we could see with wire – but still she found somewhere. I’d noticed twice before that she was disappearing somewhere in the afternoon, and it had been a while since we’d seen an egg which was definitely hers (darker than the Buff Sussex eggs, and often speckled), so I thought she’d found somewhere to go and lay in peace, following the broody Sussex saga last month.

Although I was worried about it, as she’d come back before, I assumed she couldn’t have gone too far; I hoped that I’d manage to catch her either coming in or going out, so we could block up the hole. But she didn’t appear; it got to be dusk and Quercus and I were out, be-wellied, looking for her for the fourth time, and no luck. Quercus got up at 6.30 this morning to go and search again; this time he found feathers in the lane and no further sign of her. We can only assume that a predator has got her.

I am really sad about it, far more than I’d expected; they are hens, and I am not perhaps as attached to them as I am to, say, the cats, but Liquorice was a lovely hen with a very placid nature – she exercised a calming influence on the other – entirely lunatic – hens, and was always first at the gate when I walked down the garden to feed them some leftover greens. I miss her already, and feel horrible about it all. I also know that it would be nigh-on impossible to stop them ever getting out – our garden is surrounded by a bank on one side which makes fencing very difficult, and the hedge, while thick, has holes which are clearly visible to hens even when diligent human searching misses them. Our general ambition is to be around in the garden frequently enough to alert predators to our presence, and to make the hens’ run sufficiently attractive to them as to curb their enthusiasm for escapades; generally, we do pretty well at this, I think, but I feel miserable that, on this occasion, it didn’t work well enough. It has, to say the least, rather undermined the joy at the witchling’s sleep prowess.

For ages, Quercus and I spent about half an hour of gentle torture each evening, attempting to work out what to have for dinner. Normally it went something like ‘how about [insert something for which we have roughly half the ingredients]?’ or ‘we could have [insert something which involved unfeasible levels of either effort, time or expenditure]‘, and it resulted in us eating a LOT of pasta. Oh yes. In moments of indecision, coupled with the frequent levels of exhaustion which only a new baby can bring, pasta, and particularly when coupled with its accomplice pesto, is one of our best friends.

However, there comes a time when pasta’s gentle glow begins to fade. When its wholewheat loveliness has faint echoes of cardboard. When you realise that you are now nearly entirely composed of pasta, and that man cannot – should not – live on pasta alone.

That, folks, is when you start to consider writing a weekly menu.

I never thought this day would dawn, I must say. There were years – many of them – when such organisation brought forth a mocking yawn and a comment which included more than its fair share of insults, generally of a scornful and have-you-nothing-better-to-do nature. Weekly menus? Whatever next – organised sock drawers? Spoons arranged by size? Grass polished with one’s toothbrush? Yet here I am, openly admitting (at least to the interweb) that I have embraced the inner control freak, and that menu planning has become something to which I actually quite look forward. For one thing, it’s meant that I drew up a list of all the main meals that I could think of, and that, in turn, has meant we’re eating a more varied diet (see earlier comment re pasta). It’s also encouraged me to think about the sorts of meals that I enjoy cooking, and the things that I know Quercus really likes (which, well, basically means it’s hot and edible, come to think of it; although his dear mother frequently admits to astonishment at the things I ‘get him to eat’, Quercus is truly an omnivore*). And, finally, it’s really helped in trying to cut down on what we spend on groceries as it means we shop for what we need, and the devilish lure of offers cannot touch virtuous people like us. Oh no. (Except when the offers relate to chocolate rocky-road biscuits, but let us draw a veil over this and move on.)

This week looks like this:
Sunday: cheese and lentil bake (of which I cannot speak sufficiently highly) with baked taters and veg.
Monday: mushroom and potato pie with cauliflower and broccoli.
Tuesday: chickpea croquettes with brown rice and veg.
Wednesday: salmon, new potatoes and veg. (Detecting a pattern?)
Thursday: three-bean wraps with baked taters.
Friday: sausage, mash and Boston baked beans.
Saturday: leek croustade with various veg.

God, I’m hungry.

* Imagine my delight – last week’s learning-at-work event, at which Quercus ran a sustainable building stall, prompted the first enquiry as to whether or not he was a vegetarian. See? At last, someone else has joined me in my (apparently) vegetarian appearance! At this rate, I should be able to work out some things which prompt such assumptions, and yes, for the record, he was wearing Birkenstocks. I am not the only walking cliché.

Pinched from Mon at Holistic Mama.

What author do you own the most books by?
It’s a tie between Wilkie Collins and H. Rider Haggard, the former because I love love love him, and the latter because I wrote a chapter of my PhD thesis on him.

What book do you own the most copies of?
Until recently, I had five copies of Gawain and the Green Knight. Wait – don’t judge me yet: I have reasons! I bought my first copy when I was nineteen and a first-year undergrad. Then I took a further Middle English module in second year, and of course, the reading list included a different edition. Was it in the library? Was it fuck. Then I taught a course when I was working as a seminar tutor during my PhD – yes – you’ve got it – two more editions courtesy of two different module conveners. And then I bought one more, because it was edited by my personal tutor, a lovely man who interviewed me for my place at university and said ‘I’m supposed to ask you about this bloody poem, but frankly I’ve spent all day talking about it, and I’m fed up to the back teeth with it. So, what shall we talk about?’

Did it bother you that those questions ended with prepositions?
Yes. I really hate slack English. Unless it’s of my own divising, that is. But seriously – the semi-colon. So very underrated. And why not write in a style which conveys meaning in the most elegant fashion possible? i.e. ‘Of which book do you own the most copies?’ I’m not saying that my writing is elegant – nope, more ‘c’est infernal, mais ça marche’ (which is apparently a contemporary description of the vehicular clutch). But anyway. You get the idea. I will try (very hard) to take my head out of my own arse now. In light of all that, I present the following rephrased question:

With which fictional character are you secretly in love?
Well, I have been quite keen on Kingsley Amis’s Patrick Standish (Take a Girl Like You and Difficulties with Girls) for years; I am also rather fond of Jonathan Strange (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), and of Robert Copplestone (Part of the Furniture, Mary Wesley). Oh, and George from E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Profligate, moi?

Which books have you read the most frequently?
I’ve read The Lord of the Rings several times, and E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series. Also Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love, pretty much the entire H. Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle repertoire, and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale.

What was your favourite book when you were ten?
I can’t honestly remember; I think I read the Moomins quite a bit around then, though. (Oooh – get me, with my split infinitives. See? I can be out there, me. Living on the edge, with my slack grammar and my open hostility towards the transgressions of others. Oh, and my hypocrisy. That too.)

What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie, courtesy of the Oxfam shop in Teignmouth. It was drivel.

What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
I really enjoyed Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle. It took me a while to get into, but once I had, I was hooked until the very (bitter) end.

Which book would you most like to see made into a film?
That’s a tricky one, but, generally, I find that once something’s made into a film, it skews my vision of it. I saw the film of Twilight a few weeks back – it was rubbish, to be honest, and I’d really enjoyed the books. I like the Harry Potter films, but Daniel Radcliffe is now Harry Potter to me, and before I saw the first one, he didn’t look much like that. (Is now the time to admit, slightly worryingly, that I quite fancy Daniel Radcliffe? I add, in my defence, that he looks very much like Quercus did at that age, so much so that several people have teased him about it in the years since the films came out.)

Which book would you least like to see made into a film?
See above, really.

What is the most low-brow book you’ve read as an adult?
Well, I read a lot of trash. And I mean A LOT. There is just nothing like the raw, adrenalin-filled rubbish that people aim at the ‘young adult’ market. Thanks to that demographic, I have particularly enjoyed the delights of Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom trilogy, and of Trudi Canavan’s Dark Magician stuff. Oh, and of course, the Twilight quartet.

However, I’ve also read some pretty low-brow stuff as part of my research. You have not read rubbish until you have slogged through Marie Corelli’s Ardath. It is a bewildering work. It includes such lowlights as personal vendettas against critics, protagonists who are clearly idealised versions of Corelli, and, for good measure, a bloody good slug of utter bilge.

What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
Well, first define ‘difficult’. If by that you mean ‘you must get through this, come what may, and come out the other side able to answer questions on it in a vaguely coherent manner’, see any of the standard literary criticism on an English lit. degree. So, anything by Foucault, Saussure, Barthes or Walter Benjamin, perhaps. If, on the other hand, you mean ‘challenging because of the emotional response it provokes in you’, I found The Time-Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffeneger) very affecting, along with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. If still another interpretation is meant, however, it took me six months and five attempts to crack Dickens’s Bleak House when I tried it first, at the age of seventeen (I was working in Lincoln’s Inn at the time; it seemed apt).

What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you have seen?
I haven’t seen many, actually; I’ve read nearly all of them, though. Does that count? I suppose the one about which I knew the least when I began it was probably Henry IV.

Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
I think probably the Russians.

Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer?
With a first degree which includes Medieval Studies in its title, the answer should really be Chaucer, I suppose. However, it’s probably Shakespeare, although Milton has a peculiar place in my heart courtesy of a 15,000-word dissertation on the role of kingship in Paradise Lost, and I took a module about Milton as an undergrad partly because the convener, a lifelong Milton obsessive, had become a good friend, and I wanted to see what I was missing. Also, I got my first first (ho) for a Milton essay; I can still see it now: ‘Would you mind if I kept a copy for future generations of my Milton students to look at?’ THERE ARE NO WORDS TO CONVEY THAT LEVEL OF SMUGNESS.

What is the biggest gap in your reading?
Hmm. I dunno, to be honest. Possibly poetry, I think; I am not by nature a poetry fan, with a few notable exceptions. (See below.)

Favourite novel?
Just one? Really? OK. Um. Well. Probably something Wilkie Collins. Yes. I’ll say Armadale.

Poet?
‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, W. B. Yeats. (Those exceptions include Yeats, Donne, Marvell and the Earl of Rochester.)

Work of non-fiction?
At the moment, probably What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen. Longer-term, I have various cookbooks that I love – including various Cranks ones, and a couple of the Moosewood tribe – and some of the academic books I’ve collected are also favourites. Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon would be one of them, as would Karen Edwards’s Milton and the Natural World.

Most influential novel you’ve read?
E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, for its ‘Only Connect’ opener. Also, A Room with a View.

Most overrated author?
J. K. Rowling. Yes, they’re good. Yes, they’re entertaining. But beyond that? Ephemera, and largely Tolkein-derived.

Which less widely-read novel would you recommend?
Disraeli’s Du Maurier’s Trilby. For some reason, my brain was confusing Disraeli’s Sybil with this one – no proper reason, of course, unless you count being knackered.

What are you reading right now?
Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn, The Chase by Louisa May Alcott, and The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. See earlier comment re profligacy.

If you’ve made it this far, well done. If you’re going to have a go yourself, do say so in the ol’ comments whatsit.

As part of my ‘look at all the lovely things you’ve got! You certainly don’t need [insert material object A, B, C, or, indeed, any letter to Z], now, do you, you greedy troll?’ approach to spending no money, I have been surveying things already in my hapless grasp. It’s not going badly; my credit card statement for last month was £40, and that was spent on fuel. A new perspective on things you’re already very familiar with really helps, it seems – I started looking at things anew when I resolved to stop spending money on everything except genuinely necessary stuff, and I realised that however many years of having a little, albeit a very little, spare cash have resulted in some possessions that I hope I will always have, things that really kick aesthetic arse (at least in my not-so-humble opinion) or which do their job so very well that you don’t care if they’re hideously ugly. Though I don’t seem to have included those things here. Ah. Anyway. I digress. Here we go:

1. The casserole dish that Quercus bought me for Valentine’s day this year. I didn’t see it coming; we normally agree a token sum, the surpassing of which results in immediate death a very stern look, and I think that sum was about £3 this year. I can’t really say that I looked sternly at him when he produced the casserole d’amour, however, because that would be a very large lie indeed – I was too busy hyperventilating and drooling.

2. My jewellery box. It is made of reclaimed yew, by these very lovely people, who not only let Quercus pick out the very piece of wood he wanted the box made from, but accommodated his delusions of grandeur designs for the overall shape of it and for the numbers and style of drawers and hidey-holes. He appeared with a large cardboard box at about three in the morning on the night we got married; we’d spent about four hours clearing up the hall we’d had a dance in, and were both in that strange combination of exhilaration and tiredness which one can only achieve having been awake for about thirty hours straight. I hadn’t realised we were doing presents, so felt shifty because I hadn’t got him anything (well, I had, but it was a pair of wellies; come to think of it, this exchange sums up our relationship quite well, I realise); I’d hankered after a box like this since seeing them for the first time in 1998 (this was 2005) at the craft fair which takes place each summer on Exeter’s cathedral green (should that be capitalised, I wonder?). Every time I take something out of it, and, as a habitual earring-wearer, that’s pretty much every morning, I am struck by the gorgeousness of its colours, its textures, which vary from the roughness of original bark to the smooth polish created by hours of very, very, very fine sandpaper, and by the loveliness of Quercus.

3. My slippers. These come from the very lovely folks at the Sunshine Coast Slipper Co., and were bought when Quercus and I were in British Columbia a couple of years (!) back. They are fabulous. Simple. I fight a constant battle to avoid abusing them by walking outside in them, as they are tough enough to do so easily, but I’m aware that it’s a slippery slope from a quick nip round to get the washing to never, ever, taking them off until one day I find myself in the supermarket wearing them, with unwashed hair, mad, staring eyes, and security men closing in from all sides.

4. The very lovely turquoise Raku clock which lives in the sitting room. It came from a small shop in Tavistock, and I absolutely love the colour, the texture of the glaze created by the raku firing process, and the general shape of it. Raku involves shoving pottery, coated in an appropriate glaze, into sawdust when it’s still very hot from the kiln; the fires and gases created by this are what cause the varied effects of the end-result’s colouring. The clock people used to have a website full of such lovely creations as to make one slaver rather unattractively, but, fortunately for both my bank balance and my potentially drool-covered chin, it appears to have vanished. (Though I could get quite keen on these, which they sell in the same shop.)

5. A rather extravagant bigonia which liveth in the sitting room. It was a tiny cutting from a friend about ten minutes ago, but by god these things grow! I love the red leaves – they just seem so wrong. I also rather like the pot it’s in, which came from Trago Mills, which might seem rather surprising to those of you familiar with their work, but I suppose into each life a little sunshine must also fall, or something.

6. Utensils. I love both the pot and its contents. Wooden spoons and spatulas, particularly the arbutus ones we acquired on Cortes Island, really do it for me; I rarely use anything else when cooking, and, rather wankily, I have favourites which I am quite superstitious about using – if I’m doing, say, a birthday cake, I really prefer to use the small arbutus spatula, as if it somehow imbues said comestible with super-powers. (I know. I know. Up the medication already, woman.) I also love this jar; officially, it’s a Rumtopf, and I wish, how I wish, that the aged parent hadn’t dropped the beautiful glass lid on the floor, as, if he’d only managed not to, that jar would be stuffed full of a rather appealing alcoholic substance even as we speak.

7. Books. I know – technically this is cheating, as this isn’t strictly one thing. But I don’t care – that’s the joy of being a hypocrit, you see! To know you’re wrong, and to do it anyway! Or something. Ahem. Moving on. I s’pose favourite books would include the moste excellente Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, The Pursuit of Love (both long-term loves), and, I am slightly (though clearly not too) ashamed to admit, at least for the present, Twilight.

Two together for this one: 8. The stove. Oh, the stove. A Woodwarm 6, for those of you who’re interested. Fan-bloody-tastic. Throw wood in it. Dry washing over it. Stare into it (it’s far more interesting than TV ever was). Cook on it. Steam puddings on it. Which brings me to: 9. The kettle on the stove. This came to us from Quercus’s mother, who once had a red Aga (very lovely but hideous to run because it was an oil-fired chappy); the kettle is very flat-bottomed (would that the same were true of myself) for use on Aga hotplates, but works equally well on the stove. I love the shape of it – it’s so simple-looking, not least because it has no switch.

10. A painting of Paris which my mother watched being done when she was there for six weeks with her school’s production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, for which she organised the music. It always sounded like a very happy time for her; she spent a few months in Germany the following summer with lots of the people she’d been in France with, and nearly married a German man she met during that time. How different her life would have been had things followed that path. It’s peculiar, but I particularly like the khaki colour of the mounting; my father had the painting remounted (still in the original frame) for her many years later, and the colour sets off the picture really well, in my view.

I could add a million things to this list. My wedding ring, the Tiffany lamp Quercus bought me for a birthday present a few years back, the patchwork cushion one of my newly-acquired stepsisters made me the Christmas before last, the various strings of little lighties that are strewn about the house, the sun-emblazoned cushion my mother gave me when I was fourteen. And you?

So, teeth. Not that much fun. Not nearly as much fun as one might think. In fact, decidedly less fun than one might think. Cue gallons of camomile-related concoctions, and a lot of time spent with three in a bed (not that we mind that, particularly; in fact, it’s really quite lovely, apart from the proximity of tiny-yet-strangely-powerful lungs to adult ear’oles). Oh, and the complete and utter inability to string a sentence together regarding anything other than the aforementioned teeth. Or lack thereof.

However, in other news, Quercus is doing an exciting learning-at-work thingy about cob and natural building materials; he is going to have his own stand and everything, and, as his rivals are covering such thrilling topics as Equal Opportunities, clearly he will be the belle of the ball. Or something. And, clearly, this means a new post about cob, and the fabulousness thereof, is long overdue from Earthenhouse. This must be rectified. Shortly.

Some time ago, I acquired a patchwork quilt courtesy of the aged parent. Said quilt was made by my mother, with help from the aged, before I was born, and was in need of refurbishment – about thirty patches had worn away, while others had come loose at the seams, and the fabric used to back it had disintegrated in various places. Now, I am a patchwork numpty. I like very much the look of quilts like this, and I have a collection of Kaffe Fassett books which I regard as patchwork porn, but beyond that, I know nothing (except, obviously, a keen desire to fiddle about and produce something gorgeous which involves no time, no experience, and no expenditure; modest in my ambitions, aren’t I?).

See, I had wanted to make a patchwork to go in the witchling’s room. (Nothing like having a small person about the place to bring out the crafty impulse, is there?) To start with, I wanted one for her bed. Then I quite fancied one for the chair we sit in when I feed her. That was what I decided on, in the end, as her cot is quite diddy, really, and I was imagining making something using large patches, as I thought that would be the easiest in terms of instant gratification. Patience? A virtue, I am sure, but one with which I am unfamiliar. But then there I was, in possession of this quilt – an already-made, acceptable-as-made-by-one’s-own-mama-and-thus-not-constituting-buck-passing quilt – which needed only a little TLC to restore it to its former, ahem, glory. Or so I thought…

Anyway, I found, to my slight chagrin, that up-close and personal, repairing a patchwork quilt is a little bit daunting. Not least when you find that it’s a cleverly shaped one which consists of those little … is it hexagons which have six sides? Maths has never been my strong point. I attempted to make a dooberry. You know, one of those little shape whatsits which you cut round to get the desired patch. I failed miserably, as I was basing it on the quilt itself, and somehow, the fabric didn’t want to stay in position long enough to ensure an even-sided template. (Template – that’s the word I was fumbling for, isn’t it? Although I’m still thinking there’s something beginning with M. Or is it an F? I give up.)

Eventually I settled on sticking the fabric in the gap created by taking out a buggered patch, and sort of making it up as I went along. It seemed, on balance, to work out fine. I replaced all the dodgy-looking ones, and I sorted out bits where my aged parent had haplessly stitched a patch into the backing fabric, and then I realised that what had been troubling me the most was that, despite my love for this quilt, and my appreciation of all the hard work my mother had put into it (and, yes, the work my aged had done too), I didn’t really like the overall result. For a start, there were some (to my eyes, at least) lavishly ugly fabrics involved. I’m talking orange, brown and white asymetric blocks. And bright green, pink and orange flowers. It was… well, quite hideous, if I’m honest. I mean, there were corners which I loved – lots of little be-sprigged patches, small patterns of flowers, tight stripes and plain blocks – but the overall effect was a bit like an accident in a dolly-mixture factory.

So, I resolved to dye the entire thing. Bold, I know. (God, I need to get out more, don’t I?)

And, as might already be obvious, I’m pretty chuffed with it.