I’m not really in the mood to write something long and serious, but I do seem to want to write something, and this topic is very much on my mind at the moment, so here goes. Firstly, a disclaimer – the reason I don’t want to write something long and serious is that we had a pretty rubbish night chez Earthenhouse last night, courtesy of a mixture of – I think – low-level teething pain and, if I’m honest, a bit of taking the piss on the part of a certain tiny daughter (she actually giggled – GIGGLED – when, at about 3.30, I checked her nappy to make sure she wasn’t sore or wet or anything; as you can probably imagine, while I find her laughter remarkably winning in pretty much any circumstances, this was not quite the reaction I was hoping for), the combination of which led to an awake stint between 1.00-ish and knocking on 4.00. Since I’ve been back to working mornings in my ‘official’ ‘professional’ capacity (tongue so very far in cheek that it’s likely to stick out through my other ear), I have to leave for work before 7.30, and this morning, folks, I was in a fog, and that fog was of the pea-souper variety. Anyway, all of which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not at my most objective, or coherent, or, um, insert other words which imply general clever-clog status.

So.

Here’s the thing.

When Quercus and I have talked about babies, and children, and families, and clans, we have always seen ourselves with more than one child. Indeed, during conversations of a particularly daring nature, the number three may even have been uttered. We both come from small families: although Quercus has a genuinely ENORMOUS extended family, courtesy of Roman Catholic Irish ancestry which means he has ten uncles on one side alone, he was an only child, his father having died very unexpectedly when Quercus was only two, so it was, mostly, him, his mum, and his grandma. He had reasonable relationships with some of the extended family, but he didn’t see them daily or anything like that. I, on the other hand, am not an only child – I have an elder brother, known here as the Gothic Folly, but he is eleven years my senior, and as he left home when I was six, my childhood was much more that of an only child than anything else. Added to that, and despite having a bigamous great-grandmother on my father’s side, I have a tiny, teensy extended family – most of them carked it at suspiciously young ages, and the ones that didn’t were either repugnant (most of my father’s family), sadistic masochists (most of my mother’s family), or just utterly tedious (any others not covered by the first categories). So, it was me, the aged parent, and my delicious mother, with occasional cameos by the Gothic Folly.

The upshot of all this tininess is that both of us would like the tiny daughter to have siblings. We’d like that chaos which surrounds families with more than one child (and some with only one, of course!), and we’d like to see troops of small blonde people trotting about the place destroying each other and whatnot. Having the tiny daughter has, in many ways, only made this desire stronger; I don’t think either of us was quite prepared for the totality of her conquest – we have gone from an attitude to children which is best expressed in terms of ‘children? Yes, by all means, but I couldn’t eat a whole one’, to ‘oooooooh – look! She’s poking me in the eye! She’s so clever!’, accompanied by an interest in pregnant friends which I never would have credited a couple of years ago. Yes, chaps: I am That Person Who Likes Babies And Who Is Interested In Pregnancy, Birth, and Whatnot. Extraordinary, and particularly when you think that my pregnancy, while far from disastrous, was not quite straightforward (SPD from the fourth month which increased in potency to the point where I was finding walking quite a challenge, and a constant battle with blood-pressure monitoring [white coat hypertension, anyone?], and the whole nightmare of finishing my PhD while we started knocking down considerable chunks of our house), and I didn’t get the homebirth I’d wanted (though I did get a quick natural labour, 90% of which happened at home).

Yet here I am, looking at the tiny daughter, and realising that if I were to find myself pregnant again today, she would be just about two by the time that the baby arrived. And we’d always sort of kind of maybe possibly thought that two years was a nice-sounding gap. So, why the hesitation? Well, lots of reasons, I suppose. We’re not where we hoped we’d be with the house; again, the optimistic view we had of the progress it would be possible to make once the tiny daughter was born was a little, er, optimistic, and we find ourselves with a list which includes replastering the entire original house, taking down the ceilings in the process (they all show a regrettable tendency to return to Mother Earth as it is; we will simply be hastening their inevitable descent), reworking all the windows (though we’re getting to the end of that), refitting all the doors, sorting out the shelves and cupboards (which largely means rebuilding them, as they’re all things Quercus made as stop-gaps prior to replastering), building two sheds from scratch, landscaping the garden, and finishing the extension. Ahem. No PhD to finish this time, at least.

Also, though, not much money this time; last time, we’d had the luxury of eighteen months or so where we were both earning reasonable money, working full-time and quietly amassing fortunes beyond our wildest dreams (hey – we don’t get to dream much, OK? That requires deep sleep) with which to buoy ourselves up during the renovations this house demands, and with which to lessen the drop in income that maternity leave would bring. (This bit does make me smug, though – I got through an entire year off without touching my savings at all, and so far, a lot of the work we’ve done has been paid for out of income.) This time, we’re both working part-time, and we’re reasonably broke, frankly; it makes sense because it means we get to look after the witchling between us but it’s not easy, financially. While I don’t expect to be paid to look after my own child, it does irk me rather that, at least in the UK, those who opt to send their children to nurseries or to use other forms of childcare get considerable wodges of cash put their way by a government keen to promote ‘family-friendly working’ provided ‘family-friendly’ = ‘parents who pay for childcare’, despite the fact that our choice means, if you care to look at it this way (which we don’t, really, because it’s too depressing, and because we were and are determined not to make the witchling’s childhood all about money), we pay for childcare by opting to drop our income by half. (By all means feel free to correct me; if you know of some way in which we are actually entitled to the aforementioned wodges of cash, do feel free to tell me about it.)

And then there are the physical worries. This house, even when finished, will still be tiny. It’s a two-bedroom cottage, and the bedrooms are so close that I hear the witchling the instant she moans in her sleep. Now, bear in mind the challenges we’ve faced in getting both the witchling and ourselves enough sleep; if we have another baby of similar disposition, I can’t begin to imagine how we would cope. It’s one thing when your baby can have 100% of your attention, but quite another when you must function at a sufficiently high level as to look after an inquisitive little person two years its senior. I don’t want to short-change the baby we already have, if that makes sense. (In fact, I don’t want to short-change her even if that doesn’t make sense.) (Although this is where it becomes a circular argument, because I also want her to experience having lots of people about; when my mother was dying, one of the things I realised was that having had a sibling to whom I could really talk would have made an enormous difference, I think – the feeling that you’re in it together, that sort of thing.)

Oh, and of course the worries about the pregnancy itself – will I get SPD again? Will it be worse this time? The answer to both of these questions seems likely to be yes, and I imagine that the white-coat hypertension would probably be a problem again. Oh joy. And how does one cope with the exhaustion of both early and late pregnancy while running about with a tiny toddling person? I mean, I know people do, obviously, but lately I have viewed them with a degree of awe, particularly when they manage superior things like stringing together coherent sentences and Herculean feats like, oh, I don’t know, LEAVING THE HOUSE. SPD was no fun. I remember lying in bed many times and just crying because I was so tired (little did I know of the fun that was still to come), and I just couldn’t stop the pain no matter how I positioned myself. I also remember that the stillness, the contentment I felt (despite all this), was just as bloody well, because moving further than the kitchen rapidly became roughly akin to an Olympic hurdle.

Of course, I realise that things would be different. Different baby, for starters, and thus different personality and all that. And of course this time, we do at least know which end, vaguely, one does or does not blow down. Nappies are no longer the origami hell they once were, and we are both fully conversant with the many different forms of wailing which may betoken ‘kindly change my nappy this instant’. We are also equipped with roughly a cubic ton of baby clothes, muslin cloths, nappies and general baby paraphernalia (though most of the latter we’ve never used, ironically). So, that makes it easier, right? That whole second-baby syndrome?

And of course it’s not as though we’re ninety-five. We’re not ancient to be thinking of taking more time over this; I’ll be 31 in November. Yet I always sort of thought that in terms of sleep deprivation and the particular brand of bedlam which goes with the very small person, it was probably best to suck it up in one big dose, rather than a series of smaller, but longer-drawn-out, sips. Particularly if one is thinking of doing this not once but twice more. Surely it’s better to have, say, five years of unspeakable tiredness followed by a gradual – and dependable – progression towards returning to the land of nod, rather than meeting and greeting Morpheus, sitting down for a night-cap with him, stripy cap in hand, only to watch the beggar pick up sticks and leg it, possibly to a depressingly cheerful rendition of ‘We’ll Meet Again’?

Now that I’ve actually experienced that bedlam, the bedlam which accompanies the appearance of a new baby, perhaps predictably I don’t know where I stand on this one, frankly. I don’t get unbroken sleep often; in fact, I’ve had twelve nights of it since about month four of being pregnant. I’m tired nearly all the time, if I’m honest. And sometimes I think the witchling will never sleep all night, reliably. (Though most of the time I can be all zen ‘this too shall pass’-esque.) And when I think about not just extending the time that I feel like this, but in fact worsening the way that I feel as well, possibly, well, it’s not a great outlook. I always knew that Quercus was not great without enough sleep; he has consistently surprised me with the resilience he has shown when I’ve really, really needed him (last night, for example, he took a stint with the tiny daughter from 4-ish, so that I could get a couple of hours in before leaving for work), but generally he too is exhausted, and he functions less well than I seem to in this situation. Also, of course, breastfeeding means that often there isn’t much point in asking him to get up; why bother having both of us up and awake, which only really means that I feel bad asking him to let me sleep the next day? No point in us both gradually approaching sleeping on our feet, so largely it’s me who does the night-time stuff, and I imagine that this would still be the case second time around, because I feel very strongly that breastfeeding is something I’d want to do again (not least because, on a selfish note, I read recently that there is apparently a link between at least two years’ breastfeeding and a reduction in breast cancer rates; with my family history, I can’t afford to ignore this sort of thing, particularly when it supports me in something to which I am already committed).

Of course, this all assumes that we produce another infant of the witchling’s type, and that sleep remains at a bit of a premium. But the thing is, can I assume anything else? Having experienced this, can I just tell myself that it will be different with anything approaching wholehearted belief that This Shall Be So? I think not. For one thing, I feel it would be a bit on the irresponsible side to just go into this while effectively sticking my fingers in my ears and shouting ‘la la la’ at the bits I don’t want to think about. That does not seem like the way forward, no matter how tempting my hormones may make it seem. So, I am left with the questions, and the debating, and the knowledge that Quercus would like to think about another baby this autumn, perhaps, while I am still, put simply, a bit scared by the whole thing. Does fear mean this is not the time? Will the fear go away? Or is it part of who I am now, something which will colour my decision but perhaps ought not to define it?

Well. I think that now qualifies as both long and serious. So, on that note, off to chase a ridiculously fluffy cat out from under the table, where he has succeeded in attaching not one, but two sea-creature finger puppets to his fur. I like to introduce a little light relief, see?

(Oh, and if you’ve got this far, well done, folks.)

After a productive weekend, the crapness of last whenever-it-was has just about dissipated, I’m happy to say, though some low-key teething on the part of the tiny daughter means that Quercus and I are once more entering the Sleep Deprivation Olympics. However, the sleepiness didn’t prevent us…

1. Stripping the windows back far enough that we’re going to be able to have them as plain wood inside the house; we’d thought they’d be far too buggered, and had prepared ourselves for yet more gloss painting, so finding that, actually, they’re really strong wood underneath the years of neglect has been a nice surprise; they’ll be painted outside, partly because of the listing requirements and partly because of the weather, but inside, our earthy house is going to be a woody earthy house;
2. Freezing another couple of bags of blackberries, picked in the field behind the house; I can’t decide what to do with them – jam? jelly? wine? cordial? – so I’m thinking pick ‘em while they’re there, and work out the details later, not least as the entire house is somewhat bedlam-ish (and covered in dust) because of the ongoing work on the windows;
3. Making up some lentil, tomato and onion soup, part of which I’ve frozen in individual servings for the witchling’s suppers-to-come;
4. Re-glazing the downstairs window, which now opens after being painted (and rotted) shut for about thirty years – I have come to know the love that is linseed putty, and while I didn’t really think about it when we couldn’t, I find myself delighted that we can now open the window, should the fancy take us;
5. Whipping up a couple of batches of beeswax balm, this one with a mood-lightening effect in mind – I’ve christened it Bright Skies, and it’s got indecent quantities of marjoram, cedarwood, sandalwood, rose and neroli, so hopefully it’ll do the trick, or at the very least, smell gorgeous while it’s trying.

Oh, and then, I discover that Mel has very lovelily (and yes, that is a word) given me an awardy-whatsit, with a very lovely pic to boot. The idea is that one passes said loveliness on to three people who have reminded one of witchiness and, for me, the existence of The World Beyond, so here goes:

1. Doc Witch, whose meditations on subjects ranging from striped tights to the mythical status of fairy-tales are always a pleasure;
2. Mon, whose explorations of astrology continue to pull me in, particularly in combination with her determined attempts to crochet the entire world;
3. LQS, whose ongoing explorations of What It Is To Be keep me fascinated, and all the more-so because I know some of What She Is In Person.

Happy Monday, folks.

Yes, yes – life is good and we’re all alive and we’re lucky to have a house/job/child etc. I know all that. But still, when I spend a day off from my tedious job working instead on rubbing back rotten windows, watching the dust and grime float indiscriminately over the surfaces I cleaned only two days ago, leaving as it does so an indelible layer of nastiness which will probably bring on at least another burst of my stupid finger problem (wherein my fingers develop tiny blisters, go bright red, peel, and generally feel as if I’ve had at them with a belt sander) as well as intriguing a tiny person who shouldn’t really learn about the ingestion of dust just yet, I feel, and then, THEN, I spend two hours – TWO HOURS of time, which means having the tiny daughter otherwise occupied, and ignoring the need to clean up, and ignoring the fact that we’ve got no food in the house, the washing is piling up, the place is really quite filthy and the sodding, sodding windows have no glass in them when heavy rain is forecast – THEN, I spend two hours copy-editing (for which read: completely rewriting) an interminably dull and terribly-written document about the World Trade Organisation only to have Word crash not once but twice (thus eating the auto-recovery file for afters, and leaving me bereft of the two hours of work), meaning I have about six thousand words to go, when I had literally just finished the last footnote on the last page, I feel quite pissed off, frankly.

Today has not been a good day, folks.

Did I mention that I’m fat and ugly? And skint?

Earthenwitch likes:

:: bare feet on warm grass, the smell of ground coffee, her daughter’s hands in her hair, crunchy towels, trays of blackberries laid out to freeze, bags of soup frozen into individual portions, getting parcels through the post, sending presents to distant friends, the sound of rain bouncing off the lane, mushrooms chopped in quarters (stalk and all), early mornings with mist on fields, the smell of camping, thin-nibbed black pens, sticking her hand in bags of corn, the sound of the washing machine in the evening,

Earthenwitch dislikes:

:: pegs which don’t, the smell of dust, subtitles which tell a different truth, receipts, fluorescent lighting, coffee pots which let grounds through, baby books which tell no story, soap, verbose recipes, letters beginning ‘Dear Firstname Secondname’, boiled potatoes, underlined signatures, books with upside-down spines, read receipts, mobile phones which do anything except make a ringing noise, dusty plants, that substance which collects behind the tap.

And you?

Good god, someone appears to have flipped the summer switch. Today, glorious sunshine pours in through the window, and, what’s more, not for the first time this week. At this rate, the south-west will be populated once more by people who think it’s acceptable to go into shops without the presence of a t-shirt (she said, her protestant savagery gene coming to the fore after years in abeyance). (Abeyance. Isn’t that a fantastic word?)

Anyway, yes – it’s been about twenty-eight degrees here today, and really quite pleasant. A light breeze to stop it getting too sultry, and not a cloud to be seen.

Unless, that is, you count the metaphorical cloud of teething, which is an ever-present enemy at the moment. The witchling, who, until the last few days, has been motoring steadily towards sleeping an entire night without wanting either milk or cuddles (which, of course, I then proceed to miss, predictably), and who slept a ten-hour stretch solid several times in recent memory, is having a hard time of it with what appears to be her first molar. There is a white bump in her bottom gum, and thus, she is waking quite a bit more frequently, and wailing inconsolably, which is horrid for all concerned. She is also having trouble dropping off in the day, and staying asleep for more than forty minutes at a time is also presenting considerable difficulties for the poor infant. The result is that she’s tired pretty much all day at the moment, and her natural rhythm appears to have been completely submerged in teething tears. She’d been moving towards dropping her morning snooze for a little while, and now it appears that if she sleeps in the morning AT ALL, even for half an hour, that rules out any more sustained snoozing in the afternoon, which makes for the clichéd tears before bedtime (sometimes all round; we have just arrived at ‘going batshit’ as the best definition for maternal exhaustion that we can come up with).

So, we’re attempting to claw back some sense of a pattern to our days; the tiny daughter seems to thrive on knowing, roughly, what happens when, and I think the teething woes, together with this difference in her daily snoozing (which is probably all rolled up in with the teething, of course), is combining to leave her spread pretty thin. Today, she slept for about forty minutes in the day before her teeth woke her up (she has a particular cry which really wrings my heart; you can tell she’s in pain, and deeply indignant about finding herself awake), so rather than spending ages attempting to get her to sleep again, I grabbed a sling and took her for a walk in the broadleaf forest up the road from Earthenhouse. (Indeed, I say ‘the’; there are actually several within easy reach, I am lucky enough to be able to say – the witchling, and indeed both Quercus and I, love nothing so much as a walk through a beech wood, and there are hill forts a-plenty in this area which feed our appetite for such things amply.) There was much tickling around the edges of the sling (a mei tai, which leaves handy poking holes for parental torture of tiny people), much pointing at leaves and shrieking with laughter, and considerable quantities of amusement on both parts.

And then, just as we were getting quite warm and about ready for a nice sit-down and a cup of tea, there was sticky date loaf. And it went thusly:

Sticky Date Loaf

Get mits on:

2 cups of self-raising wholemeal flour

1 cup of brown sugar

A good sprinkle of crushed walnuts (I’ve also used sunflower seeds when the walnuts had run dry, or is that a mixed metaphor too far?)

About two cups of dates, boiled in about a cup of water until they’re soft

A large pinch of cinnamon, and, if you fancy it, a good handful of lemon zest

2 eggs

Then…

Stick the lot in a mixing bowl and stir it all up; you can either wait until the softened dates have cooled, or, if, like me you are far too impatient for such things, make sure you put the eggs in last in order to avoid sticky date loaf à la scrambled egg. Shove the resulting sticky goo into a loaf tin, pop it in the oven on about 180°c for about forty minutes, et voila – sticky loveliness which goes rather well with a spot of chai.

Gosh. It’s actually sunny outside for the first time in what feels like months. Now that I’ve written that, of course, a dirty great black cloud will feel it incumbent on itself to slorm over here as fast as the quixotic zephyrs will permit, just in order to throw it down all over me, doubtless, but hey, at least in future years, I can look back to this post and say ‘look! there! it was sunny for at least ten minutes!’.

Anyway.

With the bright morning comes a brighter mood. Thank you for the lovely comments and suggestions on how to rediscover my inner creative mojo; I shall be attempting to put my money where my mouth is over the weekend, and I am already adopting witch of oz’s suggestion that I reframe my view of my current activities and start trying to see them as creative in themselves (cooking, making wine, sorting out the house and looking after the tiny daughter). What an excellent way to look on things which the drudgery of which might otherwise threaten to overwhelm. There is no doubt in my mind that simply working our way through the day in a cheerful, careful, interesting manner is, in relation to the tiny daughter, really rather important work in itself, but sometimes I need to remind myself of this, and to think that, actually, it’s OK if the only thing I do ALL DAY is keep her happy and healthy, because at the end of the day, that’s pretty bloody good going. And most days, she is indeed happy and healthy.

And I think I also ought to acknowledge more often the work that I do which is either creative (baking, cooking, wine-making), or which goes towards allowing Quercus to get on with the big, visible work on the house. I have spent a lot of time recently feeling mildly shifty for not being out there with him, chucking things in a cement mixer and getting covered in a mildly corrosive substance from head to foot, but then I realised the other day that someone has to keep us running, and basically, that’s what I do – with the witchling to look after, someone needs to be clean and presentable (or, at least, as presentable as I ever manage), and as I’m needed for feeds throughout the day, it’s probably the most sense for that someone to be me. Someone needs to make sure there is food in the cupboards, and there are bowls to eat it out of. Someone needs to keep the bathroom clean, and the rugs washed. Someone needs to feed the cats (who have hollow legs at the best of times) and clean out the chickens. Ideally, someone needs to keep the small patch of garden to which the tiny daughter has access, surrounded as it is by woodpiles and cement mixers, free of the usual bedlam, and full of things to look at (currently, lemonbalm, mint, courgettes, potatoes, runner beans, Jerusalem artichokes and sage).

So, my new resolve is to remember that it’s creative to cook meals which mean convenience food never makes it through our door, and it’s creative to think of meals ahead of time so that there are frozen bags of smugness for the witchling’s dinner, and it’s creative to think of next year, when we will be drinking plum wine (three gallons started yesterday), elderflower wine (nine gallons started about three weeks ago), or honeysuckle wine (two gallons started about a month ago). And it’s at least a part of being creative to make sure that the house is clean and clear, because otherwise I get so bogged down in the need to clear and clean that knitting or sewing or making or doing gets shunted so far down the list that it’s not even funny. Maybe this is my fallow period, in terms of actual tangible creative products – and I suppose that’s what I’m missing, really: the knitting project finished, the stitching bound off, the end result toted around by one of my lovelies as an outward and visible sign of my love for them – but that doesn’t mean it’s a fallow period in the bigger picture.

Anyone out there doing alternatively creative things? Found a way to look on the washing-up as all part of the artistic process? Let me know. In fellowship, there is strength (or something equally  communist-sounding), and the knowledge with more people searching for it, We Shall Overcome The Crap And Find A Way To Justify Knitting Instead Of Housework.*

*Obviously your mileage may vary on this one; feel free to substitute a loathsome occupation of your choice for housework, and the scintillating freedom of whatever you choose for knitting.

You know how sometimes you’re all full of good ideas, and one fantastically creative moment after another happens in an uninterrupted stream of productive fabulousness? Nah. Me neither. I’m really struggling with managing to be creative at the moment. All I seem to do is lurch out of bed, knackered and confused, get through the daily tasks necessary to decent (or indecent) living, and pile back into bed, marginally more knackered and confused. Don’t get me wrong: the tiny daughter continues to delight, fascinate and amaze me. Quercus continues to entertain, converse with and divert me. The cats, well, the cats are the cats. But I know myself well enough to know that, while I am very glad that in the last week I have shampooed the downstairs carpets, removed five (FIVE) dead mice from underneath the sofa, and generally pulled the house into a better semblance of order than has been managed for, oh, two years or more, I need something MORE. Largely, what helps me to stay sane, to feel genuinely happy, is to create things. It doesn’t really matter if it’s something baked, some writing on the wall (literally: our house currently sports a quote from John Masefield’s The Box of Delights above the dining room door, and there is an entire verse of a Mervyn Peake poem in our bedroom, put there as a surprise for Quercus’s birthday the year before last), or a knitted creation – I just feel better somehow if I am managing to make, do, or otherwise produce. I have a list of things that I’d like to do at the moment. Here it is:

- Make some more beeswax balm (my fingers have been unaccountably buggered since we moved to this house; kinda like bad eczema but apparently it’s not that, and it refuses to respond to, well, anything, really; I’m trying the balm I made originally for the tiny daughter’s nappy rash, but I want to add some things specifically designed for buggered skin of my particular variety);

- Find a simple pattern for a toddler cardigan to knit for the tiny daughter;

- Turn the old wool jumper I’ve felted into a pixie bonnet and a felted heart monster (don’t ask) for that same tiny daughter;

- Use some of the machine dyes I bought earlier in the year to dye our sad-looking towels, in part to check if they come out half as gorgeous as the colour of the red wall (I have it in mind to dye a pink rag rug to match the wall, but I don’t want to fuck up the colour as the pink is too nice to just throw away on a dodgy dye but at the same time has no obvious long-term home in our house as it’s the wrong colour, if that makes sense).

You’d think that all or any of these things would be simple, and fun, and promisingly tempting. And they are. Yet somehow I’m not doing any of them, and all I seem to manage in the evenings is to clear up after dinner, put the house to bed, and SIT. I’m doing a lot of that, somehow, when what I want to be doing is making things, and gloating as I see a tiny daughter in something I have made her – I have hats that I’ve made for her, and it still cheers me up no end when I see her little personage toddling about in the blue bonnet I improvised earlier in the summer, when there was some actual sun around the place. I keep reading lovely lovely blogs where lovely lovely mamas share lovely lovely patterns/recipes/suggestions for creative things that just make me want to go out and fall down a pothole. I’m not normally susceptible to crafty jealousy, but at the moment, the fabulous goods that the universe keeps showing me seem only to remind me that I’m not managing anything but the bare essentials of living at the moment. How to break the cycle? Suggestions, please, lovely internet.

Following the beginning of The War On Damp, this last week has been largely composed of render. Damp damp damp is the situation in the house, but we are moving steadily closer to changing that, we hope, for the better. The last of the cement render came off this week – Quercus has been using an SDS drill like it was on the way out (which in fact it did turn out to be – in just over a year, we appear to have destruction-tested the poor drill, but lovely Screwfix replaced it, free of charge, despite its being officially out of warranty, with the only proviso being that the new one hasn’t got a warranty, as it picks up where the other one left off, if that makes sense?), and the cob has gradually emerged, shaking the dust of years of cement imprisonment from its shoulders, and letting out a deep, moist breath as the sun (what little we have seen) began to warm it through in a way that not even the woodburner can manage. In under a day, the cob on the front wall, which, as a north-facing elevation, is really quite damp, had begun to change colour, moving from a dark chocolatey-brown which spoke of cake mixture and clay thrown on the potter’s wheel to a warm – drier! – orange. Funnily enough, it’s the south wall that has always tended to be the dampest, and we now see why: as the render came off, it became apparent that the repairs we’d found previously (those consisting largely of the ‘oh shit – the wall’s collapsing! Quick – shove in breeze blocks!’ approach) had been carried out on quite a wholesale footing – the first three or four feet of the whole wall has had this treatment, meaning the cob has been standing in leaky wellies, effectively, when the saying goes that it should have a good hat (i.e. a watertight roof) and a good pair of boots (i.e. plenty of drainage around its base, to ensure that the lack of damp-proof course isn’t a problem).

At the end of the week, the render is off the cob completely, and the walls continue, despite the persistently wet weather, to dry out; the hat, it seems, is good enough, even if the boots (or should that be the presence of a flasher-style raincoat?) have been a bit of a problem. I love walking down the lane towards the house at the moment – the colour of the cob looks so luscious against the verdant garden, greener than is perhaps strictly decent for the start of August thanks to the wet weather and cool temperatures, so much so that I would almost like to leave the house un-rendered, its fabric a visible reminder of the fact that it is so very much an earth house. The first coat of lime is on the extension, a pale white against the bold earthy red of the cob, and the render gun is well and truly broken in. It sometimes feels as if all we ever do is either put on a layer of something incredibly unpleasant and liquid, or hack something incredibly unpleasant and solid off. (We had cement-rendered the extension as its walls didn’t officially need to be breathable, but, on reflection, this seemed daft, given that we’re trying to do the new part of the building in a style at least sympathetic to the original house, thus Quercus, much to his delight, had to spend part of the week taking the bastard cement off, when only a few months ago he nearly killed himself putting the wretched stuff on…) Hopefully, we’re on to the bit where we only put it on now.

Four layers of render to go on the cob, and a top coat to go on the extension, and then about six or seven coats of limewash.

All we need now is some dependably dry weather. In Devon. In the summer. Ahem. Pardon me if I sound slightly disbelieving…