As I was walking across campus yesterday, looking at all the shiny happy faces of this year’s fresher intake (aged approximately fourteen), I realised it’s ten years this year since Quercus and I met. We were both going into our second year as undergraduates, and, for reasons which shall remain nameless, had opted to live in the soul-destroying self-catering apartments on offer at the back end of the university. (They’re at the back end for that very reason – even walking near those buildings, one risks succumbing to deep depression, and, believe me, the carpet choices (orange, fuzzy, prone to pilling) do little to improve one’s mood over the academic year, while the only appealing accommodation they afford is for the spiders who can fit themselves into the crevices between the unplastered breeze blocks which make up the walls.) Our official first-date anniversary is November 13, but it’s been sort of outshone by our wedding anniversary, only a few days later on November 19; I think we actually met on September 26.

The first time we met I was en route to Cornwall for a day-trip with a friend who lived upstairs, and Quercus was unloading an improbably large quantity of improbably large stereo equipment from an improbably small van. He says his impression was of something blonde, terrifying and talking far too fast scuttling past him; I thought he was interesting, in part because I’d had a feeling about him before we actually met. I knew pretty soon that he was going to be at the very least significant for me; our second conversation, which took place in the desultory kitchen and common room, was about Vaughan Williams, Debussy and Arnold Bax, and shortly afterwards he was delighted when I whistled ‘Song for my Father’ by Horace Silver. It was the first time I’d encountered someone who shared the same sort of interest in music, or had similarly bizarre tastes. About four weeks later, we went to the Double Locks fireworks party; I had had a bad dose of bronchitis and was feeling pretty grim, but when he asked, there was no way I wasn’t going.

By this time, we were in that exhilarating stage of will-we-won’t-we; we’d been spending increasingly large chunks of time together, and I could see that, if he was the person I thought he was, it could Really Work, As In Longer-Term. We’d had one excruciating late-night conversation where, lounging in my doorway, he’d verbalised his reasoning over some of my behaviour, coming to the conclusion that ‘well, that must mean that you like me’; I hadn’t denied it, so when he asked, a few days later, about this fireworks party, I felt certain that it was kind of now or never. We spent most of the evening with his friends, a little ahead of them for most of the few miles it took to get there, and just as I began to wonder if I’d got my wires not just crossed but knitted, I realised we’d ended up on our own again, and he turned to me and asked if it would be alright if he held my hand. We were both shaking; I was so nervous that I felt sure he could hear my heart thumping. By the end of that week, we were an established thing; I only realised then that we’d been the subject of a good bit of gossip for our flatmates, who were splendidly unsurprised at our union.

So, a decade on, and I still find myself smiling involuntarily when he smiles, still laugh when he tells me he has me in his evil clutches and gearboxes. I find myself in the happy position of being deeply, abidingly, stupidly, in love with my husband.

(I would put a picture of him up, but I think he might demur.)

So, the aged parent has been here since Wednesday, and left early this afternoon. We only arranged this a few days ago, though he said about two weeks back that he wanted to come. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder articulately, explicitly, what the reason for this visit might be. Not that he has to have a reason, you understand, but he doesn’t come often, and, to be honest, ever since the time when he demanded, with pretty much no warning and even less justification, that we repay a loan he’d told us he considered ‘gone’ only two weeks previously, my am-I-about-to-get-buggered-about-in-some-way radar has been at an all-time high, and I seem to be eternally on standby where he is concerned, poised to leap into a defensive pose of some sort.

It transpires that I was not entirely wrong to feel the vague sense of unease about this trip, though, fortunately for us both, that sense of peace that I reached a while back about my relationship with him seems to be persisting, ultimately. Despite a few prods to the contrary…

He has been lovely to the witchling, and took time to make her feel comfortable with him, hiding small somethings in his fists and letting her pry his fingers open to discover which side hid the present. He bought us a truly sumptuous Indian take-away last night, after a day spent rendering the house in hot sticky sunshine unlikely in late September. He produced a wad of cash towards the cost of yet another ton of sand needed to finish the sodding rendering (and yes, we hope that day may yet dawn). He took me to a local NCT sale and paid for a wodge of infant clothing which should keep the tiny daughter warm as the weather continues to cool.

And then…

He said he wants my mother’s ashes back. Largely because he feels that it’s time we addressed, finally, what is going to happen to them. I’ve had her ashes here, in Devon, for some time, and when he delivered them to me, I was under the impression that it was a permanent decision, at least from his point of view, and that, as I wanted them, it was sort of up to me from that point.

Now, if he ever finds this blog, I’m in real parental shit. Before I moved to this address, he found and read my thoughts on what to do with my mother’s ashes, as longer-term readers may recall; the fall-out was swift and extreme in nature, and after ranting at me over the phone, calling me inconsiderate and thoughtless, he didn’t speak to me for over a week. Well, I didn’t exactly seek him out during that time, as you may imagine, but whatever – it took a long time to move past that one. (Because a clarification is called for here – we don’t ever really resolve things, he and I; we simply move the carpet an inch or two higher to the ceiling as we diligently shove whatever the latest issue is into the darkest recess of the cobwebs.)

My first reaction was a mixture of anger and sadness. I felt that he’d only come because he wanted something, and that he’d either purposely misled me when he gave me her ashes initially, or had simply rewritten history to fit his view of it. Either way, not ideal. I said very little, knowing that if I got into an argument I’d only find that I was the one who suffered; the aged is a very good arguer, and has a remarkable knack for not only deeply pissing me off, but also managing to make me feel guilty about it at the same time. So, I succeeded in saying virtually nothing, and we moved on as Quercus, with rather handy – albeit inadvertent – timing, arrived home with a few tons of sand which needed shovelling off the back of the trailer.

And then I quietly fermented on it. Revolved it around in my mind, and thought about why I was cross, and why I was sad, and what to do, and what not to do.

And what it comes down to is this.

I learned when my mother was dying that there is virtually nothing truly worth falling out about, in terms of cataclysmic never-darken-my-door-again arguing. That things once said cannot be unsaid, no matter how much you may later wish they could be, and that you only really get one shot at this life, and the people you meet, and your relationships with them, might just be the most important part of life – more important than money, and things, and places – and that it’s all very well pushing the sense that you’re in the wrong, or behaving badly, or hurting someone, to the back of your mind, but that that doesn’t stop the sense being there; it merely puts ear-defenders on your conscience and passes it a very complicated crossword puzzle to keep it occupied while you continue to do whatever it is that you know you’ll later wish you hadn’t.

I am lucky in that my mum and I were very close, and there were no unspoken problems between us, and very few words I wish I hadn’t said; this has been a very genuine comfort to me in the years since she has been gone, and I imagine it will go on being. My relationship with the aged parent, however is not that simple, and has been fraught with hurt and guilt and resentment and defensiveness over the years, despite a shared sense of humour and a well-developed stiff-upper-lip attitude that I realise can be most unhelpful in terms of really KNOWING someone. However, whatever we may have fallen out about in the past, I don’t want to fall out with him now. Not over this. Not in a way which, because of its hyper-sensitive prompt, would surely be decisive, final, and, ultimately, futile.

So, despite my reservations, I think I am going to go along with his desire to have my mother’s ashes buried. Apart from any more emotional considerations, I look at the tiny daughter, and find myself wondering what on earth she would do with this dubious inheritance should I not do anything myself. I mean, one can hardly just leave one’s daughter with a box of human ashes, really, can one, perhaps supplementing it with some further relatives as the occasion warrants? Particularly as the tiny daughter never even met my mother? It seems cruel to leave the decision in her – still so tiny – hands, albeit deferred – one hopes – until she is a grown woman.* One of the very few negative things I learned from my mother is that it doesn’t help to be unclear about death, and what you want to happen after it happens to you. (Not that I hold her responsible for this, you understand; it’s more that I now see what I would prefer to do myself, in order to avoid this happening to the tiny daughter whenever I depart this mortal coil.)

She has been dead for nearly nine years; December 14 2000, just as the evening star became visible above a Christmas tree lit with stars for those who had already followed that inevitable path. Part of me finds this ludicrous – how can it be that long since I saw her last? Every moment of those months seems so clear – while another part sees the time when she was alive as almost another life, another me, another universe. I remember thinking, as she was dying, what an awfully long time would elapse, assuming I lived longer than she, before I would see her again, if we do exist in some form after we die; the years stretched before me like an unknown and unknowable journey, one for which a ticket had been forced upon me.**

I know that for many people, the fact that we have buried her ashes long since is a little odd, to put it mildly. I suppose it started with the fact that, while she was very clear about her funeral (down to choosing music and which version of various hymns she wanted), she said nothing about what should happen after that, perhaps understandably, and the jokes that she’d made, long before cancer became a blot on our particular family horizon,  about her ashes sitting in a ginger jar on the mantelpiece, with lid-rattling a means of communicating approval or approbation, only served to strengthen my feeling that a churchyard, no matter how nice, was not what she would have wanted. Mum was not avowedly religious, despite choosing a church funeral; I think she was hedging her bets, to put it bluntly, and felt the comfort of a church as something familiar from her early life. She wanted to believe in it all, I think, but wanting is a very different thing from actually doing.

The aged parent has suggested the churchyard closest to the house in which I grew up; it’s a very nice churchyard, as they go, which backs on to a beautiful vineyard, and houses a quietly beautiful example of Saxon architecture, something which would appeal to her, I think. I have asked him to find out if the convent school at which she taught would be willing to have her ashes buried in the churchyard there, as an alternative; she was, I think, happiest while teaching there, and, for probably the first time in her adult life, felt in control, confident and, though not in the way she’d expected, in love. (That is a Whole Nother Story, into which I might go another time, but while my brain throws these things up every time I think of her, it’s not really relevant to this already-behemoth-like post.) So, we’ll see; as Mum wasn’t even Roman Catholic, I suspect the answer will probably be no, but I felt I ought to at least ask.

I hate the idea of going back to Sussex. If I’m honest, the last time I was there, I felt I’d stayed too long in a place which no longer held a space for me; going back yet again is, I think, pretty sure to be a fairly bloody experience, and one which I’d prefer to avoid if possible. But of course, not going is simply not an option, and I am still trying to work out how I feel about the notion of Mum having a grave which I do not visit, realistically; I live more than a five-hour drive from the place, and have felt for years as if I was going back into my own past every time I get east of Chichester (still a good eighty miles west of my part of Sussex). The aged parent moved to Derbyshire nearly a year ago, shortly after he remarried, and he too has little reason to go back to Sussex, with the exception of the odd visit to my brother, who still lives there. So, neither of us will see her grave often. The only one who might is my brother, who saw her rarely when she was alive, despite a deep-seated affection for her. It’s ironic, really.

How to spell a long-drawn-out sigh, I wonder.

It’s a funny thing, this dying business, isn’t it?

* This, predictably, has made me think quite hard about what I would like to happen to my body after I die. So far, Quercus and I have agreed that we would like to be buried in the same place, and that, as he finds the idea of cremation abhorrent, it’s burial as in body, rather than ashes. We both quite like the idea of an ecologically sound approach; the Eco Pod is rather natty, frankly, so that’s quite high on the list, as is some sort of woodland burial. Clearly, all we need is to get our mits on so much money that we can buy a giant piece of land somewhere, and get ourselves safely stashed in the earth therein.

** I have often been tempted to try a séance, not least as my research area on the PhD front had a decidedly occult focus, and I read a lot about spiritualism and its origins while writing my thesis. But could one ever really believe it, I wonder? I’m not sure, and that’s probably why I’ve never actually done anything about it. You may say ‘but Earthenwitch, you a witch, woman! Surely that answer enough?’. Well, my answer to that is that the fact that witchcraft speaks to me on many levels (please forgive such a wanky phrase; it’s the only way I could think of putting it, really) doesn’t mean it answers every question I have, and nor does it prevent me thinking about alternatives as I find out about them. Bits and pieces of a lot of different spiritual outlooks make sense to me – I think I am a bit of a magpie in that respect – and it’s mainly the practical aspects of witchcraft which interest me the most, i.e. the seasonal transitions, the concept of things like cooking as a form of witchcraft, Knowing About ‘Erbs And All That, and so on.

OK, so that’s a little previous, in many ways, as a title, given that the tiny daughter will be sixteen months on the first of October, but let’s not be too technical about this, eh? As I mentioned some posts back, we’ve been taking her to a toddler group at the local Steiner school, and this has given me pause for thought in several ways which I didn’t expect (and wouldn’t have believed if you’d told me a few years back what I’d think).*

So, a few words about the group thing, first. To be honest, I went into the Steiner context expecting to really love it, and to start angsting for a good few years about how we might manage to pay the ‘proper school’ fees, which are something like £1000 per term for people in our income bracket. I don’t know very much about the Steiner philosophy; unusually for me, I didn’t spend the usual fourteen days reading everything I could about it and analysing its potential effects on me, the tiny daughter, the cat down the road and so on, preferring instead just to turn up and see what it was like. (Aside: OK – I confess that this approach may have had something to do with being a bit on the groggy side, sleep-wise, and having more lime rendering to get done than any nice person should ever find themselves faced with.) (Ooh. I don’t like that sentence. Nasty preposition moment. And yet I find myself moving on – see aforementioned grogginess.)

Anyhoo.

I rolled up at the start of the summer to try the last session of that term, and was, frankly, rather underwhelmed. There was no structure to the session at all, from what I could tell, and the person running it didn’t introduce herself, or give me an idea of what to expect, but just seemed to think I’d absorb the necessary information from the ether. Songs have words? Meh – I’ll create my own from the flowers and the trees. And of course there is no need to say when these songs will occur – rather, we will drift listlessly seamlessly into them.  You need to move to the table to make the dough? And there is dough? Meh – I’ll bask in the sunshine of the universe instead, while my child gambols happily in the grass; oh no – hold that thought – it seems I need to check the grass for evidence of late-night fox visits, which helpful Ms. Steiner only thought to mention after the children had made a beeline for the outdoors. You get the idea. It wasn’t great, frankly, and all the other children seemed to have colds. (Is it just me, incidentally, who finds it utterly revolting when you see children whose noses seem to be just left to run ALL THE TIME?  I mean, I know children get ill (the tiny daughter is recovering from a cold as we speak), but surely that doesn’t preclude parental intervention in the form of a handkerchief, for the love of all that’s holy?)

In short, it was all a bit wishy-washy, and I don’t really do wishy-washy.** Oh, and also, the group lasts two hours, and that was really on the upper end of the witchling’s tolerance – she was fourteen months at that point, and really spread too thin by the end of the class, so much so that I said we’d need to leave with a good forty minutes still to go, which was a good thing as it prompted the eating of the bread early, so the witchling didn’t miss out on that, at least. She did enjoy bits of it – they had some very nice toys, and she found the other children fascinating, and I liked finding some parents with similar interests (one was renovating a cob house, and a couple of others turned out to be regular readers of a magazine for which I write sometimes) – but I think we both came away with mixed feelings, and I’d gone in there intending to be a complete convert.

I was sort of glad I didn’t go for it wholeheartedly; after all, the idea of finding a spare thousand pounds or so every few weeks seems utterly ludicrous, frankly, when I look at the dubious state of our finances. (Their fees are based on a sliding scale; Christ knows how they reckon someone earning what we earn can summon up that sort of money – we have about £200 a month between us after paying the bills and buying groceries, and that money doesn’t really cover what’s left, i.e. petrol, insurance and so on.) Also, I dislike feeling that I’m a walking cliché, no matter how true that may be… (twitches visibly at this point).

But I did decide to give it another go later in the year, simply because Quercus and I both felt that it would probably be a good time to start offering the witchling the chance to see other little people, and as we look after her between us, rather than using a nursery, normally it’s just the boring old parents who are on offer. Also, in theory, this group could work well – Quercus can bring the witchling around to me after they’re done, meaning he doesn’t have to drive home before going into work for the afternoon, and we’ve even heard rumours of parents eating lunch at the school after the class finishes. (They’re doing it for the first time today; can you tell I’m a little nervous about it?) I took her along to a class the week before last, and she was MUCH more interested, and, as she’s stopped sleeping in the mornings these days, she wasn’t quite so thinly spread as the class finished. Then last week, she went with her grandmama, and apparently had a whale of a time, even going so far as to produce a rather excellent (and brightly-coloured) picture for us. So, she seems much more interested now, and going on a different morning has produced a less insipid individual as a convenor. (I am such a horrible person. They are all lovely, I’m sure, but they just gave me that… mousy… sort of… quietness that is not peace and love and the universe, but rather faded chintz and weak tea.) I want outdoors that includes shouting and jumping in leaves, not just pottering quietly and whispering about birds. I want seasons that include getting covered in blackberry juice and roaring with laughter about sticky mitts, not just felted critters on a shelf inside somewhere. I want celebrations that include stupidly large candles and brightly-coloured bunting, not just… oh. Wait. They’re completely there with me on that one.

Anyway, we’re going for a term of it, and drawing conclusions thereafter.

My feeling at the moment is that the school appears underfunded and rather unloved; the buildings are battered and rather dejected-seeming, despite the nice things housed therein, and the plot itself could do with a thorough re-working. They run a food co-op (though they’re absolutely useless by email, and haven’t replied to an enthusiastic ‘yes please!’ we sent over a week ago; this doesn’t bode well, really, does it?), they have an emphasis on the outdoors, and on seasonal transitions, and on giving children time to just be. All of this is good. So why do I still feel a bit… out of sorts about the whole thing, I wonder?

Later on:

I did just have to pop back to show off this rather lovely work-in-progress with which Quercus presented me when he arrived for the witchling’s shift-change at lunchtime. Isn’t he a clever chap, eh?

* Oh, and the thing that I thought I’d never be even vaguely interested in is the concept of home-schooling. Not that I’m saying we’d definitely do it, because I don’t know if we’ll be in a position which would allow us to, financially, but I’m more and more interested. Despite my utter inability to do anything mathematical without incurring a nosebleed. Oh, and the fact that my scientific knowledge is best summed up as ‘hmm – well, there are scientists out there, you know’. Poor child. Imagine what she’d be in for.

** You know, there’s a whole other post here, really, about the ways in which I find myself either conforming or diverging from the things I ‘expect’ myself to like, as a parent; see, with that whole looking-like-a-vegetarian background (which, I realise, I posted about on my old blog; must revisit that here, as just yesterday three people expressed surprise when they found me eating a cheese sandwich at someone’s leaving party – am I now giving of vegan vibes? Seems doubtful, given my leather shoes…), it seemed only right and proper to me that I would want the tiny daughter to be a Steiner child… just as it’s all too achingly predictable that I tend towards wooden toys, handmade clothes and ridiculously knitted hats.

So, the things that are still pissing me off, despite days hours minutes some time spent fidgeting with my CSS are as follows: the search bar is still aligned differently, I can’t seem to alter the padding between the entries and the sidebar divider, and – hang on; I’m sure there’s something – I’ve never yet worked out quite where, reliably, to find my widgets in the code, because it sure as hell seems like sometimes they’re in theme functions, and sometimes they’re in the sidebar, and sometimes, as with the search thing, well, who knows?

Meh.

Other things which are lunatic? Please tell me. Things I like even though I probably shouldn’t include the font (and size), the black and white, and the different font-size of the sidebar. I realise these make some people hopping mad, but hey – that’s the beauty of t’inter, innit?

And after all, a day which begins with the knowledge that, as I write this, Quercus’s mother’s SEVENTEEN-DAY VISIT IS COMING TO AN END cannot be all bad.*

* I am a bad person. She has been very helpful. She has helped us to render ALL OF THE ORIGINAL HOUSE, and had it not been for a hose blowing its fitting in a most unhelpful manner yesterday afternoon, we’d've got a considerable way around the extension too. However, her visit nearly killed us. All of us. Present estimated time of next visit? Somewhere around the turn of the century. Present estimated recovery from present mental anguish? Ditto.

I’ve tinkered with my CSS. Please tell me if things look odd, irritating, or ENORMOUS, as I’m using a giant monitor and it’s all gone to my head a bit.

Ta muchly.

You know, some day, at this rate, I may even get around to working out why the search bar’s larger than it should be. Steady, steady; I’ve only had this blog for, er, a year – don’t want to rush these things, do you?

It’s happened again, hasn’t it? All that tripe about posting more regularly and whatnot, and yet another week has escaped me and I’ve not even had a sniff of a post. The thing is, this lime rendering malarky – wow. It… well, it really takes A LOT OF TIME. As in, we have been eating, sleeping, breathing (that last is not a joke, come to think of it) lime render for about the last three weeks, once way or another, and now we’re on the fourth coat of four, so the end is sort of in sight, but time is short (I have a job to go to, and freelance work, and a tiny daughter, while Quercus too has a job to go to etc.) and the weather is only going to get colder, and that of course brings worries about frost, which would be fairly deadly to newly-applied lime, as it gets into the water in the render and makes it flake off the walls.

And… breathe.

So, this is just to say that I’m still here, wanting very much to post about such varied delights as:

- Steiner schools – are they all they’re cracked up to be, and, indeed just what are they cracked up to be?;

- Knitting, and why it melts my brain when I look at all but the very simplest of patterns (nearly typed ‘recipes’ there; do you think cooking is perhaps more my natural thing?);

- Wine, and how on earth we can possibly have run out of demijohns;

- Our ongoing – and frankly logic-defying, in view of current circs – desire to build a house ourselves;

And more of all that, with some cocoa fudge cookies thrown in for good measure. I want to come and comment on interesting posts, and I want to say hello and ask about the weather with various chaps out there, but for now, it’s lime, lime, and a little more lime (but sadly no coconut, and no drinking it all up). We’ve got help until Monday (by which time hopefully the streaming cold most of us have had for about a week now will finally have fucked the buggery off), from Quercus’s mother and various neighbours who were too foolish or too slow in their escape to avoid being drafted; after that, come what may, we’ll at least have to change the pace of the work we’re doing, as this is a two-man, and really a three-man, job. Hopefully, at that point, some sense of normality will return…

Oh, and it’s autumn. For us, that means the wind’s changed, the blackberries are bright jewels in the hedgerows (at least, those which haven’t been most thoughtlessly chopped about by large tractors just at the time when I wanted to go and plunder the goodies for alcoholic purposes [though see previous point about demijohns, the lack thereof, for a possible up to this down]), we’re stacking wood ready to light the stove shortly, and I’m crocheting the tiny daughter a cardigan using Cornish wool my mother had in her considerable knitting stash.

And you? What does autumn mean to you?

The rendering is going on at the moment, so the entire house – outside and, regrettably, inside, to a rather large extent – is covered in spatterings of lime. It’s not very lovely stuff – corrosive and burny – but it’s lovely in terms of covering up cob, and with autumn coming on apace, we’re really squeaking in at the last minute. Today we have been aided and abetted in our lime doings by the lovely Mr. Valley, who has lime plans of his own in the near future (we hope); three people makes such a difference, you know, and so much so that we hope to seduce him back to us at some point with promises of such esoteric goodies as, er, beer, and, well, chocolate biscuits.

In other news, I’ve lost my whatsit. My writingy crafty whatsit, that is. I’m not really in a writing place, it seems, despite my best intentions to write more regularly here, and I’m not really managing the crafty bits that I want to start, what with the work on the house and the teething-related tiredness. But I am reasonably happy nonetheless – wine is being made, cooking has been achieved, the house isn’t quite the utter bedlam I’d thought it might be at this stage, and I have plans afoot for various knitting projects which I will begin once this round of teeth – and lime-rendering! –  is out of the way, I think. (That said, I’ve just cast on a new hat for the tiny daughter; it’s called ‘Tubey‘, and is knitted in the round, which I love, and, in my case, using a skein of Noro’s ‘Silk Garden’ which is just gorgeous – it looks like blackberry crumble, with apples and ice-cream thrown in for added loveliness.)

In other, other news, um, well, nothing, really. Perhaps that’s partly why I’m not very writingish at the moment; beyond the house stuff, which is of limited interest to those not living with/in it, there’s not a lot on chez Earthenhouse, and that makes for a dull, but busy, Earthenwitch. Also, I’m doing silly quantities of copy-editing, and, despite giving a stupidly high quote to the latest person to approach me, I appear to have landed myself with a further thirteen thousand words-worth of work to do by the middle of September. The stupid quote was pitched at a height vertiginous enough – or so I thought – to put off all but the most determined, and my intention was to claw back some time to do crafty things when the tiny daughter has her snooze; that one didn’t go quite to plan, really, but at least I will be getting a comfortably ridiculous hourly rate with which to console myself, even if the closest I come to craftiness is staring absently at the wool as I read my way through lots, and lots, and lots of stuff on marketing…

Despite all this, though, and despite my generally brain-dead state, I am thinking of joining Mon‘s reading thing. I mean, an extra excuse to read – as if one were ever needed – is no bad thing, right? And the opportunity to discuss books in a way which doesn’t involve marking or being marked? Well, there’s nothing there to dislike, really, from my point of view. Of course, the downside is that it involves buying more books, and, as someone who lives in a tiny house with limited surfaces available for shelving, that’s not entirely a good thing. Wait. What am I saying? That was the practical part trying to assert itself, but worry not: that doesn’t happen often… and I have got the excuse of having sold quite a few of the more boring books associated with my PhD (note: the more boring books – most of them are boring, but some of them are especially boring, so boring that only a very, very, bored person would even think of opening them, never mind actually reading them).

So, that’s life here at the moment. And you?

I have no idea how an entire week has passed since I sat down to whinge about the internal thought process I’m working through about the whole procreation idea. (As an aside, how would one go about having an external thought process? Ah yes – a whingeing blog post.) Yet somehow it has, and here it is, Wednesday again, and me all good intentions about posting a bit more regularly too – I don’t know if it’s just me, but discussions with one or two other bloggers tend to suggest that to call oneself a blogger, one must lever oneself off one’s proverbial at least twice a week, and ideally more frequently, and bloody well write something. This works well with me because when I write frequently, I tend to think of more things to say, and I even remember to plug in the bloody camera and go through the iPhoto-related angst (I have about 8000 photos in my iPhoto library, which means it takes roughly the power needed to light Liverpool for a week to open the app, and once it’s open, it needs another kick, this time of a nuclear-like level, to actually bring the pictures up and let me sort through them, and that’s before we even begin challenges like uploading the blighters to Photobucket) of adding pictures! pictures! to my otherwise blocky text.

Anyway. Where was I? Ah yes.

So, this past week has seen Quercus finish cleaning up the old window frames in the front of the house, cutting in bits of chestnut wood where the rot had got too bad to make the original recoverable. I’ve glazed most of three windows, leaving only the tiny daughter’s to do; we left that one until last so that we’d hopefully have perfected the technique, insofar as we were ever going to do so. This morning, furthermore, will see the arrival of the replacement window catches – the old ones were rusted to the point where their continued existence was just not on the cards, frankly – which may even mean closing windows! with glass instead of board! glass! which you can see through, and everything! this very day. After two or three weeks of living with boarded-up windows in the original house, I’m quite looking forward to the restoration of light.

We’ve also been scavenging about in various hedges, procuring nine pounds of sloes (rough translation: fifteen – eighteen bottles of wine, in about six months), four pounds of rosehips (thirty bottles), shedloads of apples (mostly cooked and frozen for the tiny daughter’s afters), shedloads of blackberries (ditto) and some plums, which are nearing the end of fermentation as I write.

It’s that time of year where you can smell autumn just around the corner; this morning there was a slight mist coming across the fields and a cool breeze coming in from the west, and (annoyingly, for those of us with a scavenger’s eye) the hedges were cut last week, meaning there is a newly-spartan look to the borders around Earthenhouse. How did it get to be autumn again already? It seems only yesterday that we were taking down the wreath over the stove in January, and here we are, contemplating cleaning out the woodstove prior to lighting it for the winter (because in a house where it’s our only source of heat, it basically stays lit until spring).

And oh – we’ve got so much to do on the house before the weather gets colder. The render, for a start. The cob is still bare at the moment because the preparatory work has taken ages (sorting out the windows, the door-frame, the top of the cob walls just beneath the thatch, the fact that someone is now living in the cob wall at about bed-height in our room…), so this coming week, Quercus’s mother (who obviously drew a short straw sometime in a previous life, given that she’s a sixty-odd- year-old woman, and clearly shouldn’t have to spend her visiting time hoiking lime render into a mixer; on balance, though, she is also incredibly, astonishingly, bewilderingly irritating at times, so perhaps it’s a fair trade-off) is coming to help Quercus; hopefully, this will be the time when we actually begin to get the cob covered up again. If we manage to get the render sorted and the windows done, and the guttering on the extension, and the lead on the join between extension roof and cob wall, I shall be a very happy bunny indeed. That only leaves the woodshed to sort out – we’ve now got planning permission to build a large wooden shed which we’ll use for storing the wood we burn in the stove, so all we need to do is, er, build it. Oh, and source the wood – possibly pallets – to do so. So, yes, um, a few bits and pieces to be getting on with.

However: coming soon – crumble topping to beat off feelings of overwhelming chaos, hotly followed by a detailed – yet not depressingly-so – list of works-in-progress I’m going to allow myself to contemplate over the coming few months. Repeat after me: I will not – repeat NOT! – keep accepting copy-editing work which turns out to be written by someone for whom the English language exists only by reputation; rather, I will develop extensive x-ray writing-standards vision which will detect the looming presence of such bedlam, allowing me to decline, politely and in words of one syllable which are not open to misinterpretation, such projects.*  And, of course, stopping taking on work which ends up being rather longer-winded than once anticipated, I will reclaim my evenings, and thus, some crafty creativey whatsit time (hereinafter known as CCWT).

* As an aside, working as a proofreader/copy-editor has really pushed my moral boundaries, and I make no apology for the pompous nature of that statement. I keep getting approached by international students who are blatantly failing their assessments, sometimes at PhD level, because their English is simply not good enough. Surely the universities must have known/know what their language ability is? Or is not, more to the point? How can it be right that they are accepted on to programmes they have little hope of completing successfully? Or, worse, how can it be right that they’ll complete, having paid someone to sort their work out for them, or that they’ll complete because these universities give them a free pass in order to keep getting the fees? And where does that leave the qualifications I got myself from these bloody institutions, having spent a decade working, from time to time quite hard, in order to do so? De-valued, surely. On the other hand, I know that if I don’t do this work, someone else will; that’s not a justification for contributing to this system, and it pisses me off to be doing it. And one the other other hand (and yes – we now have three hands), we need the money. And it’s easy work for me. And round we go again, and again, and again… I still haven’t answered this one, in other words.