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?