So, where were we? Ah yes – I was having a whinge about teeth, wasn’t I? Yes, well. That. And sore throats, and sniffly noses, and nasty coughs. Oh, and dust. Lots of dust, as Quercus is working on building the kitchen – cue lots of head-scratching, noise-making, saw-using chaos creation, and, hopefully, before Christmas, a bespoke oak kitchen, complete with deeply smug-making Belfast sink and integrated oven/hob whatsit which looks as if a Physics PhD might come in handy for doing anything other than taking the packaging off.

This week we have been pottering about with Los Que Saben and their delightful mother, who we don’t see half enough of, given that she continues (rather selfishly, in my view) to live in Ireland for some dubious, half-arsed reason having to do with, oh, I don’t know, schools, and children’s fathers, and such clearly unimportant things like that. Honestly. And in that time, we went to the sea, and we ambled around gardens, and we talked about the important things in life (mortgages, children, houses, why the Twilight film sucked so badly), and we caught up on some much-needed tea-drinking, and I enjoyed being with the tiny daughter, despite her having a horrid cough which meant far more wailing than is normally encountered, and I appreciated yet again the delights of having a brown velvet sling in which to potter her about the place. (It is just so strokey, and so brown, and so velvetty.)

And of course all of this provided ample excuses for the tiny daughter to wear her new hat, which she takes off so quickly when in the house that catching a decent picture has proved near-impossible. I like it so much, though, that I am probably going to make another, and quite possibly one in my size; the yarn, ‘Silk Garden’ from Noro, is just so delectable. I have it in mind to knit another hat, a cardigan, some wristwarmers and a hat of grown-up size before Chrimbly; the sane part of me realises this may not happen, but the magpie-like idiot who takes over whenever pretty wool is in sight will not be denied.

Other things of note hereabouts this week: parsnip soup with coconut and coriander is the stuff of life, as was the chocolate ginger cake which I made for Quercus’s birthday on the twenty-third. In fact, that cake was so luscious as to warrant an appearance recipe-wise shortly; fortunately, only small quantities of it could be consumed in one sitting, so it lasted more than the thirty seconds I thought it would take to eat all of it when I first gobbled the tiny oddments stuck to the bottom of the tin post-cooking. I drool just thinking about it.

So that’s life here, only with more sniffing, moaning and hacking than the above might suggest. And you?

(I thought I’d already explained: the cakes in the pictures are Unintentional All Hallows’ Cakes, so named because they were intended to be a birthday nibble for L-Q-S during her visit, but the fates (and three children under ten) conspired against this, and they got overlooked in the general bedlam of the week. So, Quercus, the witchling and I are quietly chomping our way through them, and sending virtual crumbs to L-Q-S.)

I jest, of course. Teeth, in the context of a tiny mouth capable of surprising volume when desired, have never been a particular friend to me, and just lately they have been more than normally hostile. The tiny daughter is teething. Well, to be honest, I don’t think there is ever really a time when I can say that that isn’t the state of affairs; teeth – they loomed on to the horizon when she was about three months old, and mostly, they’ve stayed around since then. Which is a good thing, obviously. I mean, we don’t want them falling out, now, do we? Not when they’ve only just arrived.

Ahem.

Rambling.

Anyway, the point is that the tiny daughter has now got her first big back tooth (top left), and is currently working on its right-side counterpart. This means that sleep is at a bit of a premium in our household; last night I was up four times with her, and as a result I am a bit of a zombie today. This also goes some way to explaining why, despite clearly being hungry, she’s been rejecting lots of otherwise tantalising offers of food – sausages went the way of all things (i.e. down Wixon’s neck), as did sardines on toast and various versions of stews and casseroles. Stewed apple, however, is enjoying a renewed popularity, as are sweet potato and apple, butternut squash, carrot, apple and prune, and apple, sweet potato and blueberry. (Yes – I read the combinations of various posh baby foods in the supermarket, and then I go home and rip them off. And you know what? I am entirely unashamed. Mostly, the tiny daughter eats what we eat (the notable exceptions being the acres of chocolate that I consume in times of tiredness, and the odd pint of rosehip wine which has been known to cross my lips [and yes, I do drink occasionally now - literally not a drop of booze passed my lips while I was pregnant, and it stayed that way until the tiny daughter was about, oooh, nine or ten months, at which point I was getting long enough gaps in her feeds that I felt it was time to fall off the wagon in grand, ginger-wine-flavoured style], but she does like stewed fruit, so stewed fruit is what she gets as afters, normally.)

Anyway, this is largely to say that thank you for the recent comments which I have rudely ignored (except I haven’t, but, oh, you get the idea), and thank you to Mel for the lovely award thingy which I have also consigned to the depths of oblivion (except… etc.), and I will attempt to fill this space with something more interesting than ‘yaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn’ as soon as time and teeth permit. Still to come: cakeage, quince cheese, cob porn pictures and why? oh why? did we decide to build our own kitchen?

In between colouring myself nearly entirely yellow courtesy of the yellow ochre which we’re using to colour the limewash (remind me to tell you about – wait for it: annual – and singular – scientific  term usage coming up – exothermic reactions sometime, by the way), I have also been revisiting the list of things I wanted to achieve in October. So far, so good, frankly! Here we are, midway through the month which marks properly the arrival of autumn, and today is the first time we’ve lit the stove this autumn. It’s been quite cold, but we are embracing once more the put-another-jumper-on approach, largely because, having run the stove for three years on free wood we’d collected from various people who didn’t want their spare trees and whatnot, we now find ourselves with a rather depleted woodpile. Of course, by most standards, it’s still a Pile Of Shame, but we can tell already that there isn’t enough wood there to get us through the entire winter unless we get back to scavenging on a reasonably regular footing. The thing with all this building work is that it knocks a lot of the things we have to do regularly to the back of the queue. Living in a house like this is not really a sit-back-and-do-nowt existence; the house needs a lot of work, and just to keep things from getting too damp in the changing months between true summer and genuine autumn, bearing in mind that the stove being our only source of heating – and an almightily ample one, at that - we have wood to source, and chop, and store. This means trolling around with the trailer and the chainsaw, and generally going where angels fear to tread in terms of where sane people would drive cars…  (Gratuitous fireplace picture, largely because I managed to hang those lanterns up today, having had the idea festering away at the back of the ol’ noggin for some weeks now; we used the lanterns, plus about fifteen of their friends and family, as table decorations for our wedding bash, nearly four years ago. Each time I light them, I hear a vague strain of chaotic folk music, and I smell the acrid smoke of outdoor fireworks, and I taste the sweetness of icing made by our cake-making helper, and I remember the brightness of Quercus’s smile as we danced in circles with a huge throng of our friends and family.)

We are also embarking on a little time-filler; you know, just the sort of thing to knock off in an afternoon when you’ve nothing else to do. Ahem. Yes. So. We’re building a barn. You know, as you do. And we’re attempting to make it from free timber. That whole project I described blithely as a woodshed.  So far, it’s not going too badly: we’ve got planning permission for it, Quercus having drawn up scale plans and whatnot, and we’ve specified a wooden frame with shingles (wooden tiles, effectively) on the outside, so the most important thing is that hopefully it’ll look like a giant fircone when it’s done. Um. Did I just type that out loud? I was trying to keep at least a thin veneer of serious adult concern over this one. We’ve been collecting pallets as a start – the idea is that Quercus will process them with one or other of the frankly disturbing quantity of giant saws he has accumulated during the extension build, leaving us with planks ready to be cut to shingle-like length, and off-cuts which, provided the wood is untreated, will feed the stove for a while. The only slight shadow on this particular horizon is that we worked out the other day that we probably need to find not one hundred, but probably three hundred pallets in order to get this barn off the ground. Current total? About thirty. (Maybe I should start Pallet Watch 2009, in a desperate bid to keep us motivated.)

I have finished the hat I was knitting for the tiny daughter (it matches the legwarmers I made her for Christmas last year; I can’t stop squeaking when I see her in them together, which those of you who know me personally will know is a distinctly unlikely reaction to one whose favourite word is probably ‘gruntfuttock’). (Picture of said hat to follow as soon as I work out how to distract the tiny daughter long enough to allow both the presence of said hat on the head, and the camera to be within [my] [exclusive] grabbing distance.) I’ve also gained another excuse to take the tiny daughter out for a walk around the lanes – someone might see her hat! and find it as charming as I do! Tiny legs sticking out of brown velvet sling on my back, tiny head whipping around as she peers over my shoulder, both swaddled in knitted confections. Happiness is not hard to come by with such things around the place. Mostly, we’re walking a couple of miles more afternoons than not, helped by the knowledge that when I’m really tired (did I mention the molar-cutting which has been going on at night chez nous? No? Well, that’ll be lack of sleep!) the best thing is normally to Go Out And DO SOMETHING, rather than sit here, flatly, attempting to remember which way is up.

Also, we have now got three coats of limewash on the outside of the house; the render is now protected from frost, and we’ll be happy if we go through the winter without adding any more washes. The colour is just divine – the sort of yellow which speaks – no, sings of golden sunshine, of warm autumn afternoons, and of the glorious and unexpected burst of colour to be found at the very tops of our seven-foot Jerusalem artichokes.

Next up, rosehip jam. We’ve just made our first batch of quince cheese, and it is every bit as lovely as the sample we were given by our friends the other week; I am freezing it in silicone moulds and then storing small whole cheeses for later in the year. Provided I can stop myself raiding the freezer in the quiet anonymity of the night.

So, that’s what’s going on around here. And you?

I’ve been knitting for about three years or so now, and in some respects I’m quite happy with my progress. I mean, it took me about half of that time to learn to cast on, so viewed in those terms, the rather meagre output of projects I’ve actually finished becomes more… justifiable, right? I’ve learned to knit in the round, and have provided the tiny daughter with two hats, two sets of legwarmers (which are perfect when worn over tights if she’s in the sling; her little legs stick out either side but don’t get cold), and a pixie hat knitted flat. I’ve also managed a scarf for Quercus, and a rather appealing Tibetan-style hat, together with numerous scarflets for me, made up from the walnut-sized pieces of wool I tend to end up with when I actually finish something off.

Anyway, having just finished a particularly delightful hat for the witchling (this doesn’t mean my ego has achieved yet unknown altitudes, but that the hat is delightful because she’s in it, I think, and also, the wool! the wool! is just so nice – it’s a Noro yarn, and it looks like autumn in a ball), I am now contemplating something big. Something serious. Something about which no sane mortal should joke.

Yes.

I want to knit…

A CARDIGAN.

Well, a cardigan for the tiny daughter, anyway. The thing is, though, that things are all good until I sit down and start looking at a pattern. I mean, I know how to knit, and to purl, and, with some thought, to increase and decrease. I can do kitchener stitch, thanks to this last hat effort, and I can knit magic loop-style if need be. But when I read all that k2tog and psso business, something in my head just starts thinking about lemon curd, or purple, or, indeed, anything unrelated to the task in hand. If I can look at a pattern and see how it’s done without having to read abbreviations (shudder), then I’m fine. If not, then I’m a bit stuffed, to be honest. I think I have Knitter’s Fear. The abbreviations maketh me crazy, and dimwitted.

So, with this in mind, has anyone got any recommendations for a s-i-m-p-l-e cardigan pattern for small people, the sort of thing which is done in double knitting and uses, say, 5mm needles? Your prize for suggesting something idiot-proof will be pictures of the tiny daughter in her hat (SO SWEET, although I am aware that I have probably got my maternal goggles on there, and other people may just think ‘huh – kid in hat – and?’) and pictures, rather than a hideously long-drawn-out commentary, of our gorgeous newly-rendered house, which looks like cinder toffee at the moment, courtesy of its first coat of limewash (which we squeaked in just before the first frost, over last weekend).

(Disclaimer: this applies only to me. Me, myself and I. But it’s something I’ve wanted to write recently, and it keeps coming back to me, so, er, here it is. Make of it what you will.)

Labels are a tricky thing, aren’t they? I mean, there is the sort you spend half an hour trying to remove, armed only with a scrubby thing and a bowl of hot water, and then there is the sort that you spend a lifetime trying to remove, or, indeed, to acquire, armed only with a reasonable sense of humour and a general awareness of the ludicrous. One of the areas which seems most prone to the acquisition of labels is that old chestnut, being a parent.

When I first had the witchling, I scrabbled about all over the place, reading books, looking online, trying to find The Answer to a bad case of Baby. Looking back, it’s pretty clear to me now that I simply lacked the confidence to do what seemed best to me at the time, to identify myself as the expert when it comes to my daughter. I felt that someone out there must know better, that there must be a definitive way of doing things which would mean better sleep, and less crotchetiness, and an overall Better. I couldn’t really believe that I was the one who knew best what to do, or that I would become that person, despite the growing sense (which I didn’t examine too closely, in case it realised I was looking, and disappeared thus) that, at least some of the time, I was managing to stop the tiny daughter’s plaintive cries with one or another of what felt like piffling solutions. Piffling because I was coming up with them, and piffling because I hadn’t read about them, and they hadn’t necessarily got any basis in accepted parenting theories. (I mean, there can be very few people who advocate specifically hiding one’s baby under one’s own hair in games of hide-and-seek, yet my highly scientific research (with, er, a sample of, er, one) has found it to be very effective.)

I came across the concept of attachment parenting, and duly took lots of it on board. I then spent a good few months beating myself up about the fact that, despite my best attachment parenting-orientated attempts, the tiny daughter didn’t take to co-sleeping in the blissful manner suggested by Dr. Sears, and nor did breastfeeding her mean that night-wakings were the dream-like occurrence which most AP literature describes. (I hasten to add that I stuck with the breastfeeding – I didn’t choose that because of any literature on the subject, but because for us it just felt – and feels, with her now the ripe old age of sixteen months – right.) I read lots of accounts of attached parents, as it were, who determinedly identified themselves as such, and who seemed to manage to function rather better on very little sleep than did I, while on the other hand, I met – face-to-face – other parents who took the opposite approach, preferring nurseries and controlled crying as their way to get through. Different people, different babies, different approaches.

The thing that I find difficult is that these various labels, for me (and I speak only for me here, as ever), can be as limiting as they are empowering. Yes, I felt a sense of relief when I realised that other people felt that they would continue to get up at night for as long as their baby appeared to need them, and yes, I loved the fact that the Sears approach advocates listening to your instincts and doing what comes naturally. But with discovering that community came the guilt I mentioned earlier. Most of the attachment parenting literature articulates very clearly that the concepts should be taken and used only insofar as they fit any family’s needs, so of course that lovely little bundle of guilt which I created was just that – my own creation. But when sleep is a distant memory and the only thing you’ve seen for days is a pile of nappies which needs sorting and the washing-up which you’ve been ignoring since dinosaurs walked the earth, perspective can be a little… lacking, you know? And it’s quite easy to end up feeling like a failure on all fronts – you’re not a fully-fledged attachment parenting guru because you can’t get your baby to sleep in your bed without wholesale warfare breaking out every night, but you’re not in the same world as the parenting experts who advocate strict routines and whatnot because you’re clearly too wet to stick to that kind of thing, having decidedly lentil-weaving sling-wearing tendencies which preclude such things.

It’s a tricky one.

I realised recently that it’s been months since I read any stuff about being a mother.* Somewhere along the line, I seem to have discovered, albeit inadvertently, that yes, actually, I am the expert in this particular field, and I do know my baby better than any expert, and I will work out how best to do things for her, for me, for the lot of us. I still read a lot of blogs about parenting, but the ideas that I read about no longer define the way I approach being the tiny daughter’s mother. For me, it’s about stepping back from the labels, and attempting to ginger myself up sufficiently that I don’t care if I don’t fit the label, and, indeed, I’m not even sure what the label is. The more I analyse, the more miserable I become. Just getting on with it – that is the key for me, in my attempts not to create a monster. I don’t need badges, and I don’t need books, and I don’t need mottoes. In fact, I actively need to avoid them, I think, because to do otherwise just creates themed sticks with which to beat myself from time to time. (Sometimes I branch out and create, oh, I don’t know, one of those whippy things which monks used to use for flagellation purposes. Just for variety, you know.) What I need is a chaotic blend of the tiny daughter, housework, sleep, cooking, walking, fresh air, autumn rain, woodsmoke, love, candles, with the odd bit of knitting and reading thrown in to keep it light. And that’s not nearly snappy enough to be a label. I don’t think I am an attached parent, if such a term can be used in that sense. I’m certainly not a Gina Ford-esque routine queen. I’m just me. And I’m finally beginning to think that’s not such a bad thing.

* The exception to this is Naomi Stadlen’s excellent What Mothers Do, which Turquoise Lisa recommended to me yonks ago, and for which I am deeply in her debt.

I’m probably the last person on the planet to make this discovery, but Spotify! Spotify! is really very good, isn’t it? I have been using it all morning, listening to past musical fascinations and obsessions, and as I listen to this, I think of that, and as I find that, I remember the t’other. It’s quite habit-forming. You know how it is when you have a tune stuck in your head, on and off, for a decade or so, and you can never quite remember how it goes after the mid-point or something, and then you find it on the radio and suddenly all is restored? Well, I’m finding it rather like that, only to the power of a very large number indeed. (Gosh. A maths reference. Steady…)

All this mp3 malarky has made me think about the albums (see how old I am and marvel!) that have been significant to me in one way or another. So here is a reasonably random selection of favourites, and a quick waffle about what makes them so, at least in my case.

1. David Bowie, Station to Station: I love this album. I bought it first when I was about thirteen, and going through what can might be termed a rather extreme relationship with Mr. Bowie (for ‘extreme relationship’, read ‘complete geek about it’). I have often thought that the use of headphones and – at that point – a Walkman can establish a particularly intense connection with music, particularly when said music is blasted into one’s tiny brain at a volume loud enough to demolish approximately half of house. Perhaps that is the reason that I know every last lyric, every ludicrous geee-tar moment, on this album. Equally, perhaps that’s why I genuinely don’t hear it as a 1970s sound aesthetic, which, I suppose, it probably is. It remains a favourite because I now find it oddly comforting, probably because I associate it with being a teenager, and with trolling about with my mum in her slightly nutty little car while she did slightly nutty things as she drove.

2. Royksopp, Melody AM: Whenever I hear the first track of this disc, ‘So Easy’, I am transported to the first trip the aged parent and I undertook in the First New Car We Had Ever Owned. Well, I say new; it was actually six months old, but bearing in mind that prior to that, our cars were normally not only not the current model but not the one before that either, this thing seemed like a whole new breed of vehickle. I mean, for one thing, you didn’t have to use a clothes peg to keep the choke out while the engine warmed up; for another thing, the choke was automatic! As in, no room for interestingly revvy moments when one forgot to retrieve the aforementioned clothes peg, and no overfilling of the petrol tank because the fuel gauge didn’t work, and no need for a hammer when attempting to close the sunroof! Ah, happy days.

3. Joni Mitchell, Blue: this takes me to either La-Que-Sabe‘s sofa, where we sat and talked of things witchly for hours while upstairs the Sabelets slept quietly, unaware of our chocolate-scoffing ways, or to Earthenhouse in any evening of last November, when the witchling was going through a phase of sleeping the first stage of the evening in a small cot in the sitting room while Quercus and I quietly pottered about, eating dinner and chatting in the half-light thrown by the little string of flower-lights which live at the top of the bookshelves. The quiet calm of Blue seemed perfect falling asleep music; she slept through the entire album, waking only as it finished.

4. Jamiroquai, Synkronized: I’m back in university accommodation, living with Quercus for the first time, contaminating our entire flat with strong wafts of incense and blasting ‘Canned Heat’ on Quercus’s frankly most excellent stereo.

5. J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations (perf. Glenn Gould): I hear Glenn Gould singing along in the background, and I think of my mum, telling me about his tendency to play from armchairs, as we sat in the car park of the school where she taught. She had just finished for half-term, and I had come to hear her play duets with her partner, a professional pianist with whom she had a most unusual relationship.

6. Maurice Ravel, Complete Works for Piano (perf. Werner Haas): this finds me lying on the bed in my room as a first-year undergraduate (before I met Quercus); I listened to ‘La Vallée des Cloches’ and ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ almost obsessively, probably partly because I missed my mum so much when I was first away. She sent me a recording of herself playing various Bach preludes and fugues, and she had learnt ‘Le Tombeau’ as I did my A-levels.

7. Steve Reich, Electric Counterpoint (perf. Pat Metheny): Quercus hears this and thinks of British Columbia; for me, it’s driving back from Wales with him, after our first holiday together.

8. Gustav Holst, The Planets Suite: I bought a passel of CDs when I had an insurance claim settled just as I started university; I still remember walking into the shop, in Canterbury, and shelling out what seemed like a shedload of moola on music – this, Werner Haas, Glenn Gould and a few others. It’s just one of those snapshot moments, somehow, mentally. (Preferably I’d like to cheat here, and add the St. Paul’s Suite – the memory here is not the obvious one [we used two movements when we got married], but rather of driving west on the A30 dual carriageway with La-Que-Sabe in the back, talking about music as we tried, the day before the actual wedding, to work out what we’d like to use.)

9. Thievery Corporation, The Mirror Conspiracy: for most of my first degree and a good portion of my MA, I worked for Star Child, a small shop selling incense, herbs, general witchy jiggery-pokeries, and music. Oh, the happy days – sitting behind a counter, and obscured from view by a haze of incense so thick you couldn’t cut it with a spatula, I read most of my academic reading list in the quiet times, and worked my way through various witchcraft books when trade was brisk. Still ranks as one of the best jobs I’ve had, I think, if only in that it provided such very excellent access to such very excellent things.

10. Rachmaninov, Symphony No. 2: just because it’s so beautiful that it almost ought to be illegal. In fact, it probably was at the time.

And you?

1. Has anyone out there got any experience of quinces? We find ourselves with a goodly quantity of them, courtesy of some lovely people across t’other side of the village from us (the same folks who have previously donated crab apples, grapes, rosehips, blackberries and mulberries), and having just sampled the quince cheese made by said chaps, I am tempted to make some myself, but am also pondering the concept of quince wine.

2. Am I ever going to get over my adoration of baby legs in stripy tights?

3. How much jam or jelly is too much? This weekend, I appear to have concocted six pounds of crab apple jelly, and about four of bramble, apple and rose. Should I start on a ‘for sale’ sign now, bearing in mind that I still have about three pounds of rosehips waiting to be made into jam, I wonder?

4. Are our chickens in league against us? Having spent the entire summer in intensive relay broody races wherein the Buff Sussex chooks tagged each other, apparently as they left the laying box, for broodiness, one of our Black Rocks is now broody to the extent that she appears to be putting the others off even approaching the empty box. We’ve booted her out for a few days running, and she’s persisting. Egg-count today? Nil. Grumpiness as a result? Plenty. Six hens and no eggs = not fair, particularly as it’s not even daylight-related yet, I don’t think. They are moulting, though, so I am trying not to hold it against them too much.

5. What do you do when your iBook is approaching meltdown in terms of hard-drive space, and you can’t upgrade your hard-drive because there isn’t room, physically? I am contemplating backing up important stuff like pictures and whatnot, and then just wiping the whole thing and starting again. I have about 2Gb of space left out of a forty gig hard-drive; not ideal.

6. Anyone ever installed their own hot-air ducting heating system? We are thinking of doing this; have stove – will burn, sort of thing. Apparently it’s more popular as a concept in North America than here in the UK; the basic concept seems good in that it would let us move excess heat from the sitting room, where the stove lives, to the extension, along the building in a direction which heat doesn’t really move naturally, or at least not to the extent it would with a small fan attached.

7. Ever noticed how ‘tidying’ the remnants of a jam-making session into one’s stomach makes for furry-feeling teeth in next-to-no time at all? Oh. That’s just me, then, is it?

Woo! It’s the first of October! Which means, er, that, um, it’s… October, she finished, flatly. Well. Despite this slightly lacklustre start, I confess that October is one of my favourite months. Not only is it Quercus’s birthday (the twenty-third, since you asked; send extravagant presents at will), but it’s also a month of last tomatoes, illicit rosehips glowing in the morning sunshine, crabapples juicing gently on the stove, and hens pecking around in the warmth of afternoons still light enough to mistake for summer. Oh, and of course, at the end of the month, there is Samhain, or Hallowe’en, if you prefer, to look forward to; our two cats would make excellent hire choices for this particular occasion, being both black and vaguely sinister, though I have to say they’ll be spoken for. This year I am in hopes that the tiny daughter will take a little more notice of the pumpkinage we are sure to acquire; last year’s number came from the post office a mile or so away, and despite the fact that it was most splendid, she remained largely above its charms, being only four months old at the time. Add a year, and hopefully she’ll be up for helping me to hollow it out a bit too.

This month, I thought I’d start out by setting down some of the things I’d like to do in the coming weeks. It’s sort of my October wishlist, because, well, it’s October, and this is… a wishlist. Right. Glad we’ve cleared that up, then. So, in no particular order:

- Finish the hat I’ve started knitting the witchling.

- Stack the chopped wood we’ve amassed in what has become the chickens’ shed, which means emptying said shed of such varied contents as… a washing machine (defunct), a potter’s wheel (very much not defunct, but sadly underused at the moment), boxes of assorted detritus, a large rat (we fear), and fourteen incomplete sets of dustpans and brushes.

- Chop more wood so we’ve got enough to fill said shed, if possible;

- Accrue roughly one hundred pallets as part of Project Free Woodshed (of which more anon);

- Make the witchling a small quilt to go on her cot; I have lots of fabric kicking about, and lots of interest, but sadly bugger-all time at the moment (yet here I am…) because I’ve taken on yet another copy-editing job when I said I wanted time off, and this one’s 23,000 words. Oops.

- Rosehip jam, of which probably six pounds; we have quite a few rosehips kicking about – I’ve already got three gallons of wine going, so I think something new is called for. This jam is supposed to be almost cheese-like in texture, and a most glorious colour, so it sounds worth a go.

- Walk a couple of miles on at least three of the five days a week that I go to work. I’m trying to remember to do this, because since I’ve been working in the mornings, the obvious time to take the tiny daughter out for a walk in the sling has become a slot which Quercus has to himself, mostly. But I don’t want to turn into the Woman Mountain (TM) just because I’m working a desk job for a portion of my week; work, after all, is something I see as a minor interruption to Real Life, so I’m buggered if it’s going to be responsible for any further slide down the hideous slope to the point where hiring oneself out as a temporary roundabout becomes an option. Quercus and I both enjoy walking, so at the weekends I’m hoping that this month, which sees less pressure on us in terms of house work (although if we want a kitchen this side of Christmas, we do need to press on with the work inside; at least for now the outside is weather-tight, again, of which more anon) might find us out for some Proper Walks, which tend to be a full morning or afternoon, and often amount to something like seven or eight miles. But these walks alone will not suffice to escape Woman Mountain status, after all; I need regular exercise, and although I hate to admit it, I actually seem to thrive on it. I feel better. I feel more energetic. I sleep better (!). So, I must do it, and make time for it, because such things are important. (Although how best to manage it when it gets dark at four and we live in the middle of lanes with no lights, I wonder? I used to walk quite cheerily to the station in the dark morning and afternoon when I worked full-time, before the tiny daughter was born, but I feel I’d be living life on the edge slightly to wander about with her in the sling and no lights… Paranoid?)

So, that’s what October, if I manage to retrieve the small shred of discipline I once possessed, may bring me. And you?