I’m off to West Sussex for a week, with the small girl. We’re abandoning Quercus to his fate, which is to work on the house and finish various things off, in favour of an extra pair of hands to entertain personages of a diminutive stature (his mum), in favour of tidy gardens with sprinkler systems which are just asking to be played with, in favour of growing tomatoes in need of pollination help in the form of being rattled about each day, in favour of SOMEONE ELSE DOING THE COOKING. In short, it’s a sort-of holiday which gives Quercus the space to work without worrying that he’s causing utter chaos for the rest of us.

Other things: sourdough bread. Well. The small girl and I used Hugh F-W’s recipe, and though we followed it to the letter, I was surprised that the resulting loaf wasn’t more… well, different. Admittedly, given that I wasn’t using organic flour because I hadn’t got any, I did end up having to boost the starter with a scrap of yeast – could that be why, to all intents and purposes, it seemed an awful lot like, well, normal (in a homemade context) bread? I’d love to give it another go, as I hear all sorts of good things about sourdough, and so far, while it was nice, it wasn’t exactly the revelation I’d hoped for. Suggestions? Recipes? Pointers? In the meantime, I’ve been making that spelt recipe I posted a while back quite a lot – the only problem I have found with it is that, I think because of the ratio of water to flour, the top tends to flatten off during baking; I need to fine-tune quantities and rise time, I think, but the crumpetty texture is intriguingly beguiling. Crumpbread. I mean – !

Still other things: it’s the small girl’s birthday in a little over a week. She will be two on the first of June, and I have no idea quite where that time has gone. Last week, she cracked (if that’s the right verb) her first pun – a small fish finger-puppet was stuffed down her dungarees while an enormous grin formed on her face, and she then said, giggling so much that it took me a minute to work out what she was on about, ‘fish it out! fish it out!’. She is increasingly chatty, day by day; a friend told me that a two-and-a-half-year NHS check-up includes the questiof of whether a child has a vocabulary of c. 200 words – I should say that the small girl’s vocabulary now extends to something like 500 words easily. She speaks in phrases of up to about six or seven words, and often offers words I didn’t know she knew. Her company is a delight in so many ways, and we are having tremendous fun together, more-so than I’d ever imagined possible at this point. I’ve been making a few things for her birthday – so far, a small mattress, with washable quilt and pillow covers to go on a little wooden bed which Quercus is making for her various soft toys, and a set of napkins with a table cloth to supplement the tin tea-set we’ve bought her – and this week, while I have the unusual luxury of childcare in the form of the much-loved Grandma, I’m going to try my hand at making a Waldorf doll. I’ve never done this sort of thing before, but I’ve armed myself with various supplies, internet tutorials and ‘The Children’s Year’, which I read about here and couldn’t resist, so keep your fingers crossed that I don’t mangle it too badly, and if the results aren’t too horribly unexpected, I may even go so far as to post a picture.

I still have a birthday crown to make, using up some felt I’ve had kicking about for aaaages, and hopefully I’ll get through that in the coming week as well. Oh, and possibly some trousers for the small girl, and a summer dress, given that we are having improbably summer-like weather (I won’t go so far as to say that it is now summer, as this is Devon, which is in England, which makes really virtually any mention of the s-word the kiss of death in terms of ongoing, settled warmth without some hideous drawback, like rampant humidity or thunder or some-such appealing meteorological phenomena). Let’s hope the sewing machine continues its current mild manners, or the small girl’s vocabulary may be subjected to some developments I would rather postpone until at least, say, three.

Other, other things (ahem): the orchards which surround Earthenhouse are in blossom, and it’s a real sight to behold. Acres of careful rows of little stumpy cider apple trees, all weighed down with millions of dusky pink flowers, and humming with bees (some of whom live in hives at the back of the fields). The small girl and I rather like walking between the rows, surrounded by the busyness of said bees and the fragrance of the trees. The best bit, of course, is when Pyewacket and Wixon come with us too – other people walk dogs, but not us: we have walking cats.

(Since you ask, which you probably didn’t, the bonnet is made from a scrap of Kaffe Fassett’s lovely ‘Roman Glass’ fabric, because it is just tooooooo good. The colours! The circles! The – *passes out*)

I leave you with news that the caravan has finally departed the parish, after nearly a year of worrying, chivvying and general bollocking about with both its owner and the one-time friend who arranged its appearance here. We are not missing it, unsurprisingly, and I am still boggling at the situation, to say nothing of the fact that we still have a few things belonging to the one-time friend which, I imagine, he may at some point want back, but which he (apparently) can’t be arsed to come and get now. Irritating, but not eight foot by twenty, so surmountable, in the general scale of things.

Right. See you all on the other side, and have a lovely week.