For the last, oh, say six months, I’ve been thinking increasingly about the idea of having another baby. Well, that’s an enaggeration (which is, of course, the opposite of exaggeration), really, as I’ve probably been thinking about it for longer than that, if I’m honest. Ever since I was little, I have wanted to have a family of my own, to have people around, to have crows and chaos and noise and mess and games and screaming and bedlam. I think this is partly because, given the eleven-year age-gap between us, my brother felt more like an adult than a sibling, and I had a sort-of only-child upbringing as a result; indeed, the Gothic Folly, as I think of him, moved out when I was six, which only served to emphasise his grown-upness, particularly as we went round to his flat for tea once a week or so, my mother and I, at which he served all the foods we never normally ate at home, i.e. party rings, jelly and lots of fizzy drinks. (Because those are The Foods Of Grown-Ups, clearly. Ahem.)

So, it was with a mixture of envy and wonder with which I watched friends’ families at home, with brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, grandparents and so on. Our house was always pretty quiet, really, apart from the constant music that living with two musically-inclined parents created; the communal games that I saw at other people’s houses weren’t something we were in a position to do, really, given that my mother wasn’t a games person, and two people can’t really make up teams.

And then I had the small girl. When I met Quercus, we sort of thought that having some children, at some point, would be nice. Ideally, those children would appear while we were on the younger end of the child-bearing spectrum, we thought. A PhD, house-moves and whatnot put paid to that one, and by the time we were settled to the extent that it seemed just shy of utter insanity to contemplate adding to our numbers, I was twenty-eight (and yes, I know that’s not ancient, but given that my own mother was twenty-one when she had my brother, it still seemed older than I’d sort of thought I would be, in the ideal-life-with-lots-of-money-and-thus-choice scenario). That girl has transformed my life. I love her so much more than I ever thought possible. Her merest chortles are my day’s ambition. I find her continually fascinating, and being with her is the most extraordinary thing. Watching her learning about the world, seeing her trust in me, being the person she wants first thing in the morning and last thing at night – it’s amazing, without wishing to coin too many clichés.

We’d talked about children with two-year gaps. When she was about fourteen months, I reflected on this, and it felt almost like a betrayal to consider a second pregnancy. My first, which was largely taken up with working on my PhD like a compulsive lunatic, discussing extensions around that, and wondering just why the divine forces which rule over this earth had seen fit to visit me with SPD, was lovely in many ways, and I can honestly say that I loved being pregnant, but I do remember many nights in the bath, wailing that it wasn’t supposed to be like this because of the aches in my pelvis, and many days where just the smallest of tasks felt worthy of Hercules. I struggled to see how that would fit in with the world of a fourteen-month girl just discovering mobility, who was still feeding six or eight times in a day and waking at least twice a night.

A few months passed, and I realised that there was now no way we were going to manage anything like that charmed two-year gap we’d talked about. I started to feel a bit shifty about it. Quercus had already laid his cards on the table: he was quite keen to have another baby, and thought we’d find a way through the resulting chaos, just as we had the first time. To me, that chaos was still firmly in place – back at work for five mornings a week, I was still getting up frequently each night to feed or soothe the small girl, and I was a bit of a walking zombie quite a lot of the time. I couldn’t imagine how we could keep all the balls in the air aloft without at least four of them dropping on us in a painful – possibly embarrassing – manner. So, I prevaricated a bit more. When she sleeps. When she’s walking more. When I’m not so tired; when I’m fitter again. When the house is a bit more finished. When we’ve got a back door. You know, that sort of thing.

And now I find myself a year on from that.

The small girl will be twenty-six months on August 1. If I were to find myself pregnant this very second, she would be just under three by the time a sibling made its appearance earth-side.

In my mind’s eye, I see a brood of small children, all fair-haired, clinging to the leg of my rather dishevelled dungarees while I bake something delightful with the help of the eldest. I see holidays with a line-up of small people in the back seat, all jabbering excitedly. I see vast swathes of newspaper-wrapping cast aside in the dark early morning of Chrimbly as we ferret our way through bestockinged presents.

I’m still not as fit as I’d like to be. I’m still heavier than I’d like to be; though I have made a bit of an effort, I’m not winning any prizes. The house is definitely closer to being finished, but I’m aware that some of the work we have still to do will involve major disruptions – replastering the entire inside of the original house, taking down the ceilings – and will probably mean we need to move into the kitchen for at least a couple of weeks. The outside is getting better – we have fixed the render problems caused by frost, painted the woodwork, sorted the drainage – and the garden has undergone something of a transformation in the last three weeks. But still… The list of ‘to do’ that’s outstanding would be more than enough to put many people off buying this house of ours, never mind the list we started with.

The small girl, meanwhile, sleeps much more consistently these days; we never did take the cry-it-out route, though there were times when we began to wonder if we were fools not to have done, and she sleeps through most nights these days, teething excepted. We still have early starts, of course, but I no longer feel that I’m on my knees, sleep-wise, and I can cope with the mornings now that the nights are more settled; despite all indications to the contrary during my teens, I find I actually like mornings, and I enjoy that sense of smugness that I get from having been up for a good hour or so before most people, quietly walking about the house and sorting things out. She is still breastfed, but only three times a day or so, around waking up, going for her afternoon snooze, and en route to bed at night. She is altogether more independent, and yet…

She still seems so small to me. She looks at me, and expects me to know what to do. To provide the food, the cuddles, the reading, the fun, the laughter, the bathing, the understanding. How do you do that when you have a tiny person to consider too? How do you explain that things over which she has had sole dominion for her entire existence she must now share with another person? That sometimes that person’s needs may have to come first? And what of weaning? I am quite happy feeding her still: it works; it’s peaceful; it’s close; it’s pretty much perfect. Would she wean because I was pregnant? Would I want her to?

I used to think that having a second child would be so much easier after the first. I thought the decision would feel less life-changing, less enormous in its impact. How wrong I was. I find myself teetering on the brink, aware of time passing, aware of Quercus’s hopes, aware that, if someone told me tomorrow that I would never have another child, I would be desperately saddened.

When does the right time come along? And can it bring bunting, please, and a big cake, just so I know it for what it is?

In between the bouts of navel-gazing which I do so, er, well, the small girl and I have also been baking. At the moment, the small girl’s favourite activities are mostly house-related – she cooks, bakes, cleans, and does the washing-up. If I had known that one could expect a reasonable return, in housework terms, on the investment in small people before the age of three, I’d've had a brace of them years ago.  Anyway, obviously this cooking-baking-cleaning is to be encouraged, not least because it means we do lots of things together that I really enjoy doing (though the cleaning… not so much), and on Sunday we managed to make our first batch of genuinely joint-effort cheese biscuits.  Viz.:

First we create the bedlam. Note presence of Nutkin, inveterate chef extraordinaire.

Then we spend at least half an hour washing it all up, many, many times.*

Then we sit back and marvel at what we’ve made. Not least as our child-friendly biscuit cutter set includes a star, a moon, a flower, a heart, and A PIG. The mind boggles.

Then we flog our wares to an unsuspecting Quercus.

The recipe we used was from Hugh Fernley Whittingstall‘s The River Cottage Family Cookbook, and was very successful, though we added A LOT more flour than the recipe indicated before the dough was vaguely workable.  The best bit, mind you, was getting to use the most excellent rolling pin set that LQS bought us the small girl, from the Early Learning Centre. They are all sorts of fabulous, and far nicer colours than on the ELC site. My favourite is the one with spots, which leaves a sort of crater-like set of circles and spots on the dough, making the moon-shaped biscuits we cut out very entertaining.

The original recipe has these as cheese straws, but we liked shapes better. It ended up  as something like this:

Cheesy Biscuits
Ingredients
150g grated cheese (we used strong cheddar, and ignored the ‘finely’ indication on the grating instructions)
100g butter (we used a soya replacement)
About 150 – 200g plain flour (the recipe thinks 100g, but that was just a sticky unrollable mess for us, perhaps because of the soya margarine)
A goodly sprinkle of chilli powder
The yolk of an egg (and very nearly the white, and the shell, in our case)

Then…
Bung it all in a reasonably large bowl and mangle it about the place until it forms itself into a nice ball of cheesey loveliness. Cover the entire universe in flour, then roll out the dough to, well, anywhere between half an inch thick and about three milimetres (why yes, I do think in feet and centimetres – how did you know?) before bashing the ol’ cutters through it as if there’s no tomorrow. Pop them on some trays, and stick in the oven at about 200°c for about ten minutes or so; HFW reckons twenty degrees higher, but our version looked like burning on the edges at that temperature, so we took the coward’s way out, rather than keeping our eagle eyes on them, and just turned the heat down. They lasted all of twenty-four hours, and I’m only surprised they were around that long, frankly, given our cheese-hoovering natures, as a family.

We also gave a vegan recipe a run for the first time over the weekend. I say ‘for the first time’, which is not to say that we’ve never eaten vegan food before, but that this is the first time I’ve used a recipe which was avowedly such, and the conclusion I drew was that, rather like my experiences with Cranks recipes, it was brilliant not least because the vegan bit was incidental to its general stuffaliciousness. It was this macaroni cheese, and yes, most of the reviewers are right about it.  I’m not writing the recipe out in full only because we didn’t really change anything, other than to approach measurements of ingredients with a blithe spirit which scorns the use of such mortal concepts as scales; I probably used twice the quantity of vegetables for the sauce, and I added a stockcube to the water in which they cooked. Definitely going into the repertoire, though, that one.

And before I forget, please to be noting of the tileage which is encroaching on the background of the picture. in which the small girl is washing up, above.  I started tiling this weekend, having had the tiles sitting in our bedroom (as you do) since, oh, the dark ages; so far, I’ve managed three rows, about halfway along the big wall behind the counters, but I have lots of sticky bits still to go, including tiling around the sink and – I shudder to think of it – the tap. But they’re ridiculously gorgeous colours, them there tiles, and I’m pretty pleased with the way they’ll look eventually. Plus, I can disguise any ineptitude in my tiling with the phrase ‘handmade’ and ‘artisan’, given that the tiles vary in size by as much as half a centimetre, and haven’t got a straight edge between them. Ahem.

Gosh. It’s Monday. Again. How did that happen, when we have most definitely not just had a weekend?

Oh. Hang on. Just a minute.

Right you are.

So. There was a weekend; it just doesn’t feel as if there was. That would be because we all got up at something starting with a six on both Saturday and Sunday, and because Quercus has been pulling twelve-hour days working on landscaping the garden, aided by his – apparently indefatigable – mother, and because having people who are Not Us staying with us for ten days takes a toll, even if they are the loveliest souls you could imagine, and because teething is just plain horrid, and because sticky hot weather which is obviously in need of a damn good thunder storm is, well, sticky and hot.

Yes.

The division of labour referred to in the title has been giving me pause for thought recently. When Quercus and I bought our first house (well, OK, technically he bought it, and I did a PhD), we divided the work on it pretty equally. We both had a go at plastering, and at stripping walls, and at painting, and putting up shelves, and building desks, and replacing woodwork, and sorting out gardens, and marvelling at the utter tripe that passes for decorating in some houses. We both got covered in dust, and lost bits of fingernail while opening tins or ferreting about under floorboards. We both replaced sections of walls while remarking the bouncy nature of surrounding structures didn’t bode well, and we both organised quotes for things that required Teeth* larger than those we possessed at the time. (Those Teeth have now been taken out, and replaced with a giant set of chomping nashers which are unafraid of, well, virtually anything, in house terms, given that we’ve lived with acros propping up the external walls of the house, with no running water, with walls turning to dust or mud depending on the nature of the neglect they’d suffered.)

But since we’ve had the small girl, that division has changed. Firstly, while I was pregnant, we were cooking up not just a small girl, but also the plans for the extension with which we would replace the single-skin-brick ‘kitchen’ and ‘bathroom’ (I use these terms very loosely in this context…) which were here when we moved to the Earthenhouse. I was also finishing my PhD, and I can honestly say that, having thought all those claims regarding ‘pregnancy brain’ were just ridiculous females making excuses for their general state of dizziness, I WAS WRONG – I have never felt fuzzier in my life than I did when pregnant, and there came a point where it was all I could do to waddle through the work I need to get done on my thesis. The very thought of discussing extensions, planning applications and whatnot brought on palpitations, or, more often, a comatose state.

The old extension. Note buggered roof and frost on inside.

Because nothing says rural living like mouldy walls and fabric-like ceilings, right?

Why yes, since you ask: a tarp is absolutely an acceptable wall material.

Beginning to move into the new extension.

Note fairy lights, for where there are little lights, all is right with the world.

Men’s and Wimmin’s Work collides: bench saw and fermentation.

Just before this push on the garden.

Of course, we did talk about these things, because they were important, and needed decisions and whatnot, but I suppose that’s when the shift started.

And now, it’s largely Quercus who bears the brunt of the vast scale of the work our house needs to make it truly the home we want. (For now.) I have helped with things like lime rendering, and with dumper truck-driving, and with limewashing, and bathroom tiling, and various odds and sods like painting and sanding, but mostly, it’s been Quercus who’s out there slogging at it for horrible lengths of time, and it’s Quercus whose hands hurt from overuse of an SDS drill, or of a mixer, or of a breaker of some sort, and it’s Quercus who dropped the mixer on his leg yesterday because he’d been working too hard for too long, and I feel incredibly shifty.

Well, that’s the short version.

I spent the weekend with the small girl, doing things like sorting out the laundry, or making food, or attempting to cheer said girl up in the face of (we assume) molar machinations which rendered her mood less than upbeat. We made some felt balls on Saturday, and a sort of Anglo-Saxon felted crown on Sunday (all thanks to the very lovely Claire at Whispering Acres, who sent us a gorgeous assortment of goodies, including Kool-Aid, roving of all colours and textures, and even a book, about a month ago, and which we’re only just getting to grips with now). We made some bread (the quick recipe involving no kneading remains a favourite – seriously, ten minutes of actual input – all told – and just some time for it to rise and cook, and you’re done). We tried out a vegan version of Macaroni Cheese (which was lovely, and will definitely be added to the repertoire). We provided ice lollies when the heat was too much for the physical work needed on levelling the garden (which, at about four feet higher than the lane it abuts, was in dire need of some shoring-up if we were to avoid a not-that-small-given-the-size-of-the-lane mud-slide, and let’s not even get started on how much earth has been moved about the place in recent weeks).

The rational part of me knows that all these things need to happen, and that it makes sense that I am the person who makes them happen, because, well, first, Quercus is stronger than me, and fitter than me, and second, his mum actually chooses to do these things rather than looking after the small girl; I think that, while she loves her very clearly, she does find it tiring looking after her for five mornings a week, which is what she has been doing while we’re in this push of work on the house. So, when it gets to the weekend, she is quite glad to hand her back to me, and just help Quercus with things which most grandparents wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole – last night, for example, they were mixing up concrete at half-past eight, while I finished cooking dinner and sorting out the chaotic kitchen). At least some of my shiftiness is prompted by the sight of a sixty-something woman digging giant heaps of rubble out. It makes me feel like the very laziest of women to be floating about the place with the small girl, while everyone else seems to be doing Proper Work. It’s stupid, really, because, again, the rational part of me recognises and affirms the fact that looking after small people is a tremendous job, with huge responsibility and the potential to create either vast spaces of joy and fulfilledness or overwhelming depths of misery and discord, yet still there is this not-so-little voice telling me that I’m a shirker.

It doesn’t help, of course, that poor Quercus was up this morning at five, and was working with the digger by a quarter-past. Nor does it help that his hands are very achey at the moment, and he’s quite battered with various things which he’s hit or whacked or scratched or burnt in the couple of years, while I sit here proffering lotions and potions which only serve to make me more aware of the stark divide in our general daily tasks. I suppose it comes back to the familiar story: things traditionally viewed as Wimmin’s Work are not, by and large, valued as Work which will bear close comparison with Men’s Work. I am woman: hear me iron. Er…

I find that split deeply toe-curling, though. Quercus and I have always tended towards a reasonably ‘traditional’ (for want of a less loaded term) division, large-scale house renovation aside, in that I have always loved cooking, baking and generally attempting to create a feeling of home, while he genuinely enjoys such delights as chopping wood and digging potatoes. And I very much dislike the idea of a feminism which views these traditionally gendered activies – baking, making – as unworthy of card-holding feminists; rather, I embrace the recent trend in trying to change the way such activities are viewed, to reincorporate them into the overall picture of What It Is To Be Human, Never Mind Female, to show that such work is just as important as any other. I’m just having a hard time remembering to believe what I claim to know. Ya boo sucks to Traditional Gender Identities. Or something.

*Anyone who reads Blue Witch may be familiar with her Big Teeth; let’s hope that familiarity remains at a ‘by reputation only’ level – !

And you?

I’m still here, and have been meaning to write various things this week, but…

1. I spent Monday to Thursday feeling pretty dire with a sickness bug which meant that my sum total for four days in terms of dining experiences was half a sticky bun and a lot of water.

2. I have 10,000 words to copy-edit and proofread by, well, as soon as I can manage it.

3. We have Quercus’s mother with us so that we can juggle the small girl between us in order to lay a patio, finish various bits of landscaping in the garden, put drains in around the front of the house (there’s a saying about a good hat and decent boots being the best thing for cob houses, and it’s true; we have a good hat in that the roof is Norfolk reed and is in reasonably good nick, but the drainage around the base of the walls has always been utterly rubbish, frankly, so here’s hoping that this will improve things, courtesy of half a mile of flexible perforated pipe), and generally bugger about with the house, because, well, that’s what we do.

4. I spent last weekend on a dumper truck, meaning that this weekend finds me battling the Washing Mountain while realising that the entire house is coated in dust to rival Miss Haversham’s set-up. Hello, housework – long time, no see.

5. The small girl has a yen for a blue dress, so I have been cutting out pieces of fabric today. The material is left over from a tent thingy which Quercus and I knocked up when we were about twenty, so that we could go to various craft fairs and flog our wares (incense, glasses, oils and whatnot) looking suitably exotic; little did I think that I’d be turning it into a dress for my daughter ten years later.

6. I am trying to get my brain around rejigging various bits of my thesis in order to submit an abstract for an academic article to a journal that an old friend of mine set up a few years back. It’s right up my street in terms of its focus; now I just need something which doesn’t sound like the rabid ramblings of a half-cut fruitcake. I’ve also been talking to my examiner from my PhD viva about, well, things, and much to my… delight? disbelief? he thinks I should do something with the research I put together. The words ‘post’ and ‘doc’ may have come together in a sentence. They may have been accompanied by things like ‘inter-departmental’ and ‘supervisor’, and he may have said that he’d like to supervise any project I undertook. It was, er, illuminating, in that it was exciting. Exciting. That was not the reaction I’d thought I would have, but the idea of doing things which really stretch my brain to its (tiny) limits was thrilling, if I’m honest, after months of proofreading idiotic screeds of a dubious nature. I thought I definitely didn’t want to be an academic, and I think that’s probably still the up-shot, but I do like the idea of working my brain, and if I could do it while attached to a university, I suppose it wouldn’t do the freelance work I do any harm at allllll. It’ll probably come to nothing, as funding is scarce these days, and competition is ever-fierce, and the other chap I’d be looking at as a potential co-supervisor is a bit of a law unto himself (as well as being reasonably pompous, if we’re honest), but hey – it made me realise that my PhD is something about which I care sufficiently to make it worth actually pulling my finger out and sorting that abstract. On my examiner’s advice, I’m thinking that, given the other time hoovers currently sucking about the place, if I can get a draft to him (he’s volunteered to read and comment) by November, then that will be just dandy. (Gone are the days of Dire Academic Deadlines of a Brain-Defying Nature, thankfully.)

So. Those are my current preoccupations. And you?

D’you know, I almost think I like Fridays better than either Sundays or Saturdays. Everything is still to come, and there is that vast vista of time, stretching out before you in a most appealing and luxurious manner. Friday feels virtuous in that I can make the extra effort, do that little bit more, in the certainty that tomorrow will be more relaxed, and a little bit more life-as-it-happens-orientated. We’re very lucky in the Earthenhouse: we still work part-time, the pair of us, so that we can spend lots of time with the small girl, and thus our mornings and afternoons move at a more relaxed and self-determined pace than can be found in many households, but still, of course, the pattern of work is ever-present, and means that one of the three of us must be in a certain place at a certain time. Not so on Saturday and Sunday, though, and that feeling of tiiiiiiiiime is a very lovely thing to behold.

This weekend, we have hired a three-tonne mini-digger and a dumper truck. With these, we are doing some fairly major work on our garden. This week, Quercus has taken down three corrugated iron sheds which dominated one side of the garden, breaking up the concrete bases as he went, as well as moving about three hundred bricks which we’re going to reuse from the old extension, and rediscovering the slabs which used to make up the old patio (and which we’re reusing this time around, but with a smaller patio so that we can also have paths made of decent slabs). So much stuff has gone to the metals merchant, too – an old bath, the old sheds, various bits of leftover pipe and even some bits we found kicking about in the earth.

The garden, while still chaotic, is at least clear of the various things which have just been sort of stored there for the last couple of years, which is nice, and we are just about to spend a couple of days shoving earth about the place to level out some of strangeness in the garden, as well as preparing for the wooden shed which Quercus will build to house all the tools and whatnot which we’ve acquired in the last few years. This shed will be smaller and prettier, and built, nearly exclusively, from reclaimed timber, a lot of which we salvaged from a house development in Exeter. It’s deeply smug-making to get things which people are throwing away and give them new life, to say nothing of the financial bonus of not having to shell out several hundred pounds on timber.

And you? Any plans for the weekend?

So, I’ve managed to notch up another four recipes in the last couple of days, which, frankly, is about right if I’m ever going to succeed in packing in the fifty-two new recipes in one year. Granted, I started late, but still, somehow I’ve lagged behind a bit recently, and the result is that I think I’ve only got about ten done, with forty-odd to go in under half a year. Ahem. That should prove interesting.

Anyway, of these four, I think I probably liked the spinach thing the best. It goes like this:

Spinach thingy
Ingredients
A wodge of fresh spinach, probably about eight large handfuls (chard would also do really nicely in this, I think, or amaranths)
Two large onions, chopped
A splosh of olive oil
About three cardamom pods, de-seeded
A pinch or so of ground cumin
A good handful or two of sultanas
A large sprinkling of toasted flaked almonds

Then…
Onions and oil in a pot, and fry. When they’ve softened a bit, add the spices, poke about, and then just chuck in the spinach and sultanas. Let the spinach wilt down, and pop the almonds on top. Stick in capacious bowl; retreat; scoff.

Spicy beans and Algerian cous-cous*
Ingredients
Black-eyed beans, a tin thereof
Chopped tomatoes, about ten thereof
A large sploosh of Tabasco
A large pinch of cumin
About ten cloves of garlic
Some marjoram

Then…
Stick the lot in a pan, bring to a nice bubbling simmer, and attempt not to rub your eyes with tabasco-ey hands. When the beans are cooked through (about five minutes or so, if you’re using tinned), you’re done. Yes, that quickly. Meanwhile, sort the cous-cous…

Algerian cous-cous
As much cous-cous as you think your greedy family will eat
About ten unsulphured apricots, chopped up
Zest of two large lemons
A veggie stockcube
A goodly knob of butter
A vigorous grinding of black pepper
Some parsley

Then…
Whack the cous-cous in with enough boiling water to cover it (I find that most packets ask for too much water, and suggest cooking for too long), pop in all the other bits and bats, mix it all abooot, stick a plate over the top and leave it to do its thing. (I also find this true of pasta, rice, bulghur wheat and that other grain which currently escapes me – boiling water, bring back to the boil, turn heat off, wait about fifteen minutes and it’s done.)

Great steaming heaps of this, the beans and the spinach, and you’re in for a minor feastette, without having broken the bank. (Apart from the tabasco; that said, in this particular instance, it is perhaps possible that the aforementioned sauce actually made its way to the car stuffed inside the small girl’s jumper, unbeknownst to me, and was thus, er, free, and only discovered on our return home. Let us draw a veil over this unfortunate criminal turn of events.)

When you’ve wolfed that lot down, you may find your mind wandering off to places sweet and sugary. That being so, my research tells me that a sticky bun might present a very valid conclusion indeed.

Sticky Buns
Ingredients
1 lb strong flour (I used half wholemeal, and half white)
1 tsp quick yeast
4 oz sugar
½ pint milk (I used soya)
4 oz butter
2 eggs
About 6 oz mixed dried fruit

Enough icing sugar and water to make up the right quantity of water icing; in our house, that means about two gallons of it

Then…
Pop (most of) the butter and (all of) the milk in a pan together and warm it gently until the butter melts. Leave that to one side to cool for a little while. Stick the flour, yeast and (most of) the sugar in a large bowl, and beat in the eggs. When the milk/butter has cooled a bit, pour that in, adding the fruit, and mix it all up into a nice sticky dough. Leave it somewhere warm to rise for about an hour and a half, then whip it out of the bowl, add enough flour to make it a kneadable substance and roll it out to about, oh, an inch in thickness. You’re looking for a long thin rectangle here. When you’ve found one (ahem), sprinkle a bit more fruit on, adding the remaining sugar and dotting a few knobs of the remaining butter about the place, before rolling the rectangle up along its longest side, as tightly as you can manage so that you get a really good spiral bun. This quantity made about twelve for me.

On to an oiled tray with them, and back to rise for another twenty minutes or so (or a half-hour if you forget all about them…) before they go into the oven at about 180&deg c for another twenty-minutes-or-so stint (keep an eye on them; some of mine caught a bit where they were near the back right of the oven, which is always the hottest bit in mine). When they’re lightly browned, whip ‘em out and leave them to cool on a nice wee tray. (As someone who is contemplating The Move From Nappies, I shouldn’t really be bandying about the concept of trays and wee, but hey: I live for kicks.)

While they’re cooling, rediscover your rather attractive but long-forgotten icing sugar (a natural pale fawn colour), and realise that it has long since abandoned the dust-like form it once preferred, in favour of that of small-to-medium rocks. Spend the next half-hour bashing the buggery out of it, and forcing it through a most unsympathetic (and thus deeply bouncy) sieve. Add far less water to the unpromisingly small quantity of sugary dust you end up with than you would ever think likely, and behold! water icing. Pour it over the now-just-warm buns, and, if you can, leave it to set a little bit. Alternatively, stuff them down with most unseemly haste, licking your lips, fingers, spoons, bowls and worktops when no-one (who matters) is looking.

* Which is probably about as Algerian as my wheelbarrow, but hey, I approximated, based on the coalition offered by several recipes.

** Oops. I forgot the rice recipe. It’s basically a load of chickpeas, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes, onions, saffron, brown rice, tabasco, garlic, carrots and leeks, all boiled up together over a very low heat for a very long time, with a gorgeous marmitey stock with tonnes of herbs. It’s quite a good ‘un, really. Anyone fancies the sound of that, I’ll pull my finger out and post it properly. If not, it will slide quietly into gentle oblivion.

I can’t decide whether it’s just nostalgia or if I’m in danger of veering into rather morbid territory, but for some reason, ever since the immediate monumental crappitude of my mother dying had passed, I have found myself playing a small mental game about the ways in which my life, and the person I appear to be, would be recognisable to her.

This morning, I walked up a small Devonian lane, shutting the door of our house and stopping to look at our new door handle (which is of the brass beehive variety, and thus exceedingly pretty, to my mind) and the recently-cleaned foxy door knocker, to a car which is the next-to-current version of a car which Quercus drove when my mother was alive. Would our house be surprising to her? Yes, but only in that we are extraordinarily fortunate to have had it since we were twenty-six. Inside, I think she would be unsurprised, though delighted, by its hobbit-like nature. She would probably be surprised to see how practical we have become; she knew Quercus as a music student, not as wielder of chain, mitre and table saws.

I am wearing jeans (to work! horrors!), a sweater with the neck standing up against the gentle drizzle, and purple leather sandals, based on a pair I owned when she was alive. I am wearing silver spiral earrings given to me by Quercus the summer that my mother was diagnosed. I have a leather keyring which was my mother’s. I call to mind a day spent in Boscastle with her, before illness loomed on the horizon (in fact, just before, given that I’d already started university, so it must been the first time they came to visit; the return trip from that visit brought the road accident which started the process which would end in my mother dying of breast cancer, unrecognised until it was too late because her injuries masked the massing symptoms of her imminent doom. Gosh. That is still hard to write. And is it horribly wrong that even in the midst of this hardness, I note that this is a bit like the psychotic version of The House That Jack Built?), when the sun was shining and life was blissfully simple (though of course Sod’s Law being what it is, I didn’t realise this then, and I’m sure that I was full of teenage angst about something-or-other). We sat on a small wall together, and she said I looked like a pixie, a throw-away remark which I’ve often thought over since then, in moments when I contemplated a mirror which showed me a haggard vision of sleep-deprived bile.

In the car, an MP3 of David Bowie plays. This would definitely come as no surprise, and nor would the Jamiroquai I switch to later on.

My bag, which sports a fair-trade peacock on the outside, was probably not even designed, let alone in existence, when she died, but I don’t think its curly design would have failed to appeal, and nor would the felted purse lurking therein, rich in its bright spiral of colour but disappointingly underprivileged in fiscal terms. That probably wouldn’t surprise her, either.

In the back of the car, a small springy sheep lurches from the top of the window. Fastened to that bit you’re supposed to hang jackets on (who does that, incidentally?), he is there to distract the small girl when she’s imprisoned in her (German, which would also be no surprise to a woman who had a life-long affair with the Teutonic, and nearly married a German when she was eighteen) car-seat. She would not be surprised by the small girl; she it was who foresaw a ‘herd’ of small blonde children clinging to the legs of my dungarees. Not quite a herd, yet, but there’s still time.

As I get to work, a space I have inhabited for ten years in one form or another, I reflect that she’d probably be both surprised and pleased that I eschewed the London move which seemed the likely outcome for most of my sixth-form friends in favour of a life in which elderflower cordial-making goes hand-in-hand with lethal alcohol of unknown origin, rootled out of a hedge by friends, and with knackered cars which are constantly in danger of breaking down, and with a house of which gaffer tape has become an integral part. And with ancient clothes in danger of achieving listed status, and with stupidly uncommercial research projects, and with Quercus, and the small girl.

Strange though it may seem, this game is immensely comforting to me. My mother didn’t get to see my adult life, really, which had only just begun when she left, but she would feel a part of it, easily, inevitably, effortlessly, were she to reappear tomorrow, I think.