Or, ‘So, tell me more, old bean.’

Let’s see. Some interesting bits and bobs. Hum. Well.

I’ve been living in Devon since 1998, when I came to university here, having decided that the fact that you could see hills from the middle of Exeter made it a better bet than living in London and having, inexplicably, constantly grubby hands. I met Quercus in our second year as undergraduates, when we both happened to move into singularly depressing university accommodation due to a lack of funds and/or the general stinginess which made rent of £48 a week seem like a good option; within six weeks we had decided on each other, and we’ve pretty much lived in each other’s pocket since then. Sickening, non? Our first conversation was about Vaughan Williams, Holst, Steve Reich and Horace Silver. It boded well, I thought, particularly as I’d had a ‘feeling’ about my new flat before I actually moved in.

Since then I’ve staggered through an MA course and a PhD (for those of you who didn’t hear the extended wailing that was my research experience, lots and lots of moaning can be found in my archives; suffice it to say that I am not sorry to have finished, though I haven’t completely ruled out doing something else academic at some point, when my brain has recovered) (if that ever happens), and Quercus and I have become steadily more interested in things of a green and sustainable nature. We are now lucky enough to live in a tiny cob cottage, complete with a thatched roof, built in about 1650 (though when we’re feeling particularly smug and irritating, this date may slide even further back into the gloomy past); as a listed building, it’s a bastard to do work on (the paperwork! woe! the paperwork), but it’s a lovely house to live in, and we are nearing the end of rebuilding the extension which houses the kitchen and bathroom as I write this (thank the gods and all that is holy). (Actually I still thank the gods and all that’s holy even now we’ve finished.) As soon as we fix the plasterwork, the render, the windows, the doors, the floorboards, the lack of heating in the extension (though the woodstove does pretty well at heating the entire house, we learn, now that the roof is made of something other than tin), and sorting out our broken garden (twelve foot pile of clay, anyone?), things’ll be just dandy, in fact. Oh, and shift the static caravan inhabiting a third of one side of the garden. Oh, and move the sheds which are half-collapsing. Oh, and reroute the stream which runs through the bottom two sheds. (Yes, we have three sheds. And your point is…?) Oh, and build a woodshed for storing the wood we need to heat the house. Yes. Well. Moving on.

In 2008, we were lucky enough to find ourselves the parents of a little girl, known hereabouts as Hero. She is very much her own person, and has been from the very start; Quercus and I are quite demented about her, and I’ve become one of those pregnancy/birth junkies who gets all soppy about other people having babies. This is quite ridiculous, as up to about five minutes before I had the witchling, I was firmly of the opinion that children are fine provided one doesn’t eat a whole one. Who’d ‘a thunk it, eh? As I write this, our second baby girl, known as Mirth on t’interwebs, is just a month old nearly three four months old (it’s December 2011; she was born on August 10), and we’re adjusting to life as a family of four, bit by bit, with various screaming intervals all round, and lots of paranoid reading of crunchy parenting manuals. On my part, that is. Quercus, not so much, though he has just bought a poncho. Which may or may not explain… well, various things, really.

Bit parts are provided by our cats, the lovely Pyewacket (Pye appears to have gone off wacketting as of September 2011; we miss her terribly; our neighbours saw her about a week after we did, but nothing since… I live in hope, literally, in this instance, that she’ll come back someday) Hecate, a new addition to the household in October 2011, and the not-so-lovely equally, er, something Wixon, as well as our six chooks, Pepper and Liquorice (Barnevelders), Nutmeg and Posset (Buff Sussex), and Cobweb and Nightshade (Araucanas). (Sadly, chooks were eaten in 2010 by a large and unapologetic fox.) I often whinge about my father, whose romantic inclinations are roughly akin to the Bolter in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. I also whinge about the general unfairness of the fact that no-one has yet proved themselves willing to pay me a decent salary just for being me. Other topics include making your own wine from combinations of vegetables, fruit, herbs and other things which don’t get themselves out of the way fast enough, growing veg (and ignoring the complete chaos which is our greenhouse), attempting to find a way to live without a nine-to-five job, random acts of cookery and arty-fartyness, and just why it is that there are so many adverts on the radio.