And you?

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?

Well, that was quite a week! Many things have been fixed, or prepared, or done in some way. I had forgotten how everything takes 3 times as long as one thinks it might. I won’t list the rather long and tedious list of things that have changed, but think it fair to say that it’s been a productive week.

I think I should thank the Earthenwitch for actually upping and offing with the Witchling for a week, as it’s given me the opportunity to spend far more time than I would have done otherwise working on the chateau. I know that they have both been enjoying their time at Gwandma’s house (she is so called by the Witchling) and that they have had a chance to a) rest and b) visit ducks. Always a bonus. I have had a chance to lie in undisturbed this morning, which has been absolutely blissful. The week has seen me up at 5.30 and working til 7 or 8 in the evening; this comes of naturally being an early riser, I think. I do like the feeling of being outside stripping a door or something in brilliant sunshine, while everyone else is asleep. But today it was me who was asleep!

In other news, we are almost ready for the Witchling’s second birthday. Bless her, how can she be two?! I am sure pictures will be posted in due course of both beaming child and of presents. We have a couple of things we have made for her, and I’m particularly pleased with one of them. The other, from me, involved spending some time with a chainsaw in order to make it.

Right. Now I’d better toddle off to make the house look presentable again. Piles of tools in the middle of the kitchen – far simpler than putting them back in the shed every day. Can’t wait – I get my girlies back this afternoon!

Well, now that I am all alone, or rather just accompanied by paws and claws, I have taken the liberty of hijacking the tiny white box to ramble about what’s happening here. It’s been very hot here, and spending all day outside has had a curious effect on my skin – I sensibly slathered myself in sun cream, but was unable to reach a section in the middle of my back, and forgot my legs altogether. The resultant blotches may take some time to fade. I have never been a very shirt-off type of person, but in this heat doing hard work all day it seemed like a good idea. Plus I thought the only beings around to see were the cats; Pyewacket turned up her nose in disgust and retired to the pile of sawdust under the chainsaw trestle, and Wixon is too stupid to form an opinion.

So far I have worked for three rather long days, getting up at 5.30 one day and working through until the light started to go. For my own reference and to make me feel good, I have so far broken up the concrete paths all round the house and moved them to the now even more enormous rubble pile outside the back door, despite the temptation to put it all on the Witchling’s newly -laid lawn, which would have been a damn sight more convenient, sanded the render off the porch woodwork, scraped, sanded and cleaned every window in our tiny house (all nine of them; this was actually rather a big deal as they were covered in render and I had to take all the casements out as I went, then reinstall them), cleaned and sanded the fascia / soffit boards, then painted them, dug out a gatepost which was a devil of a job, and started putting guttering up.

Gosh, I’m boring, aren’t I?! Possibly the most irritating bit of it was this morning, when I painted the fascia / soffit boards. Usually the Earthenwitch does painting, particularly when it’s fiddly bits, as she is better at it than I, but I had to do it this time as it had to be finished before the guttering went up. I had primered it the day before, so this morning hoped to do the first of two top coats. We had coughed up our life savings and plumped for a Farrow & Ball number called Railings, in exterior eggshell (well actually the Earthenwitch had sat on me while reading my debit card number out to the nice man on the telephone, leaving me gasping for air and for reeling from the realisation that I had just spent £48.50 [that's a lot of dollars, for our American readers] on 2.5 litres of gunky dark paint; Messrs. Farrow & Ball must be laughing all the way to their extraordinarily large piggy bank), and I had just begun to apply it, up at the top of a very tall and wobbly stepladder, when a bloke appeared round the side of the house. I came down, and he explained that he was a tree chopping chap doing the rounds for the electricity company, and that one of the poles in our garden had about 6m more ivy on it than was allowed. I was delighted that he was prepared to hack it about instead of me, so after a pleasant conversation about wood which they might chop and I might collect, I went back to my painting. The Farrow and Ball had grown a skin. It was OK though, as I stirred it back in. I went back up the teetering ladder and continued. Almost immediately our neighbour appeared, along with two year-old boy and aged hound, who proceeded to make his way indoors to polish off Wixon’s breakfast (much to his horror). They chatted for a minute, then disappeared just as another neighbour, who is an electrician, dropped by to talk to me about some work we need doing. The skin was forming again. I continued, only to be halted five minutes later by a delivery van with bits of house for me, and then again two minutes later by the neighbour / boy / dog, passing the other way. The last straw was when a building supplies lorry turned up with more stuff for us, and I had to pause to direct the chap craning sand over the hedge. Mind you, he was my favourite driver – an animated Italian, who gesticulates wildly and talks almost incomprehensibly while beaming in glee at everything you say.

In the end the Farrow & Balls-up went alright, but took a lot longer than expected.

I have to say it’s very strange to be here on my own. I don’t really like it, although the heavenly bliss of uninterrupted nights (even if I do get up obscenely early) is enjoyable. But I miss my baby. Where is the little voice that demands “pruuuune” at the end of breakfast? Where are the tiny feet that run around upstairs? Where is the little bare naked baby who runs away at bath-time? And where is my garden helper? I miss her enormously. Oh, and I miss the Eathenwitch a bit too.

Right – I’m off for tea. Pizza again (gave up bacon sandwiches after eating nothing else for a day and a bit, and then being very sick; too much salt). Cheerio.

It’s funny, though – thinking, finally, that I actually am going to do this, after years of hankering after other people’s dreads and thinking I’d love to try it some time, has made me all the more interested in reading about other people’s experience, some good, and some bad. Some people have talked about the attitude of other people if you’ve got dreads (assumptions being that you’re into drugs, or a pikey [because having a static caravan, in a right state, in your totally destroyed garden doesn't give that impression at all], or that you never wash, or that you’re morally degenerate), and some have mentioned the practical irritations of finding the right shampoo or abandoning shampoo in favour of apple cider vinegar-based concoctions.

Mentally, I’ve been trying to think how I would feel about people judging me based on my hairstyle. Some of you might remember that the last time I mentioned this, opinions were divided, comments-wise, between ‘yay! for dreads!’ and ‘er – why would you want to do that?’, particularly in relation to the judgement people might form about me and the small girl. I’m not such a hopeless idealist as to pretend that these judgments won’t happen, but I do think that probably, if you’re going to judge me on my hair, it’s unlikely we’d get along particularly well anyway. I know it’s probably not always that simple, but seriously: we are talking about a hairstyle here, not a form of social terrorism, and I imagine that anyone talking to me for more than a second will form judgments about who I am, and what I do, whether I like it or not, and in ways that I may or may not agree with. For example, a colleague recently assumed that I was vegetarian (again). Yes, this is something which happens often, and no, I have no idea why: I think I’ve written before about how it’s possible to look like a vegetarian, and I’m still no closer to answering that, other than the fact that, for most of the people I’ve asked about it,what prompted their assumption was normally either to do with my perceived eco-consciousness, or with the way I dress. Of course, the assumption that I don’t eat meat isn’t a remotely offensive one, and, indeed, it’s not far from the truth in that I don’t eat very much meat, and I try to buy free-range organic meat when I do eat it, and I love love love vegetarian cooking (as most of the recipes here will testify). But it’s still one based on appearances, and I suppose that means it probably goes deeper than just thinking about what someone does or doesn’t eat; my colleague also assumed that I had been to Glastonbury at least once, and that I’d be the person to ask about how to make your own wine. So, no matter what I do with my hair, my appearance seems to give off a dreadlocked vibe, as it were, and surprisingly conservative friends have been all for the idea of a dreadlocked me. (Either that, or I have some very polite friends!)

Practically, I’ve been experimenting with the latter having realised some time ago that shampoo was what made Quercus’s hair more than normally crazy (he’s fine with the sort of eco alternatives, but ‘standard’ shampoo – just no, in so many ways); so far, I’ve tried bicarbonate of soda and a rinse of apple cider vinegar and essential oils, and the results were pretty good in that my hair didn’t need washing half so often, and smelled really delicious in the meantime. I still need to fiddle with quantities, mind you, as a couple of times I’ve ended up with a rather clogged feeling to the ol’ barnet – too much bicarb? Hard water? Soft water? Should I be trying baking powder instead? – but the overall effect is rather good, I think, and my hair behaves much better between washes than it does when I use shampoo (which makes it static, oily-looking far more quickly and prone to that fly-away rubbish); the shift from washing hair every day to washing it once or twice a week has not proved the challenge I’d assumed, in that I haven’t wandered about looking as if I’ve dipped my head in a chip-shop, and this bodes well, methinks, for the once-a-week washing epic which dreadlocks – and their attendant drying – might entail.

Gosh.

And there was me thinking this would be a quick post.

So, anyone out there with any advice on the alternatives to shampoo? Any experiences of dreads? And any thoughts on the whole appearance/reality dynamic?

Right. Back to the ginger wine, now, then, as we all have stinking colds, and GW is my drug of choice in this situation – bugger the paracetamol: pass the alcohol!

Ick.

And also, bums.

Update: yes, still most of the above; just a quick question, too – does anyone actually ever use the search bar? I ask because it’s just possibly going to drive me demented; finding the CSS which governs its appearance seems to demand a peculiar combination of dogged determination and a devil-may-care attitude to the passing of time – I can manage the former, but the latter is proving tricky…

Tomorrow I shall make a bid for freedom by sticking the small girl in the velvet sling and going for a walk with her. At the moment, most of our walks involve her doing the walking, and one or other of her parents sort of idling along, although when she’s on top form, I reckon she’s managing about two miles an hour, which, on legs approximately a quarter the length of ours, is not bad going, by my reckoning. But… it’s not exactly strenuous for adult companions, shall we say, and, as previously mentioned, at this rate, I shall be hiring myself out for use as a traffic island. Unfortunately, I need exercise. Don’t get me wrong: mostly, I loathe the very thought of such a thing. But… in the quiet of my secret mind, I confess (to the entire inter) that I do love that feeling when you’ve walked five miles, and have another two or so to go, and you’re into your stride, and your legs feel as if they’re walking for themselves and you’re not really putting in any effort and you could go on forever.* And perhaps it’s the Sagittarian in me, but I often feel better for getting out, getting fresh air, a change of scene. So, that’s the plan tomorrow – go somewhere, preferably by the sea, and walk for at least forty minutes, at a good quick pace, while carrying about twenty-four pounds of baby. Good for the soul, and not so bad for the ol’ cardiac whatsit either, I hope.

On which note, I shall retire to my chaise-longue. It’s not good to rush one’s recover.

*Or until someone offers you a nice bun and a cup of tea. I’m only human, you know.

So, thank you all for the lovely words and entertaining tales of woe. The moment of utter, crapulous woe of shitery-nasty has passed on this end, and we are feeling a bit better, collectively. For one thing, the lime, while interesting, is not completely buggered; our friend Chris, who is a lime specialist, reckons it’s completely salvageable, though not until any chance of frost has passed. This is good in two ways: way the first – IT’S NOT COMPLETELY BUGGERED!, and way the second – WE CAN’T DO ANYTHING ON IT NOW, which means no firking about in freezing conditions with fingers blistered from both cold and lime burns. Yay! for no burns.

In the meantime, work on the kitchen toddles along. Quercus now has wood for the worktops, and we have wax for finishing them and hard wax oil (!) on order. We’re sort of aiming to have the worktops in position for Christmas, though I’m not sure if we’re going to manage that; at least the oven is now hooked up, and working, and most exciting in that it heats up in about five minutes, which, compared with the Baby Belling of Doom, is nothing short of a minor miracle.

So, here are some jolly pictures, so lighten the doom and kid you all into thinking that I am completely on top of things, with creativity oozing from every pore. (Let us not speak of the reality: it is not creativity but stupidity and, for variety, idiocy which oozeth in this house.)

I am still marveling at the hat that I knitted. I can’t believe I actually managed to follow a pattern, for one.

We’ve been making lanterns from watercolour paper soaked in oil; horribly incendiary in nature, but rather dinky, nonetheless.

Reading continues to be the witchling’s favourite passtime (and, just to ensure that universal balance is maintained, that choas on the right is the ever-present washing stand, which probably represents my least favourite passtime).

Once upon a time, I thought that Chrimbly decorations such as these would be such fun to make; blanket-stitching the hearts together and stuffing them for a padded look is indeed quite fun, but the stars! Oh, the stars! What was I thinking? So. Many. Stitches. So. Little room. For stuffing.

So, moving on from the doom and gloom, we’re slowly remembering that generally, we can handle the shitty bits and bats because life still has some delightful moments despite the flaking limewash. It’s on to Crumphole pudding-making and general mince pie-gorging now. So what have you got left that you’d like to do before the cessation of hostilities?

- The fucking lime render is not taking the recent frosts well. For some unholy reason, the fucking fucking fucking limewash is flaking off, and the north wall of the house is encased in hard frost that looks as if the wall has had buckets of water thrown at it. Most of the limewash on this wall is going to come off, from the looks of it, and patches of it are in trouble across various other walls. I don’t know why. We have worked as hard on this project as we are capable of working, and it’s dominated most of this summer and autumn. I am beyond sick of it. We thought this bit was fixed; there are so many things to fix on this house, and we thought this was one of the things we had  - finally – managed to sort. Not so, it seems. Fuck knows what we’ll have to do. I think at least some of the render beneath the limewash will be compromised, to what extent I am not sure, but I fear we’ll end up having to redo some of it. I can’t even speak about it – I am just so fed up with this fucking house, and the number of fucking things which continue to need work. One thing gets fixed; four things break.

- The car is in for yet another bout of work. We had it back for one day after the fucking ignition switch told us it needed replacing by stopping the lights and wipers working from time to time, and the lever which allows the tilt and rake of the steering wheel to be adjusted snapped off, leaving the steering wheel unlocked and wandering, Wacky Racers-style. This, after suspension work, new tyres, a cambelt, more suspension work, a drive shaft and various other bits and bobs, takes the piss – we’ve only had this fucker for six months, and, bearing in mind we bought it to replace Quercus’s CX, which he loved but which he felt wasn’t reliable enough or affordable enough to maintain, it’s been nothing but trouble since it arrived. Fucker.

- Dad has sold his house, and continues to talk about how hard-up he and his wife are, in sort of ‘we’re all in the same boat’ terms. To clarify, we’re skint. We have a mortgage, and we have a broken house which we are trying to fix ourselves, to save money, and because we want to do things properly. He gets more than my monthly salary in a pension, ignoring the money he has until now received from his tenants. His wife gets well over my salary in maintenance from her ex-husband.

- My stepsister has attempted to kill herself and is now in a psychiatric hospital being evaluated. It looks like she’ll be there for some months. We’re not really sure why, or what’s going on with her, and it seems like she feels the same.

- I’m knackered. The witchling is teething, apparently two nasty teeth at the same time, and has been waking up quite a lot. We’re contemplating night-weaning, when these teeth are through, because, at eighteen months, we’re starting to think that unless we get some sleep pretty soon, we’re going to continue catching all the bastard illnesses that come our way, and the witchling will remain an only child, neither of which is what we’d like, ideally. I feel like a shitty parent for contemplating the weaning (even if it’s only at night), and it doesn’t sit right with me, really, despite the tiredness. But then I also feel like a shitty parent for being knackered, constantly ill (and of course missing lots of time from work, which then in turn makes me feel like a shitty worky-person), and reasonably un-self-starterish and uninspired in terms of doing things other than those things which absolutely must be done to keep us going, i.e. grocery-shopping, housework, and other such fancies. To be the parent I want to be, I need more sleep, I think. I want to be that oasis of zen-like calm who whacks out creativity at the merest whim while dandling a baby on one arm and mowing the lawn with a handknitted yoghurt pot. Instead of this, I’m more like a walking zombie on damage limitation (though not all the time, I should add – we do manage creative things, even though I feel crap about this at the moment).

- I have got to go to a supermarket tomorrow due to a spectacular lack of planning.

- We went for tea and mincepies with some lovely people down the road today. They have been in their house for six months. It only needs a coat of paint. I think I hate them. Predictably, they had bought a Christmas tree, a very pretty Christmas tree, from the farm up the road. We can’t afford said Christmas tree. The tiny daughter loves Christmas lights, but I don’t know if we will manage it this year – £30 upwards is a shitload of money. The aged parent said some time ago that he was sending us a cheque for £100; it has yet to materialise, and experience has taught me not to rely on this sort of thing.

- December 14 marked nine years since my mother died. This time of year always calls on me to walk a very careful path between ‘ooh isn’t it lovely to have winter and cooking and presents and solstices and whatnot’ and ‘I want my mum – I know I’m an adult, but I just want my mum; things would all be better if only I could have my mum back. Now would work’. I’m feeling the latter quite acutely at the moment.

The not-shit:

- We got the new oven and hob wired in. It’s a different world. The oven: it heats up in less than ten minutes.

- I have only got to work three days this week.

- We have the wood for the worktops in the kitchen, and the wax to protect them.

- I have finished Christmas shopping.

- The tiny daughter remains adorable, despite the nightly wakings.

- The cats are actually using the two-tier basket, bought in a bid to regain control of the sofas, which now lives near the stove.

I’m not really writing because of most of the ‘the shit’ list, but I’m still here, and when this lot of shit has passed, I’ll probably get back to writing more regularly. That’s my intention. For now, I think all I’m going to do is whinge, so I’m going to try not to do that, because, while wallowing can help in the short-term, as a naturally optimistic person, I think I need to a) find a practical solution to at least some of these things, and b) concentrate on the positives. So, in the meantime, how about you all distract me with entertaining tales of festive jollity? Or, possibly better still, amusing anecdotes featuring recoverable disasters?

Aaaaanyway, the point is that I think the reason I love order, and rhythm, so much, is that I experienced very little of it as a child. Now, I ground myself through the patterns which shape our lives. Quercus, the witchling and I start each morning curled up in our big bed in a largely dark room, hiding, feeding (in the witchling’s case), and generally waking up as slowly as possible. We finish each day with stories, the quiet dark of lamplight, and a bevy of kisses, as this is the witchling’s current fascination. Our days follow the same pattern, awash with constantly evolving patterns reassuring at once in their adaptability and their reliability. In the ten years we have been together, Quercus and I have evolved seasonal patterns too – Christmas, for example, now includes a cake made with dark chocolate, fruit and spices, a tree which arrives on the solstice, and Pfeffernüsse. We have non-chocolate-related calendars, homemade stockings, and far too many satsumas. Homemade puddings and mincemeat biscuits, this year mashed into submission by the witchling’s tiny fists. A real tree, and fircones, biscuits and felted hearts and stars to go on it.

It’s so, so, so nice to be the person who decides when and how we do these things. Not to have to wait and hope and wonder if things will work out the way you’d like, but to take charge and make it so. (I can never say that without thinking of that chap in Star Trek.) Part of me appreciates the notion that the witchling, as a very small person, seems to thrive on the gentle repetition of our daily lives, but part of me is aware that she is not the only one. At the moment, it seems that the spontaneity I experienced as a child was enough to be going on with; the routines we have evolved seem to support me every bit as much as they do my child. Does this mean she’ll be a thrill-seeking travel addict, I wonder? Is it as simple as a step away from what one experiences in one’s own childhood? Probably not, given that Quercus’s early childhood was pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum – he can’t remember a week where no shopping was planned, nor a journey made without preparation – yet he too thrives on the existence of certain rhythms.

And you? Do you do things differently each day, each week, each year? Do the traditions of your childhood reassure or restrict you? Do tell. I am all agog. (Can one be partially agog, I wonder?)

*Ironically, this lack of routine is now such a well-established thing in relation to the aged parent that one can almost call it a tradition.