As the year draws to a close, I hold my tiny daughter, marvelling at the blonde hair which has suddenly appeared, and attempting (futilely) to avoid her newly-arrived chomping teeth. We wander through the quiet house, the lights down low and the woodstove throwing a gentle glow across the floor; I note with satisfaction the forms of two cats, reclining and resplendent, drunk on warmth, too lazy to reach for the knitting which lies tantalisingly out of easy clawing. (Leg warmers for the tiny daughter, since you ask – my first attempt at double-pointed needles, and, thus far, a success, I am amazed to discover.) In the kitchen Quercus cooks dinner – tonight, root veg mash with sausages and my favourite, sprouts – while the ancient radio offers a comfortable selection of carols. ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, ‘Gabriel’s Message’. That sort of thing. A large and rather ungainly Christmas tree leans, at a jaunty angle, against the dark red of the cob wall, which, once an external wall, has yet to be rendered. There is a solstice cake in the oven, and a large bowl of mincemeat on the windowsill. Outside it is raining lightly, and the chickens are in bed for the night, still squabbling amongst themselves over who is queen of the roost. (What that says about the sexuality of our rooster I dread to think.)

Tomorrow there are presents to be wrapped (I wish I could post photos of two things, but it would ruin the surprise; also, our camera, with seasonal good will, has died – the shutter won’t open: is this terminal, I wonder?), and pies to be made. A tree to be decorated, and a wreath to finish. General clawing to avoid, and, of course, those tiny teeth to be stared at in amazement.

I love midwinter.

Right – another quick query for the be-chickened amongst you. On Thursday we took delivery of two new chooks – they look rather like this – courtesy of the ever-delightful e as a birthing present (they were hatched at about the same time as the witchling, who, between you, me and the rest of th’inter, I often call Chicklet). We kept them in the run, wired in but with access to the chicken house, for the whole of Friday, with our other chooks out and about in the free-range bit (no house access, but a feeder and drinker outside, and regular checks courtesy of moi), so they could see each other but not engage in mortal combat, and come the evening, I had great fun chasing near-shadow-coloured chooks around the garden when they escaped put all the hens to bed in a calm and collected fashion, having spent half an hour crawling around in the run, trying to encourage the Araucanas back into the damn house, having bonded most agreeably with the new arrivals myself. (That last bit? About the bonding? Complete porkies. The poor creatures are terrified of me; I suppose I am used to our others, with whom we’ve spent a lot of time, while these birds flap about as soon as I get near them.)

Anyway, they spent yesterday all together in the run (we aren’t letting the new arrivals out into the wider chicken area yet, because we want to make sure they know where home is, so to speak), because we had to go out and didn’t want to just let them out and hope for the best; I don’t know that it went very well. The Araucanas made it in at night, and were sitting on the floor of the henhouse when Quercus went to shut them up in the evening; this morning, I’ve let our old hands out, but the Araucanas won’t even shift into the run from the house. Any attempt to encourage them just gets them distressed, and, as Quercus is out on an emergency Chrimbly shopping run (every year he says he’ll be more organised, and every year, somehow, it fails; I tell him that I don’t mind what he gets me but it cuts no ice – I even offer suggestions when asked, yet still, here he is, panicking again, bless his little holey socks), I’m flying solo on handling them. For now, I’ve left them in the house, armed with some feed and a separate drink of water, and our other chooks are out pecking around in their free-range bit. But I don’t know what to do – is there any way to encourage the Araucanas out? Or should I just wait a bit? It doesn’t look like the others are accepting them particularly well, and I think there are small drops of blood (!) on one of the shelfy-sitty-bits in the house, which doesn’t bode well. I also need to find a way to get the Araucanas out into the run today as I want to clean the house out; any suggestions on how to do so without terrifying the poor birds would be most appreciated. My first thought was just to catch them and move them bodily, but they are very flappy, and to catch them I have to have the big door of the henhouse open, which scares me somewhat – the last thing I want is for them to actually escape!

Hens. What can you do with ‘em? (No. Really. What?)

Good lord. D’you know what, folks? I’ve finished my PhD. As in submitted, viva’d, resubmitted and passed. Passed. Ended. Submitted. Finished the whole thing, and nothing left to do on it.

It’s very strange.

I feel sort of… odd, really. I’ve been working on that thing for five years, three years nominally full-time (let’s not mention the fact that I was working twenty-two hours a week during that period) and two years part-time once I started working full-time. When I started it, I was in such a different place in my life – I finished my MA in 2003, and much to my delight (and surprise) I found myself with a distinction, which rather made up for the fact that my first degree ended in a 2:1; after my mother died, my grade average, unsurprisingly, plummeted from a comfortable first to a low second, and I only managed to turn it around in the last few months of my third year. I knew it was all quite acceptable, and all quite happy-making and so on, but it always irked me to think that if my mother could see me, she’d see a 2:1 and feel it had been her fault somehow, which was ludicrous (of both me and her. Er…), but I couldn’t stop thinking it. So then I rolled into the PhD programme, largely because I was offered funding by my department and I realised that, actually, a PhD might be within reach, in terms of my ability. Very strange to find myself here, three houses on, married, with a daughter who I love to distraction, two cats who drive me insane but are very lovely, a flock of hens and more mud than you can shake a large stick at. Oh, and a doctorate.

I should probably do something with that, shouldn’t I? Could I possibly be one of the world’s better-qualified slackers, I wonder?

This evening, Quercus had one of those makes-you-question-our-society-and-indeed-humanity moments. Coming back from Exeter, he was overtaken in a thirty limit by someone who pulled in so sharply that he thought they were going to clip the front of his car. Instinctively, he hooted them. The car, a taxi, braked very hard, stopping so sharply in front of him that Quercus locked up the wheels on his car as he too braked. I should add that Quercus, while reasonably warlike when I met him at twenty, is, and always has been, a very sensible driver – he doesn’t overreact, and nor does he seek out trouble.

Anyway, the taxi driver then drove at ten miles an hour for the rest of the stretch of road they were on, braking excessively, while his passenger leaned out of the back window, hurling abuse and throwing cigarettes at Quercus. After that, they reached a roundabout, and things appeared to revert to normal – the taxi pulled away normally from the lights that start the A30 out of Exeter, and Quercus thought they were done.

Not so.

Having driven, oh, say, five miles, normally, and some distance ahead of Quercus, the taxi then pulled into a layby, only to pull out immediately behind Quercus, so close that once again he thought he was going to get shunted. The taxi then dodged in and out behind him and in front of him, swerving aggressively as if to shunt him from the side and force him off the road, for the next four miles, before following Quercus off at the exit one takes to get to the Witchery. Quercus had still done nothing – hadn’t reacted, beyond slowing down when the taxi pulled out behind him, in a bid to get him to overtake, and leave him alone.

The taxi followed him off the A30 and round a roundabout, along another thirty limit (completely in the opposite direction from where we live; Quercus, by this stage, was very worried that the driver would follow him home, particularly as he is currently sporting a ‘For Sale’ sign, complete with our phone number, in the back of his very distinctive car) for a couple of miles, before disappearing when Quercus put his foot down as the thirty limit ended. Quercus drove around for a few miles, again nowhere near the Witchery, and then came home, armed with the registration number, and called the police. Who say they will look into it and get back to us. Hmmm. We’ll see, I suppose; my experience of the police in things like this is not fantastic. It scares me to think that one has always to keep one’s eyes on the floor, ignoring people who break speed limits and drive like maniacs because they might just target YOU this time, and there appears to be nothing that reasonable people can do about it.

Gawd. How many just-this-last-hurdle encounters is it possible to have with one PhD? I appear to be on yet another will-I-won’t-I mission re submission – if I manage to get my revisions approved by next Friday, I might make the winter graduations; if not, it’ll be next summer. To be honest, at this stage, I don’t really care about graduations; clearly, graduation ceremonies themselves were invented as the academic staff’s revenge on all those gruesome bloody students they had to endure through the teaching year – it is safe to say that I’m not in a hurry to attend, particularly given the really rather ridiculous hats that they get you to wear for PhD graduations. Anyway. Naturally, Nearly Always Absent Supervisor is, er, absent, although he has promised to read my revisions while on the train to wherever it is he’s going next, and hopefully this might mean comments back from him tomorrow. (At which point I will probably wish I’d never asked, and just burn the bastard thing.)

In other news, I am making the witchling a stocking. It is brown velvet, quilted with cream thread, and has a rather natty Kaffe Fassett fabric turnover at the top, for added, er, snazziness. Or something. Of course, at present, it is also a figment of my imagination, but just as soon as the sodding, arseing, fecking thesis fucks well and truly off (do such things ever come to pass? Even the thought seems too good to be true), there’ll be no stopping me. No. Oh, except for the fact that my sewing machine seems to be suffering from delusions of grandeur, and constantly seems about to start a new life as an armoured vehicle – this can make things like threading the needle a bit tricky, to say nothing of its newly-developed tendency to eject, quite forcibly, its bobbin. I seem to have this effect on mechanical things; I recently managed to break a washing machine, sixty miles away, just by thinking about it.

Right. Dinner calls.

Hmm.

Right.

First off, I should say that we are talking rhetorically here. Theoretically. As the title suggests. So, you know, consider this one of those friend-of-a-friend-who-doesn’t-really-exist-type deals. No real people, no. None. None of those.

So here’s the question.

Imagine you knew someone who worked for a government department. Quite a large, and, in the right circles, high-profile department, which has been in the news regularly for various failings and shortcomings. Again, take ‘the news’ here to mean a certain area of the news, which isn’t necessarily front-page of the tabloids or whatever.

And then imagine that the person had had a series of really good ideas for ways in which various of the incredibly long-winded, long-drawn-out, time-inefficient processes which are central to this department’s work might be shortened, improved, automated.

And then imagine that this person not only had the ideas, but knew how to implement them, and had a good understanding of the various software packages needed to create such improvements. And a proven track record of doing Officially Clever Things, the sort of Things which resulted once in a temporary promotion for a certain project.

And then imagine that this person can’t get anyone to support the ideas, despite them being Really Good, and very much needed. That the department is so entrenched in its long-winded ways that it appears to see anything new as something of a threat, to be discouraged and put down as wayward thinking that dares to step outside of a job description. That that attitude has been encountered at manager level, and at higher manager level. Even though there is a team of people, an entire team, which has been working on a far shittier version of this idea for the last four months, so far without success, full-time. That the person is beginning to really despair, and to feel deeply under-valued. And that the person is currently spending literally all of their working day sitting at a computer with no work to do. And that despite having nothing to do, and despite having told their manager that they have nothing to do, and having asked for work, they are told they can’t work on any ideas to improve the business processes.

And I should stress once more that this is a government department. Funded by taxpayers. Which is regularly criticised for wasting funds. And that this person is not the only person who sits, day in, day out, with nothing to do. Literally nothing. And that this person is prevented from doing anything constructive at all, and has recently been told, at a performance review, that he must just ‘look busy’.

What would you do?

Well, Posset, the Buff Sussex hen, is still moulty-looking, but otherwise in good cheer, I think. She has spent the weekend staging random escape attempts, and looks most miffed now, having discovered some new wire which prevents her egress. Yesterday I really thought Wixon, now a boisterous fourteen-month cat instead of the ridiculously fluffly little kitten we rescued last November, was going to have a go at her – she is looking rather diminished since losing featherage here and there – but I shouldn’t have worried: one squawk from a slightly manky-looking hen and Wixon, slayer of bears, dragons and giant monsters*, turned tail and ran. He is so pathetic. But of course I’d rather have him that way, where hens are concerned.

In other news, the only problem with wood-fired heating being your only source of heat is that you have, in our case, to arse around traipsing up the garden (normally in the pitch black, for an added sense of adventure) clasping a basket which is large enough to be fucking heavy when full, but small enough for its contents to disappear up the chimney with woeful rapidity, wearing someone else’s wellies (normally too large or just that bit too small, so that your feet either rub or freeze), and sliding around on the heavy frost that is appearing most nights at the moment. Then you have to exercise a few skills of which a contortionist might be proud – our ad-hoc wood shelter (built because we need to sort out listed building consent, and possibly planning permission, for the more permanent solution we have in mind – a lean-to on the opposite side of the witchery from the new extension, with a timber frame, an earth plaster finish and probably a slate roof) is a rather unusual shape, and, frankly, looks like a drunk erected it in the middle of the night, with one hand tied behind his back, in a howling gale. But hey – if it works, don’t knock it. No, really – don’t knock it: it might fall down.

And mincemeat. Now. This year. Chrimbly and all that. Hum. On a Baby Belling cooker, which works thusly: oven on – only the small ring works. Grill on – neither ring works. On occasion, the larger ring has been known to trip the circuits in the extension, and a few weeks back the bottom element of the oven just spontaneously crapped out, only to return somewhat sheepishly some time later. So, this could prove quite a challenge to my baking skills, and lordy, I do like to bake. (Baking is my general tactic for avoiding feelings of misery of any sort – it works so well, and at the end of it, not only has one been productive, but one gets to pig down the fruits of one’s labours.) This year, as I’m still PhDing (will it never end?), I’m having to be a bit restrained in the ol’ kitchen intentions. I think I’m going to make Doc Witch‘s solstice cake, and I’d really like to make some more damson mincemeat (based on Delia’s recipe, I just added shedloads of damsons left over from making damson brandy; it certainly had something of a kick, shall we say), and some of Turquoise Lisa‘s gorgeous jewel biscuits. Oh, and probably an apple and mincemeat pie or seven. Oh, and we’re thinking of taking the veggie route for our Chrimbly feast this year – neither of us is particularly attached to the poultry version, and both Quercus and I feel a little shifty eating someone who might just be Posset’s great neice seven times removed. So, mushroom pie? The omnipresent nut loaf? Suggestions, anyone?

* This may in fact be a lie.

For the be-chickened of you out there, a quick question. One of our Buff Sussexes is moulting; she is looking quite sorry for herself in terms of feather loss, but otherwise seems happy enough. We use red mite powder regularly in their house, and haven’t noticed the others exhibiting signs of anything beyond the normal chicken lunacy; any suggestions?

Why did I write my thesis in Word? It has just spontaneously reformatted bits and pieces of my footnotes (there are about seven hundred of them, I should add) so that random titles are now not in italics.

I could weep.

So here’s the thing. I drive a 1999-registered car, which is lovely, and which has suited me very well since I bought it in 2002. I loves it, I does. But – and this is a rather damning but – it is too old a model to have such things as Isofix moorings. Isofix, for the uninitiated, is a sort of natty, built-in-to-the-car-when-it’s-made affair used for bolting in seats of the kiddywink variety. Of course, Quercus drives the Nutster Mobile, also known as a Citroën CX, and that too predates Isofix by some years. Rather more years, in fact.

So, we were planning to sell the CX because it goes wrong and we don’t know how to fix it and because it’s super-hideous to run (25 mpg, anyone?) though a delightful drive and faster than shit off a shovel; now it seems we are going to sell both cars so that we can get summat with this Isofix malarky.

Now we get to the really interesting bit.

The car that I have hit upon as a workable alternative for me is a Renault Laguna. (Not quite the linked one, I hasten to add – we’re talking about my spending £1200 here, plus the £500 or so that my current car is worth. Such money gets you something like a five-year-old with 90,000 miles +.) (Please don’t tell me about your friend, the one with the Laguna, which needed not one but three clutches by the time it had done fourteen miles; I am aware of their, er, reliability reputation, but I still can’t argue with five NCAP stars, and yes, I am aware of the limitations of NCAP tests, and that they only got the fifth star because of an intelligent seatbelt warning, whatever that may be.) And of course, the aged parent drives a Laguna, in its ridiculously-named estate incarnation (that, ladies and gentlemen, is a ‘Sport Tourer’. Yes. I shit you not). I want a hatchback, and a diesel at that. I mentioned this to the AP in a general discussion about the forthcoming changes (one which was a bit sticky anyway, because of course any mention of money is generally A Bad Plan, in case it leads on to the topic of his wanting back the £13k that he lent us on the never-never, and clearly wanting to change my car must mean I have money to burn… Ho), and he went away and cogitated, and has now decided that it would be most sensible, and generous to boot, of him to sell me his Laguna, which he has been muttering about changing for about four years, at what he considers a knock-down price – £1700. Which is probably what he’d get on the open market for it, as a private sale, I think. It’s got a few things wrong with it (nothing big, but irritating); it’s got a few dents and dings; it’s done over 100,000 miles. It’s also an estate. Which I don’t want.

How to back out of this without giving offense, if that’s possible?

You know, my father didn’t even manage to send me a birthday card. I know it’s probably stupid, and at the very least something I should just get over, deal with and move on from, but he hadn’t even remembered that yesterday was my birthday. When I spoke to him on Wednesday and mentioned that Quercus had taken the following day off so that we could do something nice together, he shamefacedly admitted that he’d thought my birthday was Friday. I suppose at least he hadn’t forgotten altogether; however, here we are, Friday, and no card. He takes far more trouble over presents and support for his newly acquired stepdaughters than he does, or ever has done, for me.

It’s stupid to feel upset by it. I know this. What did I expect? It’s not as if I even feel that particular birthdays are wildly significant (18, 21, etc.), but I know that, for most people, 30 is something of a whatsit – you know, a milestone, or whatever. And I suppose for me it is too, even if I’m not desperately reaching out for the wrinkle cream while bemoaning the loss of my twenties – I have found myself thinking a lot of my mother in the week leading up to my birthday, not least because this time eight years ago saw me sitting on her bed in the hospice where she would die two weeks later, having a very subdued birthday lunch with her and trying to fight off the certainty that all was not well, and that, despite the doctors’ assurances, this would not turn out to be simply respite care designed to give her a boost. If my father feels any of this, he keeps it well-hidden.

He said in jocular tones that at least he bought me a present. I’m just going to give in to the inner teenager here for a mo, so please do excuse me: he came to visit two weeks ago, largely, despite his giving the impression that he was doing me a massive favour, because he was a) bored due to being in Kent alone while C and her daughters were back in the frozen North and he stayed behind to take care of some house-sale-related stuff, and b) to drop off some things he said I’d neglected to take with me when I cleared my stuff out of what used to be home. (That took two trips, one with a van while heavily pregnant, because the stuff ‘simply must be cleared now, and I’ve got it all ready so nothing will be overlooked’. Oh, except the entire contents of the attic and various cupboards. Oh, and half the fucking house, because I haven’t bothered to spend even half a day in preparation for this all-important clearing session. Sense the bitterness there? Oops.) He brought with him a broach which he’d bought en route. Now, two things, here: one – I never wear broaches. Two – it was clearly a chance buy, rather than a thought-out gift, and it’s tacky, frankly. He hadn’t wrapped it, and handed it over saying that he’d just happened to find it when he stopped. Maybe it’s sweet that he thought of me, and I am just an ungrateful troll. I don’t know. I just wish that, for once, he could take a few minutes to think about what I actually like, who I actually am, what I wear and what I think.

As I sit here, quietly ploughing my way through a rather lovely bar of ginger chocolate courtesy of Quercus (and Kernow Chocolate, of course), I know that I am very lucky. I have a husband who loves me intensely, absolutely, ridiculously, ‘a stupid amount’, as he told me in my birthday card yesterday. He is my best friend, my very own floor show, my companion, my first port of call for ideas, discussion, entertainment and humour. (Also, my mother loved him the first time she met him, which is always a nice feeling, particularly as they only overlapped for a year.) I also have a glorious daughter who is fit and healthy, ridiculously pretty, and learning and changing all the time, taking in her surroundings and deciding what she likes, what she dislikes, how things Should Be Done. Then there are my friends. I am lucky enough to have several close friends, the sort I know I could ring really late at night just because. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends, and I know that I am fortunate enough to have chosen very well in at least half a dozen instances. The cats are a constant source of delight, despite their nightly shrewicides (isn’t that a fabulous word? I stole it unashamedly from Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, Quercus’s current reading matter) and despite our constant feeling that Pye is in fact rather brighter than your average human being, and could, should she so choose, simply transport herself wither and thither without the need for boring details like movement or catflaps. (This would explain how she manages to come across our building-site garden and into the sitting room without getting mud either on her or on any surface, while Wixon only has to look through the catflap to be entirely covered in some disgusting substance or other. And don’t even get me started on the paw marks he leaves everywhere.) The house, while far from finished, feels like home. Not forever-home, but for-now-home, certainly. It is warm, cheery, chaotic, a complete and utter mess, but still it is our haven from the rest of the world, and when we shut the door, it feels as if no-one can touch us, should we prefer them not to. These are the things which matter. These are the people who matter. This is what I must focus on.

It’s my birthday today – I have somehow achieved a mighty thirty years on this planet, and I’m having quite a delightful day. Quercus and I have just been for tea and buns with the witchling at a very nice seaside town, and I have got four bars of chocolate to eat, a chocolate button cake, some handknitted socks from Cortes Island (my spiritual home, if so pretentious a phrase can be overlooked in light of it being my birffles), a red flexible trug bucket thingy, a copy of the Green Parent magazine, tons of candles, a book about knitting socks, some magic needles and some gorgeous wool, a pink felt hat and, very excitingly, a copy of Tales from the Green Valley. It is all most exciting. Oh, and Quercus made me breakfast, which involved grilled tomatoes and poached eggs. Lo, it was good. And on Saturday, we are going to the Yarner Trust‘s Christmas craft fair – I am so excited I can barely speak; in fact, in a bizarre Freudian typing slip, the first attempt at that sentence ended ‘I can barely squeak’.

Happy twenty-seventh of November, folks.

Why do wellies only fall over as one kicks them off when one has a large basket of wood in one’s arms, and are managing to stay upright only because of some sort of divine justice which – just to keep you guessing – does not find the concept of seeing one flat on one’s proverbial in the mud amusing this time?

Why does one only unplug the phone when one has forgotten one is waiting for some blighter to ring one back about something?

Why, of the entire kitchen floor, is the bit in front of the washing machine, i.e. right where the washing falls when one ineptly fumbles about at it in semi-darkness due to not having lighting sorted yet, the very grubbiest, despite attempts to clean it?

Why does Posset, an adventurous Buff Sussex chicken who appears to have been Scott of the Antarctic in a previous life, insist on escaping when I am in the middle of changing a grumpy witchling’s nappy?

So, in the spirit of a picture speaks a thousand whatsits and all that, here is a pictorial round-up of recent happenings here at the witchery. N.b. exciting line of washing which includes the world’s sweetest sock collection, together with a ridiculously over-the-top blanket which I made the witchling a few weeks ago as it became clear that cotton numbers just don’t cut it in a house with unheated bedrooms. Also, just as a quick reminder, QUERCUS BUILT THAT ENTIRE EXTENSION. Yes folks: everything you can see under the slate roof was built by Quercus (except the bits Lovely David did, but for present morale-boosting purposes, let us draw the proverbial veil over that). The shots of the various stages of plastering give some idea of the difference between harling coats and the final finish, I hope; it’s a long r to h but hopefully we’re beginning to get there. Also, note two pictures of gorgeous November weather hereabouts, included to remind me that there is more to life than thesis, nappies, and DIY, despite one’s constant sentiments to the contrary.

You know how I mentioned eating hot chocolate straight from the tub? Well, this is better. (And I never thought I’d type those words. Oh no.) Some time ago I bought a copy of ‘The Enchanted Broccoli Forest‘ by Mollie Katzen. Oh, the puddings. Oh, the enchilladas. Oh, the general eatingness of it all. And measured out in cups. I likes me some measuring cups, not least because it means one can give in to one’s natural inner greediness by substituting mugs of normal (or indeed larger than normal) stature, claiming ‘ah, but it says cup’ and adjusting the chocolate quantities accordingly while maintaining a look of childlike innocence. Oops. Did I just type that out loud? Anyway. To get back to the point. There is this pudding. It is of a chocolate nature. It is also of a beats-chocolate-mousse nature, which in my view makes it clearly the product of witchcraft. Obviously, I likes me some witchcraft too, so this is a very good recipe indeed. And it goes like this:

Chocolate Pudding*
Get hold of…
1 cup of dark chocolate chips (I used an entire bar of dark chocolate instead; think it was about 250g);
4 tbsp dark brown sugar;
2 cups of milk (I used soya);
3 tbsp cornflour;
Splosh of vanilla.

(Think this is about right, but haven’t got the recipe in front of me, and as the entire kitchen is currently coated in sawdust because Quercus is making an attic door, I’m not about to brave its depths.)

Then…
Melt the chocolate in with the (soya) milk and sugar. When it’s thoroughly combined, pour half the hot mixture on to the cornflour, and mix the buggery out of it before returning it to the rest of the chockiness. Mix very thoroughly over a gentle heat, and yes, there will be lumps, and yes, you will need to beat the fuck out of them in order to disperse them. A smooth finish is essential to this little number, and it thickens quite rapidly once you add the cornflour to the mixture. Whack the vanilla in, and pour it all into a tin. Katzen suggests covering with something to keep air out; I couldn’t be bothered, and it was fine. Chill the bally lot for at least two hours, during which time some sort of miracle occurs and the thing achieves a sort of Nutella-like consistency. It is sublime.

We have also discovered that optional, go-faster-stripe-style things can be added for differing sorts of sublimity; for example, milk chocolate and orange bits, a drop of rose or geranium oil (for that all-important Turkish Delight option), or even a good whop of ground coffee. Ah, the unalloyed bliss of it all.

In other news, we spent this afternoon trekking from one soggy part of deepest, darkest Devon to another. Cheriton Fitzpaine, to be precise (you couldn’t make these names up, could you?), wherein dwells the very lovely Chris Brookman. Mr. Brookman runs the so-green-it’s-practically-emerald Back to Earth, a natural building company through which, fortunately for us, he is happy to provide an advisory service for average eejits, i.e. us. We have returned clutching two large vats of limewash, which, for the uninitiated, is a sort of breathable paint which one whacks on top of lime plaster in order to keep the building breathing and thus, hopefully, not suffering from manky, manky damp. Say it with me: NOT SUFFERING FROM MANKY, MANKY DAMP. Let us hope not, anyway. Quercus has put a first (harling) coat of lime on the entire extension, and we are on to the pretty coat now. A mysterious contraption made of tarps and odd bits of wood has appeared over one side of the building in an attempt to keep the bastard rain off the lovely surface of the new lime render while it goes orf; poor Quercus had to re-render the wall he’d started because of rain damage when he and Lovely David couldn’t find a way to get the bastard tarps to stay in place. Fortunately, we now know that I can get quite a nice finish on lime plaster with the aid of a small but serviceable sponge, so it looks like I’ll be doing the finishing, which is quite nice, bearing in mind my love of all things pottery-clay-related.

In short, yay.

* Buy a copy of the Enchanted Broc Forest, if only for the gorgeousness of the entire concept – the front cover is blissful, as are the illustrations throughout.