Still here and still contemplating what to do about this here blog. I don’t want to lose my archives, you see, but there’s no easy way (apparently) to extract them from WordPress format, so I’m sort of wallowing in indecision, all the while knowing that I’ve given notice to my hosts, and the day when I must make some sort of conscious move approacheth on swift wings. I feel I could justify spending money on hosting more if I was actually getting round to writing here more than once in a blue moon, but between being at work, doing freelance work, the various shenanigans that life with two under-fives bring and the vague attempt at having some sort of relationship with Quercus beyond the discussion of which dead animal has been left half-eaten under the kitchen table (a headless rabbit, most recently) and whether it’s possible for a washing machine to consume not one but thirty washable wipes (it clearly is) life is quite full at the moment. Added to that, I just seem to have run out of things to say, a bit. Somewhere in the last year, something shifted in my head, and I spent a miserable few months feeling horribly out of place and wondering if various of my past decisions had been the right ones. I think it was the combination of a long time spent working on our house (those longer-term readers will remember such delights as lime rendering and cob rebuilding, and the fact that ice ages have passed more rapidly) and the resultant miniscule time that Quercus and I spent together, conscious and alone, and the move from one child (oh, how I laugh at the ‘difficulties’ I once saw with just the one!) to two, and not having enough money, and the uncertainty of redundancy for Quercus, and just generally being a bit fucking fed up with being the adult and being the buck-stops-here person and wondering if I could just hop off the world and disappear under a large – or indeed a small: I’m not picky – stone for a while until sanity reappeared in some dim and distant future of which I could but dream.

Anyway, the result was quite a miserable me, and quite a miserable Quercus, and for a while I wondered if we would ever be anything but miserable ever again.

But fortunately, something has shifted once more. Now don’t go saying it’s the better weather because I heard just this morning on Radio 3 that the average temperature for March, April and May has been a stonking six degrees. But anyway, whatever it is, things seem to be on the upswing again, which is both hugely reassuring and deeply pleasing, not least as it’s Hero’s fifth birthday tomorrow (TOMORROW). Now just where the fuck did all that time go? There are buttercups in the field across from the house, just as there were the year she was born, and it seems only a few days ago that I staggered up the lane at snail’s pace (I believe the technical would be ‘heavy with child’, although I realise that I wasn’t that heavy, really, by most people’s standards, given that I was wearing normal jeans when I was seven months pregnant) wondering if it would ever end, and completely incapable of understanding quite how different life was about to become.

Anyway, tomorrow, weather permitting, will see a five-metre bell tent in a large field behind our house, with bunting and cake and bubbles and what will doubtless feel like half a million small children beetling about the place. Hero is almost painfully excited as her first year at school draws to a close; coming on the first day of summer, her birthday is the gateway to that golden time of school holidays and hay-making, of time lived more outside than in, of walks and wine-making and fruit-picking and hen-harassing and jam-boiling and paddle-pooling and living life as it happens rather than to the termly timetable. I am doing my best to enjoy this time, to embrace it, to realise that what she really wants is my attention rather than a homemade something-or-other (though there are trousers and a new bag for school amongst her birthday presents, and I hear from her grandmother that she tells everyone when she is wearing things I’ve made her, so perhaps in this, as in most things, it’s all about getting the balance right) and masses of Stuff, despite my natural inclination to throw Stuff at the situation. I have learned a lot about myself in the last year. I want to make sure I don’t forget any of it in the year to come.

In other news, we’re thinking of moving Hero to another school. The end of her first year lurches into view; the defining characteristic of her experience thus far appears to be frustration. She went into school desperate to read, but a combination of frankly boring books (the Oxford Reading Tree, the basic plots of which appear to be, well, non-existent, really, which, to a child used to Russian fairy tales and the doings of the Moomins, is a bit of a step backwards) and the constant repetition of sets of words appear to have dampened her enthusiasm somewhat, as has the largely pedestrian creative stuff they’ve done. Her one ‘big’ project this year seems to be the construction of a bus from a shoebox, which is lovely and definitely one we’ll be keeping, but still – one? all year? Hmmm. She isn’t difficult to get to school, and it’s certainly not a bad school per se, but something somewhere isn’t working. We’re going to talk to the teachers involved and to the head, just to get their perspective and see what a better way forward might be, but we also have irons in other fires in terms of a place at a different school. There are other concerns about that one, as with anything I suppose, in that instead of walking to school through fields of buttercups (and yes, I realise this is vomitously idyllic) with her sister, we would be adding several car journeys to our lives, which is obviously not ideal, and putting her in a place where friends would probably also be a car-journey away. But set against that is the possible reigniting of her… zest, for want of a better word. She just seems a little less, somehow, than she was, and the gradual accretion of phrases like ‘it’s not fair’ and ‘I’m telling’ and ‘I won! I won!’ and ‘Let’s put on a show of princesses!’ have done little to reassure me that this is the right place for her to really prosper, on a deep (and utterly wanky-sounding) soul level. I so want her to feel able to be who she is, and not to feel coerced into certain patterns of behaviour which, while they may be cultural norms to a degree these days, I don’t feel to be the best of starts. I also want to feel that the people teaching her, and spending such a big portion of her waking time with her, really ‘see’ her, for want of a better phrase, and who thinks that she is fundamentally a cracking little girl… instead of the cautiously indifferent yet somehow implicitly suspicious response she seems to elicit at the moment. So yes, fun times, my friends.

But let us not dwell on the shitteries of the educational world. Let us think instead of raw vegan chocolate cheesecake (recipe to follow), and of chocolate orange cookies (ditto), and of possibly the world’s nicest way to use cabbage (likewise).

And you?

I think there is a lot to be said for habit in the notion of blogging. Probably in the notion of writing as a whole, when I think about it. It makes me laugh to think of the 98,000 carefully-crafted words that I submitted as my PhD thesis when taken in the context of having written over 200,000 words of drivel on my blog at that time… There is nothing like a bit of procrastination, is there?

Today, I am procrastinating instead of…
- working out what is for dinner. The sod about dinner is that this question is never answered. You can never say ‘I now know what is for dinner; let us move on.’ Rather, you say ‘I know what I can manage with what’s in the house, and what it’s likely that the teething maniac will eat – let’s go with that.’ Not quite the same thing, and oh, the temporary state of the answer, it gets me down, it does. If only it were possible to answer that eternal dilemma just the once, and never have to think about it again.

- clearing up the house in (the midday blitzkrieg – a necessary but ultimately pointless exercise, when taken in the context of the bombsite which still greets me at the day’s end). Why is there not some fundamental evolutionary mechanism which is activated by pregnancy hormones such that you grow thicker soles on your feet, defeating once and for all the constant assault your paws face by such evils as Lego, building blocks and crayons?

- finishing off a cardigan for Mirth. I am on the second sleeve; it’s a top-down raglan construction, so all that’s left after this is the button band and the hell that is buttonholes.

- writing something other than this. As an aside, I wonder why it is that I find talking about writing very difficult. It makes me feel deeply shifty, as if I’m some sort of interloper with pretensions, and am about to be exposed in a very public manner by people who shout ‘down with this sort of thing!’ while pelting me with something painful and probably fruit-based. Why do I feel such a fraud? I spent my entire time in higher education feeling similarly, mind you, and still, when asked about ‘my research’ (which I can’t help regarding with a sense of irony and with invisible air-quotes), I feel I am about to laugh inappropriately or be proven an idiot (either of which is quite possible).

- bringing in the washing. It hasn’t rained for – shhh! – two whole days. It’s dry, but colder than a polar bear’s arse out there. Where are the songs of spring? Where?

OK – so nine and a half stone then, instead.

13,000 words written, a few of which may not be utter bilge.

Spring late in Devon – fucking arctic out there, but sunshine today, proper blue skies, and daffodils nodding in the garden.

Children both insanely energetic. Parents, less-so. (How surprising.)

Quercus left work last Thursday. Spent today making someone an outdoor log shelter and cutting up stuff with The Big Saw. Good times, my friends.

Kindles. Good, bad or the stuff of Satan?

Good, reliable, basic and cheap laptops. Any suggestions? I want my MacBook back to myself and reckon Quercus needs his own, now that he’s working from home and is thus only more likely to pour Baileys on mine. Something child-friendly would also be good; I am a bit reluctant to let tiny paws all over my precious.

Chai. Proof of divinity.

I appear only to be capable of bullet-style updates here, and only that sporadically. But I am still here. And you?

Today was the first time I can remember decent sunshine for what seems like months. I would love to say that it was pure love of light that inspired me to walk to Hero’s school to collect her, but, although that was a part of it, an equally large part of this decision was the fact that the car is completely buggered, and is at a garage having been declared unfit to drive. Oh, the pain. The woe! The WOE! A new gearbox, having had the car only five months, and despite it having a warranty, we’re still looking at kicking in £1500. That, my friends, is some gearbox.

But I can take this in the spirit of the new year. Yes, this is shit, and yes, it’s annoying. But the day that we learned this woeful diagnosis also brought the news that, as of the end of March, Quercus will leave his job. He is being made redundant, and has been offered a deal which should equate to roughly ten months’ salary as a pay-off. No bad thing, I tell you. I hope, I so hope, that this year will be a new start. We had a really difficult 2012, somehow. Too much dividing and conquering meant that I spent much of the year feeling lonely, tired overworked and harrassed, while Quercus felt lonely, sick to death of renovation, and exhausted. It was probably one of the more difficult years of my life, truth be told, and is at least partly shown by my lack of presence here. I just got to the point where I had nothing left to say, really, and it felt as if life had dwindled to being a constant stream of nappies to wash, noses to wipe, meals to prepare and sleep to yearn for. Time spent actually doing fun things was at a bare minimum, and we just spent all our time working, working, working. Eventually, of course, this gets you down, and it took me going back to work to realise how lonely I had been while on maternity leave.

Anyway, things now feel rather better. Working again, while in some ways loathsome, means economic recovery, to an extent (which would be a larger extent if it weren’t for things like the sodding car, but let us draw a tactful veil over that particular indiscretion), and more time to think, given my commute. This has meant that I have started writing again, and have managed to come up with seven thousand words towards the book I would like to write. It has also meant a lot of thinking about what I actually want out of life, and what I’d like to do this year, some of which may come to pass, and some of which may simply pass. Either way, I am ready for a new phase to begin, and it feels like Quercus’s job situation is the impetus for this to start.

In other news, I have a spiral brotform. It is awesome.

And you?

Happy new year and all that.

:: Christmas trees :: German biscuits made by Hero, and iced on her own to boot :: the stove’s eco fan :: clear skies for the first time in what seems like weeks :: boots :: the sound of Wixon purring on the back of the sofa :: Earl Grey :: bread sauce :: a muddy walk around the fields with a good friend and her dog (who only tried to go home on his own once) :: Sebastian Faulks :: two dresses bought in an online sale which actually fit, and which are now about half the money they would have been when I liked them first! :: a thick new yoga mat :: apple and mincemeat pie for New Year’s Day :: Dr. Who :: Gabriel García Márquez :: Father Ted :: Hero singing her version of carols :: Mirth saying ‘heddo!’ :: dancing round the kitchen to Coldplay’s ‘Rainy Day’ and finding that those missing three stone make such things a lot more fun :: lampshades ::

And you?

It has been so long since I posted regularly that I had to think about my password quite hard. Well, as hard as I think about anything these days, which is somewhere between a cottonwool and a brie-like consistency, I would say.

Rain, rain, rain. Dark days, my friends, and shitloads of floods and gales and all that. But this is all made bearable by the fact that we have wood-fired central heating, working and fully installed, and we’re only considering killing the man who fitted it all, so I think that must count as a success. If we’re honest, at one time or another I have contemplated killing most people, so the heating engineer isn’t particularly bad. Anyway. I digress. In fact, that is really what blogging is for me these days: digression. I mean to post here, and I think about things I could write about. Then somewhere between actually logging in and faffing about with cameras and whatnot, the urge wanes and I end up contemplating either my navel (which translates reasonably well in blog terms) or the counterful of crumbs I can see across the kitchen floor (which doesn’t). I think the trouble with dipping in and out of blogging is that you sort of lose the momentum, and the sense of community, and then it’s trickier to work yourself back up to it. For one thing, practically, I just have so much less time to do it these days. When I started blogging, I was a full-time PhD student, after all, which is tantamount to saying a professional layabout, and the most pressing things on my calendar included making sure I didn’t miss the lunchtime episode of whichever dodgy 1980s murder mystery was currently being shown on the BBC. Now, with two short people to look after, two cats, a house renovation project, a job, a freelance job, an attempt at novel-writing in progress (yes, yes – shut up – I know it’s horribly predictable, and no, it’s not a ‘chick-lit’ whatsit, and no, it’s not a love story), presumably a husband with whom I spend time when we’re both conscious and in the same place (I say presumably because these circumstances happen so rarely as to make the reappearance of the Gordian knot seem likely), and a notional nod towards maintaining some sense of friendship with people I know…. Time – it is not infinite.

But I would like to post here a bit more frequently, so I’m hoping that maybe the stuff I’m intending to do with Hero and Mirth in the next few weeks will galvanise me.

School continues to be fine for Hero. She’s not yet going full-time, but the tiredness that friends warned us about doesn’t appear to be a huge problem for her, and she’s enjoying the social and creative aspects of it, I think, despite telling us that she misses us when we’re not there with her. She did have the perception to say that school is more fun than being at home when Mirth is teething, mind you, which amused me. Mirth continues cheery and easy-going for the most part, although a recent stint of waking at five has been good fun. I honestly can’t complain, though – when I look back at this sort of time when Hero was little, I was just constantly exhausted, and getting through the days was about the best I could manage. Mirth, while an early waker, does sleep much more consistently, and has done for quite a long time, when I think about it. She is a cheery little bundle, with lots of teeth now, and constantly mobile – climbing, rolling about the place, following her sister and putting her hands over her eyes when asked to do something she doesn’t like, as if to make it simply go away. She doesn’t say as many words as Hero did at this age, but she is far more physically capable than Hero was – swings and roundabouts, I suppose, in this case.

We have a downstairs again now. Furniture. Electrics. Carpets, even. It is … odd. We’ve been back in there for a few months now, but it still doesn’t feel quite finished, partly because there are odds and ends to do like tidying up post-stove-fitting plasterwork issues (don’t get Quercus started – his fury knows no bounds), but also because we’ve largely just unloaded books and that’s it. No pictures, really, or placing of stuff – just a breathing-out after months of living only in the kitchen and bedrooms. Sometime I hope I’ll summon up the energy to have a think about what I’d like to go where, but for now, the urge to sink on to the sofa and Just Be is too strong, my friend.

My weight loss continued for a good while after I posted last. I went, finally, from 83kg to 65, and that appears to be where I’m staying. I’ve gone back to doing quite a bit of yoga; I find it helps me sleep, and the space in my brain which it appears to create, particularly if I do it last thing at night, when everyone else has gone to bed and the house is quiet, and dark, and mine alone, is both useful and calming. I didn’t really follow a diet, as such – just stopped eating as much as I was eating, and nothing between meals – and I hope that means it’ll stay gone. I’m happier with my weight now than I think I have ever been; the last time I was this sort of weight, I was a teenager, and I was far too busy wishing I was thinner/taller/cleverer to really appreciate it at the time, so this time around, I’m just feeling bloody chuffed, while also feeling a hint of smugness at never having got stretchmarks when pregnant. It’s all good.

New boots because they now fit my legs. Jeans, cords, some leather gloves. Constantly stacking the stove, but gloating over free hot water. Scraping the car’s windscreen. A vintage Kenwood Chef for my birthday. Contemplating making bread for the first time in weeks. Reading Juvenal’s ‘Satires’, and José Saramago. Quite liking Vermeer. Listening to the Fleet Foxes, Coldplay, Chilly Gonzales. Learning to play Chilly Gonzales’s ‘White Keys’ because my mother’s piano now lives with us. Scattering my mother’s ashes on a clifftop with the aged parent. Sorting out things that have been difficult between us for a long time. Learning that thing are very rarely black and white, and that there are infinite shades between these two extremes. Remembering that we are all just people, and most of us are doing our best, at any given time.

So, that’s the patchwork of life in the earthenhouse at the moment.

And you?

Somewhere in the last few weeks it has become normal that Hero is going to school. Three times a week, at the moment, she trots into the classroom, so far quite happily. As a summer baby, she was scheduled to start in January until the school learned that the official line is to have only one intake a year, which meant that the eight children who were to have started later would have cost the school £38,000 in funding, it seems. So, they asked, very nicely, if we were open to sending her earlier than we’d planned, and that is what we’ve ended up doing. To start with I felt we’d been cheated out of the autumn to ourselves; I had things in mind to do, you see, and they didn’t really include the Oxford Reading Tree stories. However, on balance, it seemed more important that Hero started at the same time as her classmates, and to her credit she has adapted so far very well. She still seems tired and a bit emotional on school days, and we are both finding that boundaries are quite important at the moment as she is certainly pushing us to delineate them clearly, shall we say (which is Parentese for ‘she’s being a bit of a trout at the moment’), but she is also telling us all about the people she’s talked to, and the pictures she’s drawn, and the rabbits she’s looking after (!), and these are all happy-making things. Together with the empty lunchbox she brings home at the end of the day.

Domestically, things are also improving. We are slowly but surely getting through the immense list of things left to finish off on the house. It’s funny, but as soon as you start living in the space you’re working on, the pace changes. Obviously. There is waxing of wood to do, and things like carpet-edging to fit in doorways. Quercus has just put some panel pins in the shelving for me, so that I could put up the autumnal felt bunting that I made last year, and we’ve managed to get the books all sorted; slowly but surely, the house becomes ours once more, after months of living in just the kitchen, surrounded by boxes of our things, all packed away for the duration of the renovation work. I am rereading ‘Catch-22′, having found my rather dog-eared copy when unpacking; I had forgotten quite how amusing it is, but am enjoying rediscovering it, and remembering why it’s long been in my top five.

I am still struggling to get to do things with the children in the afternoons. Since I’ve been back at work, I never seem to be in one place quite long enough, and while I mean to do all sorts of interesting things when Hero gets home from school, or indeed on the afternoons when she hasn’t been, too often this dissolves into perhaps some baking, or time spent pottering in the garden. In theory, we’re making watercolour birds and perhaps doing some felting, but in fact, we’re just not, really. I hope that once we finish off all the niggles with the house, there will be more brain space and energy for such diversions; for now, half of the arty-farty supplies involved are in a chaotic bag under the kitchen table, and just the very thought of fighting my way through that puts me off…. Roll on completion, or something. Or is that one of those things like thinking you’ll know what you’re doing when you reach a certain age, I wonder, and will I still feel a bit knackered and a bit too tempted to just think ‘fuck it’ for ever?

Oh, the deep joy of the prospect of going grocery-shopping at the weekend. I can barely contain myself.

However, it could be worse. This morning, Quercus is having a lie-in; Mirth has gone for a half-hour’s snooze, and Hero and I are basically bumming about the house in pyjamas, feeling contented after pancakes for breakfast, and listening to my current audio fascination, Alt-J, who are truly fantastic (if you like that sort of thing, and stuff). One of the things I’m really enjoying about having a child who’s a little older is discovering things that we share; musical taste seems to be one of those things where Hero and I are in a club of two, given that some of our recent explorations (the Editors, for example) are pleasant only to us, leaving Quercus quite cold. Hero now knows a few Editors songs by name, and it sort of amuses me to hear her demanding ‘Spiders’ or somesuch, particularly as she knows the words here and there in a most haphazard manner; she’s familiar enough with a song which includes the lyric ‘you’ll become digested’ (whatever the fuck that means) to think that it’s all about how much the singer likes biscuits. I find this oddly charming, while at the same time remembering the times when I felt parents were being irresponsible by letting their children listen to the aural delights of, say, Nirvana. Oh, the thing I have learned most about being a parent thus far is that all those things you once thought were black and white are actually just infinite variations of grey (I can’t bring myself to use the word ‘shades’), and that the definite doesn’t really exist. In fact, I think I’ve probably come to realise that that’s true of most things (with the exception of morris dancing, obviously, which is just wrong).

So, sun shining, washing on, house vaguely sane. Later, shopping, and possibly some time in Exeter in the search for skirts since most of my wardrobe doesn’t fit particularly well at the moment, given the weightloss I mentioned earlier. That’s the only downside, really – skirts I’ve loved for a really, really long time no longer need unfastening to go over my hips, and while that’s lovely in lots of ways, it’s also kind of expensive, and kind of tiresome, in that they’re not easily replaceable. Still, set again that, the calf boot delight. It’s all good, really.

And you?

Some time ago, and indeed many times ago, I mentioned how miserable I have felt about my weight, ever since I was about, oh, twenty-two. I said all the usual guff about how I ought to lose some weight, and how I’d do it sustainably, and how it would take ages but I’d need to be disciplined about it, and not eat shitloads of chocolate.

And then I did fuck-all about it, for fucking ages.

And then I had a fit of the guilts about the fact that I was going to visit all my mother’s difficulties with weight and the negative body images that went with it upon my small daughters, so that they in turn could find themselves overweight and underhappy.

And then I went back to work after Mirth’s first year, and decided that enough was enough.

So I lost 14kg.

Partly through just fucking eating less, and partly through developing a healthy if somewhat obsessive relationship with the stairs in the buildling in which I work, all nine floors’ worth.

And so I find myself thinner than I have been since I was a teenager. Wearing size twelve jeans. And calf boots which actually do up.

It is not obligatory to reenact the things your parents did, it seems, after all.

Still here, still alive, still doing all the things that you do.

Teething

Stove installation

Going back to work

Carpet-fitting

Cleaning

Living the dream, me.

You?