Hello. Quercus here.

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.

Lordy-me, I’m having a blogging slump, it appears. It’s not that I’ve nothing to report, and more that I’m not finding time to do it. I honestly don’t know how so many delightful bloggers find time each day to sit down and post things which not only consist of more than the written equivalent of the twin fingers of derision, but are well-thought-out and eloquent, complete with pictures and illustrations. It’s depressing. Or, rather, it would be, if I didn’t enjoy reading such pourings-forth.

Anyway, recent activities have included the acquisition of a reclaimed pine table for our kitchen, which genuinely feels like a kitchen now, and which has really changed the way we’re living in our tiny house to an extent I hadn’t anticipated. It’s so nice to have space for the small girl to toddle about the place without having to think about table saws and screwdrivers as potential weapons in tiny hands. We’ve even got space for a rug where she can sit and explore some of her recent haul from her grandma; she is loving the extra space, and we are breathing out, collectively.

We’ve also made quite firm plans for what this summer will be. So far, it looks like Quercus will take parental leave from his job in order to spend a concerted block of time on the house – three weeks to finish the outside of the extension, which includes drainage, guttering, painting and various bits and bobs of things like fixing lime render where frost came too soon for us. It’s going to be another busy year, but I’m trying to stay upbeat about this; the loss of the chickens has hit me harder than I’d imagined possible, to be honest, and I am struggling to find the optimism which normally buoys me up on even the greyest of days. Partly, I think that’s why I’ve not been writing here very frequently; it’s not that I have sunk into the slough of despond, but I do feel that it’s very wearisome to read yet another depressing ‘oh shit’ post, and it’s probably only going to hack me off further to write such witterings. So, I’m holding my metaphorical tongue until such time as I have more cheery tidings to impart.

I’m also conscious of being rather very behind in the 52 Recipes in 2010 stakes. I started late – I think it was April – but still, I think I need to be cooking something new every single day from here to 2011 at this rate. I’m going to try to get two new things in this week as a bid to turn things around, mood-wise. I’m reasonably cheery, I suppose, and I just need to remember that, and develop it, all of which is hard when the small girl is teething molars, and waking quite frequently, so we’re knackered, as usual. (It’s all so boring, sleep deprivation, yet utterly overwhelming from time to time, I find.)

Current preoccupations:

Children, the number, timing, and nature thereof;

Cooking, and the need not to repeat oneself ad nauseum;

House work, as in cleaning and painting windows, drainage, fixing gardens et al;

The physical self, and why my body wants either chocolate or sleep ALL THE TIME.

Tell me nice things in my comments box, please. (Inspired by DW, whose “I need to hear nice things” post made me smile.)

In lots of ways, I want to get that last entry further down the page, metaphorically and literally.* This afternoon the small girl and I went to visit our remaining two hens, Nutmeg and Cobweb, who are currently on holiday with e. We had a very nice time, despite the origins of the reason for our visit, and the hens are clearly doing fine; Nutmeg is even laying still. Cobweb, of course, being an Araucana, is completely mad still, but then that’s nothing new. Anyway, the small girl enjoyed feeding them, and talking to them, and a resemblance to various of our other hens didn’t hurt, although we have explained to her that part of the reason for the chickens’ holiday is that we are worried that the fox might come back to visit, and that foxes and chickens can’t be friends. It’s been a tough week, and having the aged parent here didn’t really divert attention from it so much as highlighting another area of life which is far from satisfactory, to wit: the relationship between AP and small girl, or lack thereof. (That’s a whole nother post, but basically he doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of her, and she, as a result, is a little stand-offish, which creates a wholly inaccurate impression of who she is, normally, with people who really know her.)

Anyway, that is a rant for another day, and for now, I’m happy to see our hens still standing, and OK, and alive. Quercus and I are still miserable about what happened, and the garden is horribly quiet without the chooks about the place. We had had them for three years, and seeing the place without them is just wrong. I think we are tentatively agreed that we will have some more hens while we live here, though we have yet to work out which changes we’ll make to make the run more secure (and, of course, how we can make me less forgetful; I feel unspeakably guilty, predictably, and I think I will full-stop, to be honest, when I think about what happened). I think we’re both prepared to go quite some way to try to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, whether that means an automatic chicken gate (which sounds rather like a bizarre political scandal, doesn’t it?) and electric wiring, or just tonnes and tonnes of ordinary chicken wire, or a moat and guard dogs and machine guns on watch-towers or what. But I feel better in my head when I think that this is not the end of the line for us as hen people, so we’ll continue to work out the details while I try to sit on my hands and not push Quercus before he’s ready.

We’re also trying to use what happened with the hens as an incentive to sort out the garden. A few weeks back, we tidied intensively in one half of it, before rotovating and sewing a mixture of grass, clover and camomile; it’s getting quite green out there (though let us not speak of the insanely healthy-looking rhubarb which has survived this ordeal, having played dead for several months prior to our decision to just cut our losses with it…) and it’s made us appreciate how nice it would be to have outdoor space that didn’t involve old nails and rusty bits of ex-roof. A garden, one might call it; I hear these things are catching on these days. So, it looks like our plans are changing from focusing entirely on the inside of the house, to sorting out the rest of the exterior work and creating a garden, not least for the small girl to have somewhere nice this summer. Hopefully, part of this will be creating a secure space for some more hens. And then retrieving our two from e.

In other news, next weekend we are getting a dining table, bringing us dangerously close to civilisation! In the kitchen! There will be pictures! We are going to Quercus’s mother’s for this, and a weekend away seemed like a rather nice idea given that we’ve had a week of horribleness. So, Weald & Downland here we come.

* And thanks for the sympathy on my last post; I really appreciated it, and it did go some way to stopping me feeling a complete and utter arsehole.

This morning I came down to find that five of our seven hens had been attacked by a fox. Quercus had to kill our rooster, whose neck was clearly broken but who had lived anyway, and four of the hens were already dead. We have sent the remaining two to live with e, who has lots of hens and from whom two of ours originally came. I feel just horrible about the whole thing; there are feathers everywhere and I feel physically sick when I think about poor Pepper’s horrible fate. The worst of it is that I forgot to shut the henhouse up last night; I think they came out very early and that was when it happened. I know it’s dramatic-sounding, but I shall never forgive myself for it. And yes, I know it could have happened to either me or Quercus, but it happened to me, and I feel just awful. I don’t know if we’re going to get more hens, and, if we do, when we might do it, but for now, we’ve a lot of clearing up to do and a small girl to lie to.

Yes, well, it appears that I may have temporarily broken my website. Technically, I hasten to add, it wasn’t that I actively did anything, but rather that I ignored both an email from my host which told me that they were going to upgrade the version of something deeply important to a new and more exciting incarnation (now with added sparkles!), and the constant pleas from WordPress to update from their paleolithic platform to something more contemporary. Who’d've thunk it, eh? Anyhoo, if you’ve stopped by in the last few days and seen lots of rather unhappy-looking code, that’ll be why.

Anyway, in other news, well, nothing much, really. We’ve had lots of snow, which was very pretty and meant three days of working from home, and we’ve now had lots of rain, which means business as normal for Devon, really. I am struggling to work up enthusiasm for anything at the moment, somehow, partly because I’ve got lots of loose ends which I really ought to weave into some semblance of order, and partly because the witchling is teething and we’re up a fair bit in the night once more, after nearly three weeks of unprompted, spontaneous, out-of-nowhere sleeping-entire-nights bliss. I have got plans and whatnot (as ever, being the paranoid soul I am) but I’m just sort of ‘meh’ about putting them into action. Is this Januaryitis, I wonder?

Anyway, as a bid to ease myself back into the proverbial (saddle, that is), I thought I would share some of the questions currently tormenting my tiny mind. Here they be:

1. How on earth do we persuade the cats that the newly-fitted, polished, and worked-on-to-within-an-inch-of-our-lives oak worktops are not seating places, nor scratching posts, nor (God forbid) extended hunting grounds for playing with mousies? I don’t want to have to shut them out all night – the cats, that is, rather than the mousies; they I am quite happy to shut out – but our catflap is in the kitchen door, and Quercus is getting a rather mad glint in his eye whenever he sees the cats within, say, a four-mile radius of that woodwork…

2. Why does having been hit by a van means oodles of paperwork for us? OODLES OF IT, I tell you. All to be returned in seven days. Shite.

3. How does anyone find technology interesting? I have just spent about three months (well, in active terms, about half an hour) agonising over external hard-drives. Of course, because I’ve got a Mac, I’m looking at about half the storage for a wodge more cash. Arses.

4. How does one reset one’s mojo? Mine appears to be in a bit of a decline, in a sort of Victorian-lady-reclining-on-chaise-longue manner. I had all these good intentions about blogging more regularly, and maybe adding pictures more frequently, and getting more exercise (which is a whole nother post on its own, frankly, as I reach ever closer to Woman Mountain Status), and whatnot, and instead I am largely sitting here and thinking that ginger wine would seem to be in order.

Answers, anyone?

1. Has anyone out there got any experience of quinces? We find ourselves with a goodly quantity of them, courtesy of some lovely people across t’other side of the village from us (the same folks who have previously donated crab apples, grapes, rosehips, blackberries and mulberries), and having just sampled the quince cheese made by said chaps, I am tempted to make some myself, but am also pondering the concept of quince wine.

2. Am I ever going to get over my adoration of baby legs in stripy tights?

3. How much jam or jelly is too much? This weekend, I appear to have concocted six pounds of crab apple jelly, and about four of bramble, apple and rose. Should I start on a ‘for sale’ sign now, bearing in mind that I still have about three pounds of rosehips waiting to be made into jam, I wonder?

4. Are our chickens in league against us? Having spent the entire summer in intensive relay broody races wherein the Buff Sussex chooks tagged each other, apparently as they left the laying box, for broodiness, one of our Black Rocks is now broody to the extent that she appears to be putting the others off even approaching the empty box. We’ve booted her out for a few days running, and she’s persisting. Egg-count today? Nil. Grumpiness as a result? Plenty. Six hens and no eggs = not fair, particularly as it’s not even daylight-related yet, I don’t think. They are moulting, though, so I am trying not to hold it against them too much.

5. What do you do when your iBook is approaching meltdown in terms of hard-drive space, and you can’t upgrade your hard-drive because there isn’t room, physically? I am contemplating backing up important stuff like pictures and whatnot, and then just wiping the whole thing and starting again. I have about 2Gb of space left out of a forty gig hard-drive; not ideal.

6. Anyone ever installed their own hot-air ducting heating system? We are thinking of doing this; have stove – will burn, sort of thing. Apparently it’s more popular as a concept in North America than here in the UK; the basic concept seems good in that it would let us move excess heat from the sitting room, where the stove lives, to the extension, along the building in a direction which heat doesn’t really move naturally, or at least not to the extent it would with a small fan attached.

7. Ever noticed how ‘tidying’ the remnants of a jam-making session into one’s stomach makes for furry-feeling teeth in next-to-no time at all? Oh. That’s just me, then, is it?

Woo! It’s the first of October! Which means, er, that, um, it’s… October, she finished, flatly. Well. Despite this slightly lacklustre start, I confess that October is one of my favourite months. Not only is it Quercus’s birthday (the twenty-third, since you asked; send extravagant presents at will), but it’s also a month of last tomatoes, illicit rosehips glowing in the morning sunshine, crabapples juicing gently on the stove, and hens pecking around in the warmth of afternoons still light enough to mistake for summer. Oh, and of course, at the end of the month, there is Samhain, or Hallowe’en, if you prefer, to look forward to; our two cats would make excellent hire choices for this particular occasion, being both black and vaguely sinister, though I have to say they’ll be spoken for. This year I am in hopes that the tiny daughter will take a little more notice of the pumpkinage we are sure to acquire; last year’s number came from the post office a mile or so away, and despite the fact that it was most splendid, she remained largely above its charms, being only four months old at the time. Add a year, and hopefully she’ll be up for helping me to hollow it out a bit too.

This month, I thought I’d start out by setting down some of the things I’d like to do in the coming weeks. It’s sort of my October wishlist, because, well, it’s October, and this is… a wishlist. Right. Glad we’ve cleared that up, then. So, in no particular order:

- Finish the hat I’ve started knitting the witchling.

- Stack the chopped wood we’ve amassed in what has become the chickens’ shed, which means emptying said shed of such varied contents as… a washing machine (defunct), a potter’s wheel (very much not defunct, but sadly underused at the moment), boxes of assorted detritus, a large rat (we fear), and fourteen incomplete sets of dustpans and brushes.

- Chop more wood so we’ve got enough to fill said shed, if possible;

- Accrue roughly one hundred pallets as part of Project Free Woodshed (of which more anon);

- Make the witchling a small quilt to go on her cot; I have lots of fabric kicking about, and lots of interest, but sadly bugger-all time at the moment (yet here I am…) because I’ve taken on yet another copy-editing job when I said I wanted time off, and this one’s 23,000 words. Oops.

- Rosehip jam, of which probably six pounds; we have quite a few rosehips kicking about – I’ve already got three gallons of wine going, so I think something new is called for. This jam is supposed to be almost cheese-like in texture, and a most glorious colour, so it sounds worth a go.

- Walk a couple of miles on at least three of the five days a week that I go to work. I’m trying to remember to do this, because since I’ve been working in the mornings, the obvious time to take the tiny daughter out for a walk in the sling has become a slot which Quercus has to himself, mostly. But I don’t want to turn into the Woman Mountain (TM) just because I’m working a desk job for a portion of my week; work, after all, is something I see as a minor interruption to Real Life, so I’m buggered if it’s going to be responsible for any further slide down the hideous slope to the point where hiring oneself out as a temporary roundabout becomes an option. Quercus and I both enjoy walking, so at the weekends I’m hoping that this month, which sees less pressure on us in terms of house work (although if we want a kitchen this side of Christmas, we do need to press on with the work inside; at least for now the outside is weather-tight, again, of which more anon) might find us out for some Proper Walks, which tend to be a full morning or afternoon, and often amount to something like seven or eight miles. But these walks alone will not suffice to escape Woman Mountain status, after all; I need regular exercise, and although I hate to admit it, I actually seem to thrive on it. I feel better. I feel more energetic. I sleep better (!). So, I must do it, and make time for it, because such things are important. (Although how best to manage it when it gets dark at four and we live in the middle of lanes with no lights, I wonder? I used to walk quite cheerily to the station in the dark morning and afternoon when I worked full-time, before the tiny daughter was born, but I feel I’d be living life on the edge slightly to wander about with her in the sling and no lights… Paranoid?)

So, that’s what October, if I manage to retrieve the small shred of discipline I once possessed, may bring me. And you?

Yesterday Quercus, the witchling and I went out to pick yet more elderflower. On Sunday, the solstice, we started off four gallons of elderflower wine. I took the witchling out for a walk while Quercus had a lie-in (it being father’s day), only to return with enough honeysuckle for another gallon – this is an experiment, as we’ve not done honeysuckle before, and there are dire warnings about all but the very ripest flowers (if flowers can be ripe) being poisonous, so if this blog stops being updated in about six months, you’ll know why…

Our second picking trip brought home a big bag of elderflower, gorgeously pollen-dusted and blissfully fragrant, which we then proceeded to ignore in the evening, having said we’d sort it as soon as we got home, in favour of sitting on the sofa and watching Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (we started out saying ‘ooh – we should so watch this more often! It’s a lovely film!’, then reached the bit where everyone gets blown up and remembered why we don’t watch it more often…).

Guess what we’re going to be doing tonight, then? Yup – another four gallons of de-stalking flowers and whatnot. The smell makes it more than worthwhile, particularly as it gives us chance to sit in the kitchen, gawping at our newly-painted-red wall, and remembering the months we spent without plaster on the wall, and with cob dust collecting all over the place as a result. Cob dust. So very… dusty. And so very… red, in our case (Devon has very, very red earth). And, of course, as we pick, we listen to music. I suggested the idea of a music swap in the post below, and a few people have asked for a theme for playlists; on balance, I think the best plan I can come up with is to say how about music that just works for you? Here is a rough idea of what we’ve been listening to lately:

Joni Mitchell – we listen to a LOT of la Mitchell chez nous. Oh yes. From ‘My Old Man’ to ‘Free Man in Paris’, it’s all good.

Thievery Corporation – every. single. album. Even the slightly dubious mix ones.

Bach – particularly the Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould.

Steve Reich – ‘Electric Counterpoint’ is one of my favourite pieces of music.

Gotan Project – ‘Queremos Paz’ always makes me think of driving across southern France and marvelling at fields of sunflowers.

Debussy – particularly the String Quartet.

Horace Silver – the first CD I ever bought Quercus was ‘Pieces of Silver’.

Cali – ‘Je m’en vais’ is an utterly fab song, and one which I can listen to for hours.

So, there you go. Illustrative of this week, at least.  If you don’t fancy the idea of the CD swap, then how about some listening suggestions in the comments box? Go on – be a devil.

(Quick update: just to clarify, what I’d like best is to do the actual CDs you think are worth a go – I burn you something, you burn me something, we all make tracks to the post office et voila!)

The good:

For the first time ever, the witchling slept through the night last night. This is even better than it might otherwise have been, as we have been having Interesting Times, sleep-wise, in the last few weeks; the night before last, we got about four hours, and she was awake from 4.00 until about 6.30, with four previous wakings between 7.00 (when she went to bed; it took her about ninety minutes to get to sleep, with lots of up-and-down-stairs for us before that) and 2.00. I don’t know if it’s teething, or nappy rash, or frustration that she wants so to be able to move freely and can’t quite manage it yet (she is now able to stand quite confidently for about ten minutes, though walking – as I look around our chaotic, DIY-in-progress house – is, thankfully, some distance off, I think); whatever it is/was, it wasn’t easy, and Quercus and I had had a few nights of shiftwork, where one of us (me, in this case) sloped off to sleep in the caravan at the end of the garden for a few hours, in order to function during the day. I hate doing that, and I hate being tearful and emotional all the time due to the lack of sleep; just as I was getting to despair, she went and slept from 7.30 until 6.30. Who’d'a thunk it?

We are continuing to eat better, and to eat earlier. Our evening meal had slipped back to 8.30 or so, due largely to its being prepared after the witchling had settled for the night. Now, I am trying to get at least the legwork of cooking done during the afternoon, so that dinner is cooking while we’re in the bath with her; it makes for an easier, earlier, more relaxed feast, and means that I can contemplate going to bed at 9.30 without feeling gargantuan. I likes that.

Pyewacket has taken to sleeping on top of the fridge, curled up on our woolly-sheep tea-cosy.

The bad:

Yesterday, for the third time, Liquorice, our Barnevelder hen, managed to escape somehow. I don’t know where the hole she used is – Quercus and I have looked all around the hedges several times, down on hands and knees, and blocked up any holes we could see with wire – but still she found somewhere. I’d noticed twice before that she was disappearing somewhere in the afternoon, and it had been a while since we’d seen an egg which was definitely hers (darker than the Buff Sussex eggs, and often speckled), so I thought she’d found somewhere to go and lay in peace, following the broody Sussex saga last month.

Although I was worried about it, as she’d come back before, I assumed she couldn’t have gone too far; I hoped that I’d manage to catch her either coming in or going out, so we could block up the hole. But she didn’t appear; it got to be dusk and Quercus and I were out, be-wellied, looking for her for the fourth time, and no luck. Quercus got up at 6.30 this morning to go and search again; this time he found feathers in the lane and no further sign of her. We can only assume that a predator has got her.

I am really sad about it, far more than I’d expected; they are hens, and I am not perhaps as attached to them as I am to, say, the cats, but Liquorice was a lovely hen with a very placid nature – she exercised a calming influence on the other – entirely lunatic – hens, and was always first at the gate when I walked down the garden to feed them some leftover greens. I miss her already, and feel horrible about it all. I also know that it would be nigh-on impossible to stop them ever getting out – our garden is surrounded by a bank on one side which makes fencing very difficult, and the hedge, while thick, has holes which are clearly visible to hens even when diligent human searching misses them. Our general ambition is to be around in the garden frequently enough to alert predators to our presence, and to make the hens’ run sufficiently attractive to them as to curb their enthusiasm for escapades; generally, we do pretty well at this, I think, but I feel miserable that, on this occasion, it didn’t work well enough. It has, to say the least, rather undermined the joy at the witchling’s sleep prowess.

1. Quercus’s mother has been here since last Thursday. For the most part, it has been OK – she has helped with bits and pieces of DIY, which means that we now have everything done in the extension bar the last remaining bits of plastering (we’re getting a plasterer for this, as our abilities with lime render are not matched by our abilities with cement-based stuff) and the fitting of skirting boards. Oh, and painting. And, er, making a kitchen. But, you know, getting there. Lots of gloss painting, lots of undercoating, lots of cleaning. Progress, in short.

2. The witchling is teething again. She’s got four teeth at the moment, and seems to be working hard at the arrival of number five. Lots of crying this morning which wasn’t very nice for either of us; fortunately, the sling still works wonders with her, as she very rarely cries when carried. 

3. Over the weekend we have clawed back a small piece of vaguely presentable garden so that the witchling can have some time outdoors without being bombarded by building-site nonsense. I am really quite pleased, not least as it gave me an excuse to dig out a couple of windchimes to hang in the tree. 

4. We are about to order some clay paint. Well, it might be clay paint, but it might be casein distemper; having spent days sorting out the lime render on what used to be an external cob wall, we’re keen to give it the right finish so that the wall can breath. It’s going to be red, whatever the finish, and eventually I shall paint a new spiral on the wall somewhere. I am looking forward to that day more than I can say. 

5. We have acquired a new magic board. When I was pregnant, Quercus had the rather touching idea of a board where I wrote things I wanted to do myself, but couldn’t, for one reason or another. He then came along and did said things, without saying anything, and wiped them from the list when they were done. It worked very well, and kept me sane about various bits and bobs that an increasingly large waistline made difficult. Now, it’s become a bit swisher – a dry-chalk pen, and a picture frame with a piece of black card behind it in order to create a wipeable surface – and has spawned a ‘We must…’ section, together with a ‘We need…’ bit. 

6. One of our hens is broody. Trout. We’re not in a position to make raising chicks sensible, and are thus spending a lot of time turfing her out of the nesting box. 

7. The witchling’s favourite meal appears to be sardines on toast. I have gone back to making bread lately, which is a genuine delight to me. Months of bought bread, no matter how nice, makes me realise anew how much I enjoy baking bread, and how grounding I find it. The kneading, the rising, the baking – there is a sort of rhythm to it which I find immensely reassuring, particularly when I do it just after the witchling has gone to sleep, and the house is still and gently dark. Better yet, the witchling seems to like my bread best. 

8. The witchling’s favourite activity is probably playing hide and seek, which she does at the table in her chair. I finished making a cushion for the chair on Thursday; it’s a wooden highchair with a sort of curved back, a little like a carver chair, and she likes to rock, which gave me conniptions because I thought she would bash her head, sooner or later, hence the cushion. (The irony is, at school, I loathed needlework and all such things, yet now I frequently make things, and the more I make, the more I enjoy it. I wonder if the people who were good at things like this when we were in classes together still make things, or does the universe move to ensure that only a select few can ever master the obscure art of sewing-machine-threading at any one time?) Anyway, she raises a tea-towel over her head, and grins out from underneath it, sometimes hiding, sometimes peering around one edge. It’s hard to say who has more fun – her or her audience. 

9. My favourite words at the moment: mama, dada, duck-duck. Bet you’d never guess why…!

10. The chard seeds I sowed last week have sprouted already. Soon, we shall have rainbow leaves again. The colours! The colours! 

This is the sight that greets me most mornings when I open up the cupboard which now hides the fridge away: we’re getting about two dozen eggs a week, lots of them blue, and Quercus, whose real life is interrupted daily by a large office, is doing a roaring trade in selling; so much so, in fact, that we sometimes find ourselves eggless, which is ironic, given that we’re the ones with the chooks. I’m particularly delighted with the blue eggs, I confess; the colour of them is simply gorgeous in person, and it’s particularly touching that one can tell which hen laid which egg by the colour. Cobweb, who came into lay before Nightshade, lays eggs which are on the yellower-end of blue (two of hers are at the back of this photo), while Nightshade delivers turquoise confections which you can see in the foreground. Then we have darker, speckled eggs courtesy of Liquorice, our Barnevelder, and the paler ones from the two Buff Sussex hens, who – and I swear they do this on purpose to increase the frustration of not being able to tell them apart because their markings are so similar – seem to produce identical eggs.  I’m starting to think that white eggs might be nice too… Or perhaps green ones. Anyone got any breed suggestions? (And yes, I’m playing with fire here – I remember a conversation with Quercus, oh, two years ago, where I said ‘it’ll only be two of them; no, really!’.)

In other news, I have acquired the most fantastic fabric. It has got wols on it. Wols, I tell you. Shortly, it will be transformed into a blind for the witchling’s window; not before time, I might add, as British summer time has only been prevented from fucking with our normal morning timings by the fact that the poor tiny daughter has been rather sick for the last day or so. I know I’m in a lucky percentage here, mind you, in that this is only the second time she has been ill, and she seems to be getting over it pretty rapidly, but I did feel for her yesterday when gravity appeared to be suffering a regrettable performance lapse in relation to her tum. I am glad that she is still breastfed; it seems to be the one substance which stays down.

In other, other news, the thing I wrote for Juno Magazine is going to be in the next issue. I am quite excited. Oh yes.

I am feeling a little paranoid – well, it may not be paranoia – that one of our Araucanas isn’t all she he it should be. Thing is, I am sure that Nightshade is a lady. She is often seen in the laying box, so unless she is preternaturally devious, we are assuming that she is responsible for the near-daily blue egg which appears in said box. She is also the more accepted of the pair; she will peck about amongst the other hens quite cheerfully, with little trouble, while Cobweb tends to hang back, lone-ranger-style. We have yet to have a day with two blue eggs (which would presumably settle it once and for all; I realise that I have no basis for this assumption, but both Quercus and I are under the impression that hens lay once a day, and once only – do correct me if we are wrong), and I’m starting to wonder about Cobweb… Could he she it be a female impersonator, I ask? As far as I can tell, they look the same, with the only easy difference being that Cobweb has pale yellow legs while Nightshade has darker, almost black legs. They don’t seem to have different combs, though, and there are no obvious spurs going on. Am I paranoid?

Also, I found a rather mangled egg in the henhouse today. It hadn’t had a proper shell, but rather a sort of papery-feeling effort which clearly didn’t protect it during the laying process; there was yolk to indicate it had been an egg, but that was about it. We haven’t been giving the hens much in the way of grit lately, I realise, largely because they are out all day with access to lots of gritty ground, and partly, if I’m honest, because the bag of sodding grit is behind an equally sodding piece of plasterboard. Thing is, though, none of the other eggs have been in any way unusual, and the hens have the same diet. So, does one simply get one-off odd ones from time to time, or is this something we should investigate further?

It is Monday night, and outside there is snow falling across the fields of Devon, and quiet lies on the land like the softest of feather quilts. All around, people are sitting down to eat dinner, or watch a film on the television, or perhaps just chatting about their days while swigging down a quick sherry…

… Clearly, then, if you live in the Earthenhouse, this is the ideal time to find oneself dressed only in a sweater and tights while hanging off a ladder, at the top of one’s largest kitchen wall (a dizzy height of some thirteen height, for the pedants amongst you), wielding a water-spraying thingy.* How did I find myself in this situation, I ask. Well, it went something like this: sell house rather unexpectedly; look at houses covering half of Devon and requiring the donation of several large organs in lieu of payment; realise at least ninety per cent of said houses are insane in more than one way; decide that one aspect of house-move can be insane, but only one; purchase small cob cottage with thatched roof as ‘project’ house, and dig in for the long haul. Thus you find me, folks, surrounded by listed building applications, rootling about for such arcane objects as distempers, and generally attempting to transform what my mother-in-law described as a ‘dank little hovel’ into some semblance of the gorgeous, eco-friendly little dwelling that Quercus and I saw when we came to look at Earthenhouse way back in August of 2005.

This weekend, Quercus has been engaged in the slightly mammoth task of hurling half a ton of lime at the kitchen wall. This is one of many steps needed to sort out the persistent damp problem from which Earthenhouse suffers; cloaked in cement-based render and plastic paint for at least twenty years, the cob walls beneath are unable to breath, and have thus gone on strike – the wallpaper is the only thing holding the internal plaster in place, and most of the ceilings are headed south before too much longer, and let us move swiftly past discussion of the, er, interesting decorative effects created by mould which grows not on, but through the walls. During the replacing of the single storey lean-to which housed the kitchen and bathroom, one of the cob walls has been made an internal wall where previously a good portion of it was outside; this seemed a good time to hack off the evil render of woe and replace it with an alternative coat of goody-two-shoes lime. The harling coat, for such is the proper name for the whole chuck-it-at-the-wall-to-give-a-good-key-for-the-pretty-coat, is now done, and we’re spraying it to prevent it drying out too quickly (it’s surprising how warm the new extension is – as yet it’s completely unheated, but the heat provided by the woodburner, twenty-five feet sideways in the sitting room, seems adequate thus far, despite the current cold weather) as lime likes a slow relaxation, unlike its cement relations. Hopefully, the next couple of weeks will see us get a decent coat of lime on top, something which makes the cob look more like a wall and less like the bottom of a cow’s trough, though I will be genuinely sorry to cover it in many ways – it is a constant reminder of Devon, of the earth from which this house is built, taken from the land on which it stands. I’d quite like, were it not for the need to for the cob to breath, to fix a sheet of glass to the wall, letting you see the bare bones of this house while avoiding the constant dust caused by an unrendered cob wall. I shall settle, however, for the lime – which is a joy to work with (once you’ve got past being picky about things like, you know, retaining fingerprints and top layers of skin), and all the more to me, a would-be potter, as it’s very like working with clay – and a coat of the deeply posh Farrow & Ball distemper, preferably in a dandy shade of red.

But that’s for another day.

For now, it’s cob, lime, cob, water, cob, water, lime, and, oh, a little more lime.

Suits me.

* The tights and sweater combination isn’t strictly necessary, but somehow even I baulked at the idea of climbing up a lime-encrusted ladder while wearing a long corduroy skirt.

Well, it looks like our new arrivals have now settled in. We’ve had the Araucanas, Cobweb (front) and Nightshade, for about two months, and they seem to be quite happy. Or, rather, they appear to be as happy as mad little creatures of a chicken persuasion ever are – utterly neurotic, they beetle about the place as if the world is about to end, and we, virtually only ever bearers of food and other forms of chicken worship, are harbingers of doom of the nastiest variety. Such is life, when you is a chicken, I suppose. (Though not necessarily, come to think of it – Liquorice, our Barnevelder lady, is distinctly unconcerned by us, and will happily follow one around with a rather hungry look that, in a larger animal, might prove somewhat disconcerting; I tell you, it’s only their diminutive stature that prevents chooks being utterly fucking terrifying – think about it: all those claws, and the beaks! the cruel, cruel beaks! I rest my case.) The other hens don’t really seem to mind them now, and I think they’ve got off pretty lightly, really -there was a bit of ‘oh no you fucking don’t’ when they started up towards the perch for the first few nights, but other than that, and the odd bit of ‘every single morsel of food here is MINE! all MINE!’ from Liquorice (a very greedy little hen, it must be said), it’s been quite straightforward, and better than we’d hoped, really. They’re all going in and out together now, and the pecking order is thus established, I imagine. They are also delighted by the appearance of poultry spice in their diet, and, to be frank, I can see their point – made with such delights as ginger, it smells rather like potted Chrimbly. Though, come to think of it, it’s possibly rather bad taste to mention a festival so closely linked to the demise of certain larger fowl…

We have been getting anywhere between one and four eggs a day, thus far; I now have a full half-dozen little turquoise eggs sitting in the fridge courtesy of the Araucanas (though we have yet to get two blue eggs in one day; until that happy event, I shall always be looking askance at one or other of the blighters, in case they have the temerity to be a rooster, on the sly), and the original hens’ eggs seem larger this year than they were last, in their first year of laying. I’m now thinking that it might be quite nice to have, in addition to the pretty turquoise eggs, white eggs too. Eight chickens. Oh dear. I remember quite clearly the day that I mentioned, with the sort of assumed carelessness which comes only after at least half a dozen preparatory sessions in front of a mirror while on one’s own, that a friend had offered me some chooks, and that I’d, er, sort of said yes, despite Quercus and I having agreed only quite recently that we had far too many things to get on with (in house terms) to start having animals about the place. Ahem. Oops. (Blame it on Ally; she is a chicken-pusher, you know.) Have I become one of those people? You know the sort: the ones with all the animals…? I mean, two cats, six chickens, a baby… what next? A goat? (Tempting.) A sheep? (Only if it has big horns and a curly tail, thank you – I have got some standards.) A llama? (Called Dalai, obviously.) An alpaca? (Al Pacacino. Naturally.) I ask you.