This morning, I walked up a small Devonian lane, shutting the door of our house and stopping to look at our new door handle (which is of the brass beehive variety, and thus exceedingly pretty, to my mind) and the recently-cleaned foxy door knocker, to a car which is the next-to-current version of a car which Quercus drove when my mother was alive. Would our house be surprising to her? Yes, but only in that we are extraordinarily fortunate to have had it since we were twenty-six. Inside, I think she would be unsurprised, though delighted, by its hobbit-like nature. She would probably be surprised to see how practical we have become; she knew Quercus as a music student, not as wielder of chain, mitre and table saws.

I am wearing jeans (to work! horrors!), a sweater with the neck standing up against the gentle drizzle, and purple leather sandals, based on a pair I owned when she was alive. I am wearing silver spiral earrings given to me by Quercus the summer that my mother was diagnosed. I have a leather keyring which was my mother’s. I call to mind a day spent in Boscastle with her, before illness loomed on the horizon (in fact, just before, given that I’d already started university, so it must been the first time they came to visit; the return trip from that visit brought the road accident which started the process which would end in my mother dying of breast cancer, unrecognised until it was too late because her injuries masked the massing symptoms of her imminent doom. Gosh. That is still hard to write. And is it horribly wrong that even in the midst of this hardness, I note that this is a bit like the psychotic version of The House That Jack Built?), when the sun was shining and life was blissfully simple (though of course Sod’s Law being what it is, I didn’t realise this then, and I’m sure that I was full of teenage angst about something-or-other). We sat on a small wall together, and she said I looked like a pixie, a throw-away remark which I’ve often thought over since then, in moments when I contemplated a mirror which showed me a haggard vision of sleep-deprived bile.

In the car, an MP3 of David Bowie plays. This would definitely come as no surprise, and nor would the Jamiroquai I switch to later on.

My bag, which sports a fair-trade peacock on the outside, was probably not even designed, let alone in existence, when she died, but I don’t think its curly design would have failed to appeal, and nor would the felted purse lurking therein, rich in its bright spiral of colour but disappointingly underprivileged in fiscal terms. That probably wouldn’t surprise her, either.

In the back of the car, a small springy sheep lurches from the top of the window. Fastened to that bit you’re supposed to hang jackets on (who does that, incidentally?), he is there to distract the small girl when she’s imprisoned in her (German, which would also be no surprise to a woman who had a life-long affair with the Teutonic, and nearly married a German when she was eighteen) car-seat. She would not be surprised by the small girl; she it was who foresaw a ‘herd’ of small blonde children clinging to the legs of my dungarees. Not quite a herd, yet, but there’s still time.

As I get to work, a space I have inhabited for ten years in one form or another, I reflect that she’d probably be both surprised and pleased that I eschewed the London move which seemed the likely outcome for most of my sixth-form friends in favour of a life in which elderflower cordial-making goes hand-in-hand with lethal alcohol of unknown origin, rootled out of a hedge by friends, and with knackered cars which are constantly in danger of breaking down, and with a house of which gaffer tape has become an integral part. And with ancient clothes in danger of achieving listed status, and with stupidly uncommercial research projects, and with Quercus, and the small girl.

Strange though it may seem, this game is immensely comforting to me. My mother didn’t get to see my adult life, really, which had only just begun when she left, but she would feel a part of it, easily, inevitably, effortlessly, were she to reappear tomorrow, I think.

Number of shiny British pounds spent bringing about this happy state: not going to be thought about

Number of shiny British pounds about to be made by shameless flogging of iPod bought for £20 courtesy of Apple deal in shop: probably about £130

Number of hours spent in frustrating discussions about wireless router: mind-numbingly plural

Number of loaves of bread baked this week: 6. Six. SIX.

Number of presents currently scattered about the house in happy toddler disarray: approx. four billion

Number of cats snoozing, complete with muddy paws, on newly-waxed oak bench seat: 2. That’s eight paws, and forty claws. FORTY CLAWS.

Number of mothers-in-law currently entering their third – THIRD – week of residence: 1. Thankfully, they don’t tend to be a plural phenomena.

Number of hair-pulling insane discussions with afore-mentioned legal maternal relative: lost somewhere in the first twenty-four hours

Number of blog posts fermenting in Earthenwitch brain, or remnants thereof: 3, including dolls, cooking, and exterior painting of windows and doors which has greatly reduced the pikey appearance of our house.*

And you?

*Is it horribly anal of me to find it almost hand-clenchingly wrong to write a number, i.e. a numerical character rather than the word, followed by punctuation? Or, indeed, to use numbers rather than words full stop?

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.)

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.

While he is out, I am reuniting with my sewing machine. It has been off for a service with someone his agent laughingly described as ‘a sewing machine geek’; just as well, given that a bit of internet stalking revealed that it is actually well over a hundred, and thus something of a dying breed. Hopefully, I will now find my way to The Zen Of Sewing, but frankly I’ll settle for not wanting to hurl its not inconsiderable bulk out of the nearest window. I have a bag which is nearly finished – it’s been waiting for the return of the beast for about three weeks – and wants only four straight seams. D’you think I’ll manage it without some form of homicide taking place?

I’ve been thinking of establishing myself a regular crafty slot, and now that I think about it, Thursday evenings seems like a good plan. I don’t get very much time in the house on my own, as it were (the small girl having gone to bed just before seven, as is her wont), and as afternoon snoozes seem to be a bit hit-and-miss these days, I think that evenings are probably a better option, not least as I quite like a bit of time on my own and am thus in a positive frame of mind at the very outset, which is in itself a useful thing when I find myself confronted by a) my own technical ineptitude, and b) that recurrent desire to hurl said machine forth. So, we shall see; now I’ve said the whole regular bit, doubtless Quercus will have a drought of rehearsal time, and I’ll forget all about it until the next time I’m feeling particularly batshit.

In other news, in a moment of spectacular magnanimity the uncharacteristic nature of which those who know me personally will attest in the strongest terms, I have given the caravan’s owner (let us call him Jules, for that is… his name) another week’s grace in the ongoing saga of its removal (or lack thereof) from our garden. His girlfriend, the not-very-lovely one from the phone conversation the other week, has just had their baby, and he was proposing to come here (a five-hour drive for him) in order to, well, generally prat about in an attempt to formulate Plan B for its removal. Plan B is needed because Plan A was to get David to move it, and, as regular readers will know, that doesn’t seem to be on the cards given that he doesn’t reply to our emails or phone calls these days, and seems to wish that a large rock would appear just for the very purpose of our crawling beneath it and remaining there for a goodly period of time. Sadly (for him), said rock is about as keen on making an appearance as he himself is, so we persist. Anyway, I don’t want to be the utter trout who insists that Jules leaves his new baby and his recently-given-birth partner to drive all the way over here and attempt to clear up this situation, so we’ve left it until next weekend, with the solemn vow that then, It Shall Be Moved.

My.

Right. Knitting calls, as does the sewing machine, and, to my shame, an online episode of something terrible. Oh, but just before I go, let me gloat about this year’s foray into seasonal crafty whatsits: coloured eggs. I’ve never done these before, but have often seen them on blogs and thought how lovely they looked, so this was the year. Ye gods, blowing eggs requires some determination. I think it’s the sort of thing I’ll do again, though, as I quite like the idea of building up a collection of eggs over the years. (Assuming they last that long!) Have you tried this, and if so, what did you use for colours? For us, it was leftover food colouring from making L-Q-S‘s pumpkin birthday cake, some white crayon and a rubber band, together with some water and some vinegar. We never managed to get the green colouring to come out green, though – it always ended up bright turquoise.

And how is the internets tonight?

Also, it being that time of the month, I have the cramps from hell.

Now, this brings me to a tricky subject.

WHY DOES IT HAVE TO HURT?

No, seriously. WHY?

I mean, I am all in favour of the many and varied attempts that various female writers have made to reclaim the majesty of menstruation, and to work in into some sort of alternative feminine esotericism which rejoices in the power of birth and recreation of the divine spirit through birth and blood, milk and ecstasy and all that. Oh yes. And I read tons of very lentil-eating books about childbirth when I was pregnant, and yes, I ended up very much in favour of home-birth with as few interventions as possible. (And yes, I am off to knit my own placenta into a menstruation veil shortly.) (Kidding.) But the thing that really stops me short of buying into this logic is that every month, my period arrives, and I feel pretty shoddy for the first day or two, to the extent that, today, all I’ve wanted to do is crouch over a hot water bottle, while muttering darkly about hysterectomies.

Traitor to the cause, see. Next thing I’ll be seeking out the interventions of a white male GP with an Oxbridge degree who votes Conservative and lives within an hour of London, not to mention burning my sandals and eating a Big Mac.

I do want to find a way to perceive menstruation as something other than a royal pain in the arse, if you’ll forgive the literal nature of that phrasing, but it’s something with which I struggle. I mean, mentally, I find the idea of a cycle which is in time with the tides of the moon immensely appealing, and I love the idea of women being linked with lunar tides and whatnot. I am also not at all squeamish (I have been using a Mooncup for about five years, for example, and am not at all grossed-out by anything involving blood and guts), so it’s not that that’s the problem. I even like the novel idea of using menstrual blood in composting, for the iron contained therein, and, after a brief deliberation, this month I’ve switched to using washable pads, with which I am so far delighted. Also, given my witchcraft tendencies, I have used a variety of herbal approaches in the past, some of which I continue to use, more out of habit than any particularly overwhelming effect; raspberry leaf tea, scullcap tincture, cramp bark, camomile, valerian, peppermint and many others which I can’t remember have all joined me in the ouch-why-ouch monthly dance, yet none have really trounced the problem. (And that’s before we even start on The Teenage Years: Does Any GP Think That The Pill Doesn’t Cure All Problems, And If So, Give That Doc A Prize.)

So, the eco aspects of menstruation get my vote, as it were. And the whole you-can-make-people-if-you’re-female bit never fails to astonish me, as it did throughout conception, pregnancy and birth, and as I hope it will again, if we ever finish our sodding house (that, dear reader, is another post entirely). I can talk my way around all sorts of phrasing which plays up the importance of positive imagery about menstruation in terms of having daughters and giving them a good feeling about being female, and I have learned to stop thinking of menstruation as ‘the curse’, a phrase my mother used for years (and perhaps unsurprisingly, given that she had a hysterectomy at forty after years of endometriosis) because I don’t want to feel that something which is natural to the female body is in any way something inflicted upon it; no – I prefer to see it as a sign of the great things of which women are capable. But that’s exactly where I flounder: I do believe that it’s a sign of all the extraordinary things that we can handle, as women, yet at the same time, the pain really pisses me off. It’s not like I’m lying in my bed of pain for days at a time, trailing a wan (and suitably Victorian) hand over a lacy cotton nightgown, but it does take the edge off me, for want of a better phrase, for the first couple of days, and my skin is completely crap for a few days before that, just to remind me of the delights which lie before me.

So, in short, how to resolve this dichotomy between the mental resolution with which I can cheerfully face the monthly challenges of being female, and the physical wimp which appears as soon as the bleeding begins? It’s a question I haven’t yet answered, but I’d really like to get my hymn-sheets in order before I start explaining all this to a small girl, one day.

So, that was the frustration just seeping out there. Largely, it’s frustration at being made to feel like the bad person when actually it’s not me (us) who is (are) the evil whatsit, but someone we considered a friend. Yes – it’s the caravan’s latest saga. Now we have its owner’s phone number, and we’ve been trying to get him to fix a date for its removal, having offered him three weekends when we spoke initially nearly a month ago. Two and a half weeks passed, and we’d heard nothing; a phone call revealed he had yet to speak to the person he’s relying on to move it, and, as long-term readers may have already guessed, that person is not normally someone to whom I would go in a tight spot, timing-wise, unless EVERYONE ELSE HAD DIED.

Why yes, since you ask, I am feeling a little irritation about this.

So, I had a twenty-minute conversation with the caravan owner’s very agitated, very pregnant (38 weeks) significant other tonight, during which she strongly implied that we are complete arseholes who’d walked all over the person we once considered a friend, using him for all he was worth and generally being arseholes. Did I mention the arseholery? Oh, and making merry with their caravan for however long we’ve had it, free of charge and without a care in the world, before turning around at very short notice and issuing edicts about its removal.

I can’t even be bothered to get into the many ways in which this isn’t true, but what really gets me is that said thought-to-be-friend allowed this situation to unfold without setting the record straight, and now here we are, with me having to be mildly unpleasant (i.e. persistent in something they would rather we didn’t persist in – getting a date settled for moving this sodding caravan) to a woman who is about to give birth.

I’m so pissed off I could spit.

In other news, I am running away from home again. The kitchen is nearing completion, but the dust, grime and hours needed simply aren’t really working with a small girl who isn’t very well and a sleep-deprived mama, so it’s off to Quercus’s mother we go, we go, yo ho ho. Or something. This means no internets for a few days, but probably lots of knitting; I’ve finished that cardigan shown in progress in the last post, and am suitably stunned at my own wondrousness (er… ‘luck’ might be closer to the truth), so I’m now casting around for something new to knit. Current possibilities are, well, largely hat-related, although truth be told I’m a bit bored with hat-knitting; somehow I have accrued lots and lots of small quantities of very pretty wool, which means lots of small projects, really, unless I buy yet more wool, when what I really want is something more substantial. The only candidate for such an enterprise is, at the moment, a huge knot of wool which looks as if the cats had scrumbled at it for at least two weeks prior to its being forgotten in the attic for about six months. Ahem. This is rather dampening my appetite for starting, shall we say.

Hoo-ho.

And you? What’s going on in your neck of the woods?

So.

The letter that we sent recorded delivery to David, he who hath saddled us (apparently) with a caravan we don’t want, don’t own, and want gone, has come back to us – the post office attempted to deliver it, left a card saying they’d tried, and then it waited for two weeks in their depot thingy before wending its way back to us.

ARGH.

Is so annoying.

In the meantime, I’ve tried emailing David again to let him know that if we can’t raise him by post or phone, we will end up going round there, either to tackle him face to face or to find out if his landlord knows where the fuck he’s gone. It’s all so bloody unnecessary. That’s what pisses me off. It’s not like we want anything from him now – that ship sailed bloody months ago – but you’d think someone we once considered a good friend would have the decency to pass on a phone number, at least, wouldn’t you? I mean, obviously we did something to piss him off, but surely it must be clear that we’ve no idea what, and, if he ever does read this blog still, that whatever it was was inadvertent; I just can’t for the life of me work out what has happened here.

Fucking caravan.

Fucking situation.

Fucking prospect of over an hour’s drive each sodding way to see if he’s moved.

Fucking fucking fuck.