Well, not really unspeakable, as I am about to speak it, metaphorically, er, speaking. But still. Woe. Yes. Woe, for I have spent two days with a not-very-well small girl for company. And lo! there was much lying on the sofa with a small wailing person on top of me, wanting to do nothing except feed and go to sleep. She is most pathetic, and I feel very sorry for her, and have pretty much no idea what’s wrong. She just seems to have picked something up, and is a bit on the warm side, is completely uninterested in eating or going out and doing things, and is rather lethargic. I am taking the drink-lots-of-fluid-and-thank-the-gods-for-continued-breastfeeding dance, while perfecting the skills of doing normal household stuff with a toddler in one hand. Quite different from the same dance conducted to the tune of tiny babe, I find, and rather more demanding on one’s wrists (to the extent that I appear to have acquired a repetitive strain injury in my left wrist, which is currently intimating that physiotherapy might be the only way to persuade it to cease and desist).

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.

ARGH.

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.

Much to my astonishment, the last-ditch email I sent David has elicited a response – I still have very little idea what’s happened as he was quite mysterious about it, frankly, but at least we’ve established some form of contact, and he’s emailed back saying he’ll get Jules to get in touch with us. So, that’s a big relief – I really hate conflict, particularly when it involves people I consider friends (albeit in a ‘I may voodoo you soon’ manner), and I’ll be very happy if we can resolve this amicably; it’s never good when you find yourself idly wondering if the police will be able to give you reliable advice on something, is it? So, fingers crossed, this will be sorted soon.

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?

ARGH.

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.

Those of you using feed readers may have picked up a post I disappeared a while back, one in which I explained the oddities of the caravan which lives in our garden at the moment. Well, to those of you who didn’t, the brief overview goes thusly: Lovely David, fixer-up of Citroëns and general all-round good chap, helped enormously on our extension self-build, and in the process he found us a caravan to use as a temporary kitchen, bathroom and general living space while chaos enveloped our house. The caravan belonged to a friend of his, J(o?)ules; we did him a favour in giving it a temporary home while he moved house, and he did us a favour in providing us with something which we’d otherwise have had to buy and then resell when the building work was done.

Hmm.

So far, so good.

Fast-forward six months, and it was the summer of last year. David had some odds and ends to finish on the wiring he’d done in our extension, wiring for which he’d been paid (and which he’d been able to do because, during the build, he’d gone on a course to become a certified electrical installer-type person, able to do Part P certification, a necessary part of building regulations in the UK; we paid about a third of the fee for this, which was quite a considerable wodge for us), and we’d arranged a time for him to come and do it. He didn’t appear, and since that last normal conversation back in the summer, we’ve not heard from him at all. Despite calls and emails and texts and messages and forum posts.

I’d just like to say, at this point, how upset I’ve been about it; we both have. We thought this man was our friend, and, while we’re both open to an explanation which contradicts our eventual, reluctant conclusion that not only was he not really our friend, but that he was being a bit of a swine too, we’ve no idea why he’s disappeared off our particular universe. Being me, and naturally prone to a particularly unlovely combination of guilt and incessant curiosity, I feel quite sad about it still, if I’m honest; it’s so rare to meet people with whom you really get on almost from the word ‘go’ that I feel you have to hang on to them wherever possible. Of course, to do so requires, generally, a little reciprocation on their part. That is where this one falters a bit.

And, while Lovely David may have beaten a hasty retreat, sadly, the caravan has stubbornly refused to do likewise. It sits, festering, at the end of the garden. It is eight feet wide and twenty feet long. It occupies the space we have got in mind for a woodshed, and it’s a pain in the arse, not least as it means we’re constantly parking in eight inches of Devon mud. Also, of course, it’s one of those “but it’s not even ours!” things. J(o)ules hasn’t got in touch with us, as, to the best of our knowledge, he hasn’t got our number or address (although my real name and general location on Google brings me up as hits numbers one to ten), and we haven’t got anything beyond his first name, and David doesn’t seem to want to give it to us.

So, yesterday, I finally managed to speak to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, and they tell me that we must write to David, sending it by registered post so that he must sign to show he’s received it, and then wait two weeks. If he doesn’t reply, we’ll be selling the caravan, before hanging on to the proceeds for six years (!), in case J(o)ules should appear, wanting his wagon back. I don’t know if David will reply; to be honest, if you’d told me a year ago that we’d find ourselves in this situation, I simply wouldn’t have believed it, so little would this have fitted in with the image that we had of him at the time. But hey -here we are. I’m quietly depressed about the whole thing.

Two weeks and counting, eh?

I’ve been revisiting my tarot cards quite a bit in the last few weeks. It started when my eye fell upon them (I would say, mysteriously, ‘quite by chance’, but actually, there is very little chance you could miss them when they are poked at your nose by a small and very curious girl) the other week, and, after years of abandonment on the shelves downstairs, I felt a pull to have a potter through them once more. I’ve had these cards for about twelve years, I suppose, and while I was all enthusiasm, gypsy caravans and wafts of incense when I first bought them, somehow I sort of lost interest when I realised I’d have to actually read an entire book to get to grips with them. See? Fickle, I am. Anyway, perhaps it’s no longer having to read swathes of literature so dull that one questions the usefulness of literacy in its entirety, but somehow I managed to rip through the book in only a few days, and my interest has been on the up ever since.

When I was about fourteen, I came across a well-established witch who read tarot cards with astonishing accuracy. At the time, I felt pulled between the assumption that he must have been cheating in some way, surely, and the equally strong desire to believe that We Just Don’t Understand Everything There Is. Over the years, I think I’ve come down on the latter side, for the most part. Yes, there are some charlatans out there (and various aspects of this person’s conduct are, shall we say, questionable, perhaps), but that doesn’t seem to mean that everything they stand for is rubbish.

I’ve been picking the cards up on nights when Quercus sleeps downstairs, and having a quick look at whatever comes out first. It’s sort of meditative, and at the same time renews my sense of connection. ‘Connection to what?’ I hear you cry (along with ‘good grief, woman – what incredible old bollocks’), and well you might (to both!), because I’ve got no idea what I’m on about, frankly. I was trying to explain to Quercus yesterday what I feel when things seem… witchier, somehow, and of course I fell over my feet, verbally, and ended up sounding like Madame Arcarty, which was, shall we say, not quite the effect for which I was aiming.

I think it’s something which requires some serious thought, at some point. I mean, what do I actually think? I think there is More. I have an enduring interest in witchcraft, which, for me, means an awareness of one’s surroundings, including but not limited to the seasons, the weather, the herbs, flowers, oils, spices and so on that can be used culinarily but also for purposes less well-known. I also have a strong feeling that the universe sometimes sends you what you need, even if it’s not what you wish for. Fate, I suppose. I think I might just believe that sometimes you can effect what you wish for yourself, but only if it’s vaguely in line with What Will Be anyway. But beyond that, I’m not sure what I think. I have had a few examples of things I couldn’t explain, and I have reason to wish for More, for sure, after my mother’s death. I’d also like to know why I feel so preoccupied by these questions just now, when there is no obvious prompt for them.

The inherited lunacy, by the by, is a reference to my grandmother’s conversations with her own grandmother, who had been dead for thirty years at the time. Apparently, I have two generations of mediums in my family, and my father has often demonstrated worrying foresight, once or twice in most unusual circumstances. That, coupled with my mother’s strong interest in witchcraft, speaks clear and loud (and apparently alliteratively, as we shall see) of as barking a bunch of beggars as one could hope to meet, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s something in the DNA.

In other news:

Why is my radio constantly wandering off its station, sometimes after a few seconds, sometimes after an hour?

Why, on the first weekday after I start thinking seriously about what I’m eating, is my office strewn with cake and biscuits?

Starsky or Hutch? I think my money is on Hutch (if only for the quirky vegetarianness)*, but this is subject to change.

Homemade apple pancakes – do they count as junk food?

Why is it impossible to get in touch with the Citizens’ Advice Bureau if you’re not in a position to walk through the door?

* This definition of vegetarianism is also something of a post in itself; I’m still going about the place “looking like a vegetarian”, according to colleagues. More on that anon.

Gosh, that sounds a bit academic article titley, doesn’t it? What a worrying start.

Anyway, whatever the inauspicious title, I’ve been thinking a lot about self-image in the last few months. Well, probably the last two years, if we’re honest, since I was pregnant. The thing is, I really hate having my photograph taken, probably because most of the pictures I see of myself are utterly abysmal, and I see, rather than the person I hope I am, outwardly, a knackered-looking woman with dubious hair and a clear love of chocolate which manifests in the physical world as hips the size of Australia and a hint of second or third chins from certain angles, none of which is particularly flattering.

Of course, there are also photos which I consider acceptable (and rest assured that those are both firmly in the minority, and the only ones I post here!); yes, I still look knackered and my hair is obviously in need of urgent attention, but normally these photos don’t, at least to my mind, show the fat bird I am so worried to be the truthful representation. Now, I know, rationally, that the weight I am is not my ideal, in terms of longevity and whatnot. I also know, however, that I am not horribly unfit, and nor am I the size of a house, despite some photographic suggestions that such is the case (we’ll say it was a combination of an unfortunate angle and the deeply unflattering sweaters I used to think made me look slimmer, ironically. Oh, ignorance was bliss!).

But still, when I see myself in the mirror, I am not happy with what I see, mostly. I am happy to have what can only be described as a Junoesque figure – I have always had reasonably large breasts, and hips which look ideally suited to producing broods of small, dungaree-clad infants with blonde hair before carrying said infants about perched on one side or the other – but the stomach? The stomach I am less happy about. I am also less happy about the general… weightiness of myself. Mostly, I am unhappy about the fact that when I see myself in the mirror, I am reminded of the years I spent reassuring my mother that she wasn’t fat, and that she looked nice in such-and-such, and so on. My mother spent most of her adult life worrying that she was too heavy, and, indeed, being too heavy. I don’t know what the risk percentages are, but I do know that extra weight is no good thing when it comes to breast cancer; as fatty tissue may produce extra oestrogen, the less tissue you have which is fatty, the better, it seems. (I don’t know if the breast cancer which killed my mother at 53 is genetic, but I do know that her mother died at 39, and that the two breast cancer genes identified thus far [for which I have tested negative] are not necessarily the only ones, so in the meantime, I’m thinking bet-hedging is the way forward.) Anyway, yes – there she was, worrying that she was overweight, and yes, sometimes, and indeed prior to her initial diagnosis with breast cancer, she was too heavy. And there I was, at the time pretty slim, reassuring her.

(Aside: I look very like my mother. The small girl looks very like me. Genetically, it’s as if our genes didn’t even notice the paternal whatsits floating about, so weak and pathetic were they when compared with our own mighty, er, persistence.)

I suppose it’s at least partly from our parents that we learn our eating habits as adults. Yes, some of it is choice, but it seems reasonable to think that some of it is learned behaviour from our childhoods. I am fortunate in that I like pretty much all sorts of vegetables and fruit; I am less fortunate in that, like many, I seem to equate food with security and happiness. If I am tired, or sad, or depressed, or just a bit low, it is all too easy to reach out my increasingly porky trotter and waffle down some cake. Likewise, one of the best ways to improve my mood is to bake. Both traits inherited, if not learned, from my own mother, and not helpful, see, when combined with a ridiculously sweet tooth and the willpower of… a very unwilled thing indeed. (Although somewhere in there I must have some backbone – I quit smoking when I was nineteen and have never gone back to it, and I did, eventually, finish that sodding PhD.) (Aside: hmm. Maybe I used up all the willpower I had? Maybe that’s my quota gone…?)

And so I find myself, at the age of thirty-one, thinking that this time, I’ve got to stop pissing about and actually drop some weight. I think that a stone would make a big difference. I am a size fourteen, in English sizing (which I think works out at a ten in the US), and I think I weigh about twelve stone.

God.

When I write that, it does not feel good. But see again the point re stopping pissing about. I don’t think I eat terribly; rather, the problem is that I simply eat too much of everything, and I don’t get enough exercise to justify doing so. When I lived on my own as a bid to make myself get over my mother’s death and start actively living, rather than simply existing, again, I joined a gym, controlled what I ate, and lost over a stone relatively easily. I can’t really join a gym these days, partly because I think my arms would take on a life of their own and repeatedly punch me in the face until I realised the extent to which I had betrayed them, and partly because I am skint enough to consider buying coffee a lavish extravagance, and then again partly because I have the perfect accessory for doing bench-presses: a nineteen-month walking talking infant. So, I can’t be completely control-freak about this, in the way that I was when I had only myself to please, and only myself to consider when I went to bed hungry – but quite smug – each night. How, then, to proceed? Well, first up, I think I need to just cut down on everything, a little bit. I don’t drink, really, and I must stop baking, I fear, for the next month, just to see if that helps. (Of course it doesn’t help that Quercus, who isn’t overweight and can eat like a bull, gets very tired in the afternoons and often perks up when presented with cake; neglectful wife charges in the offing, courtesy of none other than my own brain, see?) And after managing a three-mile walk with the small girl in the sling yesterday, I think I must also manage this more than once in a blue moon, because It Is Important, and should not always be put to the bottom of the list.

Oh, if I could only just start with a clean slate, rather than having to slim down the sodding slate I’ve developed, as it were.

All of which brings me to my second point: self-image. Essentially, in emotional terms, what’s made me really think about all this is that I don’t want the small girl to spend her life watching her mother feeling crap about the way she looks. Yes, I embrace the idea of people being different sizes, and different shapes, and just… different. I love having a feminine-shaped figure, and am not interested in losing lots of weight. But I’m not happy, and I don’t want to put that on her, if that makes sense. From a practical point of view, I find myself thinking with increasing frequency that if I really love my girl – and I do; oh, I do! – then I must do everything I can to ensure that she doesn’t become the third generation in my family to lose her mother at an unusually early age. My mother was 15 when it happened to her, and I was 22 when it happened to me. (In amongst all this thinking I’ve been doing, I note also that there are relatively few photographs of my mother; I think this is partly because she experienced the ol’ self-loathing I often feel when faced with photographic representations of ‘oh, one more slice won’t hurt’. I make myself appear in pictures, and in videos, with the small girl partly because I know that, while I may love the pictures of her as a small child, when she is older, she may want to see her parents too, and images of our lives together, rather than isolated snapshots of her sitting on worktops or something similar. Yack, it’s hard, though.)

So, here is to new beginnings. I shall try not to witter on about this to so long and so navel-gazing an extent again, but also, I would appreciate it if any regular readers – or those who lurk and would like an excuse to pick on me – could pop out of the woodwork with chirpy little ‘so, lardarse, lost the excess yet?’-like comments from time to time, just to ensure I stay on the straight and, hopefully, increasingly narrow path to losing that stone, preferably in about twelve weeks.

Let’s see, shall we?

So, the aged parent has been here since Wednesday, and left early this afternoon. We only arranged this a few days ago, though he said about two weeks back that he wanted to come. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder articulately, explicitly, what the reason for this visit might be. Not that he has to have a reason, you understand, but he doesn’t come often, and, to be honest, ever since the time when he demanded, with pretty much no warning and even less justification, that we repay a loan he’d told us he considered ‘gone’ only two weeks previously, my am-I-about-to-get-buggered-about-in-some-way radar has been at an all-time high, and I seem to be eternally on standby where he is concerned, poised to leap into a defensive pose of some sort.

It transpires that I was not entirely wrong to feel the vague sense of unease about this trip, though, fortunately for us both, that sense of peace that I reached a while back about my relationship with him seems to be persisting, ultimately. Despite a few prods to the contrary…

He has been lovely to the witchling, and took time to make her feel comfortable with him, hiding small somethings in his fists and letting her pry his fingers open to discover which side hid the present. He bought us a truly sumptuous Indian take-away last night, after a day spent rendering the house in hot sticky sunshine unlikely in late September. He produced a wad of cash towards the cost of yet another ton of sand needed to finish the sodding rendering (and yes, we hope that day may yet dawn). He took me to a local NCT sale and paid for a wodge of infant clothing which should keep the tiny daughter warm as the weather continues to cool.

And then…

He said he wants my mother’s ashes back. Largely because he feels that it’s time we addressed, finally, what is going to happen to them. I’ve had her ashes here, in Devon, for some time, and when he delivered them to me, I was under the impression that it was a permanent decision, at least from his point of view, and that, as I wanted them, it was sort of up to me from that point.

Now, if he ever finds this blog, I’m in real parental shit. Before I moved to this address, he found and read my thoughts on what to do with my mother’s ashes, as longer-term readers may recall; the fall-out was swift and extreme in nature, and after ranting at me over the phone, calling me inconsiderate and thoughtless, he didn’t speak to me for over a week. Well, I didn’t exactly seek him out during that time, as you may imagine, but whatever – it took a long time to move past that one. (Because a clarification is called for here – we don’t ever really resolve things, he and I; we simply move the carpet an inch or two higher to the ceiling as we diligently shove whatever the latest issue is into the darkest recess of the cobwebs.)

My first reaction was a mixture of anger and sadness. I felt that he’d only come because he wanted something, and that he’d either purposely misled me when he gave me her ashes initially, or had simply rewritten history to fit his view of it. Either way, not ideal. I said very little, knowing that if I got into an argument I’d only find that I was the one who suffered; the aged is a very good arguer, and has a remarkable knack for not only deeply pissing me off, but also managing to make me feel guilty about it at the same time. So, I succeeded in saying virtually nothing, and we moved on as Quercus, with rather handy – albeit inadvertent – timing, arrived home with a few tons of sand which needed shovelling off the back of the trailer.

And then I quietly fermented on it. Revolved it around in my mind, and thought about why I was cross, and why I was sad, and what to do, and what not to do.

And what it comes down to is this.

I learned when my mother was dying that there is virtually nothing truly worth falling out about, in terms of cataclysmic never-darken-my-door-again arguing. That things once said cannot be unsaid, no matter how much you may later wish they could be, and that you only really get one shot at this life, and the people you meet, and your relationships with them, might just be the most important part of life – more important than money, and things, and places – and that it’s all very well pushing the sense that you’re in the wrong, or behaving badly, or hurting someone, to the back of your mind, but that that doesn’t stop the sense being there; it merely puts ear-defenders on your conscience and passes it a very complicated crossword puzzle to keep it occupied while you continue to do whatever it is that you know you’ll later wish you hadn’t.

I am lucky in that my mum and I were very close, and there were no unspoken problems between us, and very few words I wish I hadn’t said; this has been a very genuine comfort to me in the years since she has been gone, and I imagine it will go on being. My relationship with the aged parent, however is not that simple, and has been fraught with hurt and guilt and resentment and defensiveness over the years, despite a shared sense of humour and a well-developed stiff-upper-lip attitude that I realise can be most unhelpful in terms of really KNOWING someone. However, whatever we may have fallen out about in the past, I don’t want to fall out with him now. Not over this. Not in a way which, because of its hyper-sensitive prompt, would surely be decisive, final, and, ultimately, futile.

So, despite my reservations, I think I am going to go along with his desire to have my mother’s ashes buried. Apart from any more emotional considerations, I look at the tiny daughter, and find myself wondering what on earth she would do with this dubious inheritance should I not do anything myself. I mean, one can hardly just leave one’s daughter with a box of human ashes, really, can one, perhaps supplementing it with some further relatives as the occasion warrants? Particularly as the tiny daughter never even met my mother? It seems cruel to leave the decision in her – still so tiny – hands, albeit deferred – one hopes – until she is a grown woman.* One of the very few negative things I learned from my mother is that it doesn’t help to be unclear about death, and what you want to happen after it happens to you. (Not that I hold her responsible for this, you understand; it’s more that I now see what I would prefer to do myself, in order to avoid this happening to the tiny daughter whenever I depart this mortal coil.)

She has been dead for nearly nine years; December 14 2000, just as the evening star became visible above a Christmas tree lit with stars for those who had already followed that inevitable path. Part of me finds this ludicrous – how can it be that long since I saw her last? Every moment of those months seems so clear – while another part sees the time when she was alive as almost another life, another me, another universe. I remember thinking, as she was dying, what an awfully long time would elapse, assuming I lived longer than she, before I would see her again, if we do exist in some form after we die; the years stretched before me like an unknown and unknowable journey, one for which a ticket had been forced upon me.**

I know that for many people, the fact that we have buried her ashes long since is a little odd, to put it mildly. I suppose it started with the fact that, while she was very clear about her funeral (down to choosing music and which version of various hymns she wanted), she said nothing about what should happen after that, perhaps understandably, and the jokes that she’d made, long before cancer became a blot on our particular family horizon,  about her ashes sitting in a ginger jar on the mantelpiece, with lid-rattling a means of communicating approval or approbation, only served to strengthen my feeling that a churchyard, no matter how nice, was not what she would have wanted. Mum was not avowedly religious, despite choosing a church funeral; I think she was hedging her bets, to put it bluntly, and felt the comfort of a church as something familiar from her early life. She wanted to believe in it all, I think, but wanting is a very different thing from actually doing.

The aged parent has suggested the churchyard closest to the house in which I grew up; it’s a very nice churchyard, as they go, which backs on to a beautiful vineyard, and houses a quietly beautiful example of Saxon architecture, something which would appeal to her, I think. I have asked him to find out if the convent school at which she taught would be willing to have her ashes buried in the churchyard there, as an alternative; she was, I think, happiest while teaching there, and, for probably the first time in her adult life, felt in control, confident and, though not in the way she’d expected, in love. (That is a Whole Nother Story, into which I might go another time, but while my brain throws these things up every time I think of her, it’s not really relevant to this already-behemoth-like post.) So, we’ll see; as Mum wasn’t even Roman Catholic, I suspect the answer will probably be no, but I felt I ought to at least ask.

I hate the idea of going back to Sussex. If I’m honest, the last time I was there, I felt I’d stayed too long in a place which no longer held a space for me; going back yet again is, I think, pretty sure to be a fairly bloody experience, and one which I’d prefer to avoid if possible. But of course, not going is simply not an option, and I am still trying to work out how I feel about the notion of Mum having a grave which I do not visit, realistically; I live more than a five-hour drive from the place, and have felt for years as if I was going back into my own past every time I get east of Chichester (still a good eighty miles west of my part of Sussex). The aged parent moved to Derbyshire nearly a year ago, shortly after he remarried, and he too has little reason to go back to Sussex, with the exception of the odd visit to my brother, who still lives there. So, neither of us will see her grave often. The only one who might is my brother, who saw her rarely when she was alive, despite a deep-seated affection for her. It’s ironic, really.

How to spell a long-drawn-out sigh, I wonder.

It’s a funny thing, this dying business, isn’t it?

* This, predictably, has made me think quite hard about what I would like to happen to my body after I die. So far, Quercus and I have agreed that we would like to be buried in the same place, and that, as he finds the idea of cremation abhorrent, it’s burial as in body, rather than ashes. We both quite like the idea of an ecologically sound approach; the Eco Pod is rather natty, frankly, so that’s quite high on the list, as is some sort of woodland burial. Clearly, all we need is to get our mits on so much money that we can buy a giant piece of land somewhere, and get ourselves safely stashed in the earth therein.

** I have often been tempted to try a séance, not least as my research area on the PhD front had a decidedly occult focus, and I read a lot about spiritualism and its origins while writing my thesis. But could one ever really believe it, I wonder? I’m not sure, and that’s probably why I’ve never actually done anything about it. You may say ‘but Earthenwitch, you a witch, woman! Surely that answer enough?’. Well, my answer to that is that the fact that witchcraft speaks to me on many levels (please forgive such a wanky phrase; it’s the only way I could think of putting it, really) doesn’t mean it answers every question I have, and nor does it prevent me thinking about alternatives as I find out about them. Bits and pieces of a lot of different spiritual outlooks make sense to me – I think I am a bit of a magpie in that respect – and it’s mainly the practical aspects of witchcraft which interest me the most, i.e. the seasonal transitions, the concept of things like cooking as a form of witchcraft, Knowing About ‘Erbs And All That, and so on.

So, the things that are still pissing me off, despite days hours minutes some time spent fidgeting with my CSS are as follows: the search bar is still aligned differently, I can’t seem to alter the padding between the entries and the sidebar divider, and – hang on; I’m sure there’s something – I’ve never yet worked out quite where, reliably, to find my widgets in the code, because it sure as hell seems like sometimes they’re in theme functions, and sometimes they’re in the sidebar, and sometimes, as with the search thing, well, who knows?

Meh.

Other things which are lunatic? Please tell me. Things I like even though I probably shouldn’t include the font (and size), the black and white, and the different font-size of the sidebar. I realise these make some people hopping mad, but hey – that’s the beauty of t’inter, innit?

And after all, a day which begins with the knowledge that, as I write this, Quercus’s mother’s SEVENTEEN-DAY VISIT IS COMING TO AN END cannot be all bad.*

* I am a bad person. She has been very helpful. She has helped us to render ALL OF THE ORIGINAL HOUSE, and had it not been for a hose blowing its fitting in a most unhelpful manner yesterday afternoon, we’d've got a considerable way around the extension too. However, her visit nearly killed us. All of us. Present estimated time of next visit? Somewhere around the turn of the century. Present estimated recovery from present mental anguish? Ditto.

I’m not really in the mood to write something long and serious, but I do seem to want to write something, and this topic is very much on my mind at the moment, so here goes. Firstly, a disclaimer – the reason I don’t want to write something long and serious is that we had a pretty rubbish night chez Earthenhouse last night, courtesy of a mixture of – I think – low-level teething pain and, if I’m honest, a bit of taking the piss on the part of a certain tiny daughter (she actually giggled – GIGGLED – when, at about 3.30, I checked her nappy to make sure she wasn’t sore or wet or anything; as you can probably imagine, while I find her laughter remarkably winning in pretty much any circumstances, this was not quite the reaction I was hoping for), the combination of which led to an awake stint between 1.00-ish and knocking on 4.00. Since I’ve been back to working mornings in my ‘official’ ‘professional’ capacity (tongue so very far in cheek that it’s likely to stick out through my other ear), I have to leave for work before 7.30, and this morning, folks, I was in a fog, and that fog was of the pea-souper variety. Anyway, all of which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not at my most objective, or coherent, or, um, insert other words which imply general clever-clog status.

So.

Here’s the thing.

When Quercus and I have talked about babies, and children, and families, and clans, we have always seen ourselves with more than one child. Indeed, during conversations of a particularly daring nature, the number three may even have been uttered. We both come from small families: although Quercus has a genuinely ENORMOUS extended family, courtesy of Roman Catholic Irish ancestry which means he has ten uncles on one side alone, he was an only child, his father having died very unexpectedly when Quercus was only two, so it was, mostly, him, his mum, and his grandma. He had reasonable relationships with some of the extended family, but he didn’t see them daily or anything like that. I, on the other hand, am not an only child – I have an elder brother, known here as the Gothic Folly, but he is eleven years my senior, and as he left home when I was six, my childhood was much more that of an only child than anything else. Added to that, and despite having a bigamous great-grandmother on my father’s side, I have a tiny, teensy extended family – most of them carked it at suspiciously young ages, and the ones that didn’t were either repugnant (most of my father’s family), sadistic masochists (most of my mother’s family), or just utterly tedious (any others not covered by the first categories). So, it was me, the aged parent, and my delicious mother, with occasional cameos by the Gothic Folly.

The upshot of all this tininess is that both of us would like the tiny daughter to have siblings. We’d like that chaos which surrounds families with more than one child (and some with only one, of course!), and we’d like to see troops of small blonde people trotting about the place destroying each other and whatnot. Having the tiny daughter has, in many ways, only made this desire stronger; I don’t think either of us was quite prepared for the totality of her conquest – we have gone from an attitude to children which is best expressed in terms of ‘children? Yes, by all means, but I couldn’t eat a whole one’, to ‘oooooooh – look! She’s poking me in the eye! She’s so clever!’, accompanied by an interest in pregnant friends which I never would have credited a couple of years ago. Yes, chaps: I am That Person Who Likes Babies And Who Is Interested In Pregnancy, Birth, and Whatnot. Extraordinary, and particularly when you think that my pregnancy, while far from disastrous, was not quite straightforward (SPD from the fourth month which increased in potency to the point where I was finding walking quite a challenge, and a constant battle with blood-pressure monitoring [white coat hypertension, anyone?], and the whole nightmare of finishing my PhD while we started knocking down considerable chunks of our house), and I didn’t get the homebirth I’d wanted (though I did get a quick natural labour, 90% of which happened at home).

Yet here I am, looking at the tiny daughter, and realising that if I were to find myself pregnant again today, she would be just about two by the time that the baby arrived. And we’d always sort of kind of maybe possibly thought that two years was a nice-sounding gap. So, why the hesitation? Well, lots of reasons, I suppose. We’re not where we hoped we’d be with the house; again, the optimistic view we had of the progress it would be possible to make once the tiny daughter was born was a little, er, optimistic, and we find ourselves with a list which includes replastering the entire original house, taking down the ceilings in the process (they all show a regrettable tendency to return to Mother Earth as it is; we will simply be hastening their inevitable descent), reworking all the windows (though we’re getting to the end of that), refitting all the doors, sorting out the shelves and cupboards (which largely means rebuilding them, as they’re all things Quercus made as stop-gaps prior to replastering), building two sheds from scratch, landscaping the garden, and finishing the extension. Ahem. No PhD to finish this time, at least.

Also, though, not much money this time; last time, we’d had the luxury of eighteen months or so where we were both earning reasonable money, working full-time and quietly amassing fortunes beyond our wildest dreams (hey – we don’t get to dream much, OK? That requires deep sleep) with which to buoy ourselves up during the renovations this house demands, and with which to lessen the drop in income that maternity leave would bring. (This bit does make me smug, though – I got through an entire year off without touching my savings at all, and so far, a lot of the work we’ve done has been paid for out of income.) This time, we’re both working part-time, and we’re reasonably broke, frankly; it makes sense because it means we get to look after the witchling between us but it’s not easy, financially. While I don’t expect to be paid to look after my own child, it does irk me rather that, at least in the UK, those who opt to send their children to nurseries or to use other forms of childcare get considerable wodges of cash put their way by a government keen to promote ‘family-friendly working’ provided ‘family-friendly’ = ‘parents who pay for childcare’, despite the fact that our choice means, if you care to look at it this way (which we don’t, really, because it’s too depressing, and because we were and are determined not to make the witchling’s childhood all about money), we pay for childcare by opting to drop our income by half. (By all means feel free to correct me; if you know of some way in which we are actually entitled to the aforementioned wodges of cash, do feel free to tell me about it.)

And then there are the physical worries. This house, even when finished, will still be tiny. It’s a two-bedroom cottage, and the bedrooms are so close that I hear the witchling the instant she moans in her sleep. Now, bear in mind the challenges we’ve faced in getting both the witchling and ourselves enough sleep; if we have another baby of similar disposition, I can’t begin to imagine how we would cope. It’s one thing when your baby can have 100% of your attention, but quite another when you must function at a sufficiently high level as to look after an inquisitive little person two years its senior. I don’t want to short-change the baby we already have, if that makes sense. (In fact, I don’t want to short-change her even if that doesn’t make sense.) (Although this is where it becomes a circular argument, because I also want her to experience having lots of people about; when my mother was dying, one of the things I realised was that having had a sibling to whom I could really talk would have made an enormous difference, I think – the feeling that you’re in it together, that sort of thing.)

Oh, and of course the worries about the pregnancy itself – will I get SPD again? Will it be worse this time? The answer to both of these questions seems likely to be yes, and I imagine that the white-coat hypertension would probably be a problem again. Oh joy. And how does one cope with the exhaustion of both early and late pregnancy while running about with a tiny toddling person? I mean, I know people do, obviously, but lately I have viewed them with a degree of awe, particularly when they manage superior things like stringing together coherent sentences and Herculean feats like, oh, I don’t know, LEAVING THE HOUSE. SPD was no fun. I remember lying in bed many times and just crying because I was so tired (little did I know of the fun that was still to come), and I just couldn’t stop the pain no matter how I positioned myself. I also remember that the stillness, the contentment I felt (despite all this), was just as bloody well, because moving further than the kitchen rapidly became roughly akin to an Olympic hurdle.

Of course, I realise that things would be different. Different baby, for starters, and thus different personality and all that. And of course this time, we do at least know which end, vaguely, one does or does not blow down. Nappies are no longer the origami hell they once were, and we are both fully conversant with the many different forms of wailing which may betoken ‘kindly change my nappy this instant’. We are also equipped with roughly a cubic ton of baby clothes, muslin cloths, nappies and general baby paraphernalia (though most of the latter we’ve never used, ironically). So, that makes it easier, right? That whole second-baby syndrome?

And of course it’s not as though we’re ninety-five. We’re not ancient to be thinking of taking more time over this; I’ll be 31 in November. Yet I always sort of thought that in terms of sleep deprivation and the particular brand of bedlam which goes with the very small person, it was probably best to suck it up in one big dose, rather than a series of smaller, but longer-drawn-out, sips. Particularly if one is thinking of doing this not once but twice more. Surely it’s better to have, say, five years of unspeakable tiredness followed by a gradual – and dependable – progression towards returning to the land of nod, rather than meeting and greeting Morpheus, sitting down for a night-cap with him, stripy cap in hand, only to watch the beggar pick up sticks and leg it, possibly to a depressingly cheerful rendition of ‘We’ll Meet Again’?

Now that I’ve actually experienced that bedlam, the bedlam which accompanies the appearance of a new baby, perhaps predictably I don’t know where I stand on this one, frankly. I don’t get unbroken sleep often; in fact, I’ve had twelve nights of it since about month four of being pregnant. I’m tired nearly all the time, if I’m honest. And sometimes I think the witchling will never sleep all night, reliably. (Though most of the time I can be all zen ‘this too shall pass’-esque.) And when I think about not just extending the time that I feel like this, but in fact worsening the way that I feel as well, possibly, well, it’s not a great outlook. I always knew that Quercus was not great without enough sleep; he has consistently surprised me with the resilience he has shown when I’ve really, really needed him (last night, for example, he took a stint with the tiny daughter from 4-ish, so that I could get a couple of hours in before leaving for work), but generally he too is exhausted, and he functions less well than I seem to in this situation. Also, of course, breastfeeding means that often there isn’t much point in asking him to get up; why bother having both of us up and awake, which only really means that I feel bad asking him to let me sleep the next day? No point in us both gradually approaching sleeping on our feet, so largely it’s me who does the night-time stuff, and I imagine that this would still be the case second time around, because I feel very strongly that breastfeeding is something I’d want to do again (not least because, on a selfish note, I read recently that there is apparently a link between at least two years’ breastfeeding and a reduction in breast cancer rates; with my family history, I can’t afford to ignore this sort of thing, particularly when it supports me in something to which I am already committed).

Of course, this all assumes that we produce another infant of the witchling’s type, and that sleep remains at a bit of a premium. But the thing is, can I assume anything else? Having experienced this, can I just tell myself that it will be different with anything approaching wholehearted belief that This Shall Be So? I think not. For one thing, I feel it would be a bit on the irresponsible side to just go into this while effectively sticking my fingers in my ears and shouting ‘la la la’ at the bits I don’t want to think about. That does not seem like the way forward, no matter how tempting my hormones may make it seem. So, I am left with the questions, and the debating, and the knowledge that Quercus would like to think about another baby this autumn, perhaps, while I am still, put simply, a bit scared by the whole thing. Does fear mean this is not the time? Will the fear go away? Or is it part of who I am now, something which will colour my decision but perhaps ought not to define it?

Well. I think that now qualifies as both long and serious. So, on that note, off to chase a ridiculously fluffy cat out from under the table, where he has succeeded in attaching not one, but two sea-creature finger puppets to his fur. I like to introduce a little light relief, see?

(Oh, and if you’ve got this far, well done, folks.)

Yes, yes – life is good and we’re all alive and we’re lucky to have a house/job/child etc. I know all that. But still, when I spend a day off from my tedious job working instead on rubbing back rotten windows, watching the dust and grime float indiscriminately over the surfaces I cleaned only two days ago, leaving as it does so an indelible layer of nastiness which will probably bring on at least another burst of my stupid finger problem (wherein my fingers develop tiny blisters, go bright red, peel, and generally feel as if I’ve had at them with a belt sander) as well as intriguing a tiny person who shouldn’t really learn about the ingestion of dust just yet, I feel, and then, THEN, I spend two hours – TWO HOURS of time, which means having the tiny daughter otherwise occupied, and ignoring the need to clean up, and ignoring the fact that we’ve got no food in the house, the washing is piling up, the place is really quite filthy and the sodding, sodding windows have no glass in them when heavy rain is forecast – THEN, I spend two hours copy-editing (for which read: completely rewriting) an interminably dull and terribly-written document about the World Trade Organisation only to have Word crash not once but twice (thus eating the auto-recovery file for afters, and leaving me bereft of the two hours of work), meaning I have about six thousand words to go, when I had literally just finished the last footnote on the last page, I feel quite pissed off, frankly.

Today has not been a good day, folks.

Did I mention that I’m fat and ugly? And skint?

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.

So, teeth. Not that much fun. Not nearly as much fun as one might think. In fact, decidedly less fun than one might think. Cue gallons of camomile-related concoctions, and a lot of time spent with three in a bed (not that we mind that, particularly; in fact, it’s really quite lovely, apart from the proximity of tiny-yet-strangely-powerful lungs to adult ear’oles). Oh, and the complete and utter inability to string a sentence together regarding anything other than the aforementioned teeth. Or lack thereof.

However, in other news, Quercus is doing an exciting learning-at-work thingy about cob and natural building materials; he is going to have his own stand and everything, and, as his rivals are covering such thrilling topics as Equal Opportunities, clearly he will be the belle of the ball. Or something. And, clearly, this means a new post about cob, and the fabulousness thereof, is long overdue from Earthenhouse. This must be rectified. Shortly.

- that it is raining, hard, on the one day in living memory (OK, slight exaggeration, but only slight) that I have access to a car, and, of course, the car is parked a mile away, down very wet and muddy lanes. Hello, soggy walk with baby in sling, and how are you today?

- that the blind I am making for the witchling’s room presents some sort of unusual challenge to the sewing machine, which has, in accordance with the unwritten Code of Sewing, decided that there are too many users connected to the central sewing knowledge database, and thus I must be disconnected, leaving only a plethora of unsightly, and utterly inexplicable, threads.

- that, despite her sixth tooth declaring its woe done and finally deigning to appear on Saturday, the witchling is still out of sorts in a seems-like-teething manner, on the day when Quercus is in London from nasty o’clock this morning until horrendous o’clock this evening, meaning a solo bath- and bed-time for me, on not much sleep, and with a bit of a headache.

- that, now that the broodiness has passed, at least one of the chickens has taken to Renegade Laying: Eggs on the Edge. Found one yesterday in the middle of a load of brambles. I swear they do it on purpose, just to mess with us.

- that, when moving a chair across the kitchen in a slightly lack-of-sleep befuddled manner, I put the leg of said chair through the front of the microwave door, meaning it is probably gently microwaving our entire house even as we speak.

- that, having spent approximately an ice age researching nappies and the various possibilities therein, it is conceivable that the witchling is allergic to latex (in the leg bindings of the waterproof wraps), which would explain why the bastard nappy rash Just Won’t Fuck Off.

In short, arse arse arse. Normal service resumes shortly.

ARG. 

In fact, no, wait – ARRRRRG. 

That feels a bit better, but not much. 

So. Picture the scene: Quercus hasn’t had a car since he sold his beloved CX back in January, and he’s thus been using mine to go to and from work, which is fine, though as we live in the sticks, it’s rather circumscribed my activities (no bad thing – can’t get to shops, thus can’t spend money, or something, and no, now is not a good time to mention the positive plethora of delightful goodies available on the internet). All this time, he has been hunting down his particular vehicle of choice. Eventually, he found one, and managed to win the auction on eBay. So far, so good – good car, good price – but of course the car had to be in Manchester, didn’t it? For those not in the know, that’s about four hours from here by road, and more than that by train courtesy of the need to change in various places and of course the ineptitude of our train system here in the UK. But lo! my father was visiting! And lo! doth he not live within spitting distance – OK, within forty miles – of the car’s location? And lo! wast he not returning thither on Friday, i.e. today, the very day which Quercus had arranged to collect said vehicle? Verily – OK, let’s cut the crap, shall we? – he asked for a lift. And then there was a TREMENDOUS quantity of discussion. First, it was fine to give him a lift. To the door! Not a problem. Then, the car’s location appeared to move. Or something. Suddenly, it was a long way to go, and really not that close at all to where the parent needed to be, and perhaps he could take Quercus to a station en route? But not too en route – after all, he hadn’t planned to drive that way, and it would add ever such a long time to his already-long journey. And he and the new wife were planning on going out that night, so he’d need to be back in good time, and leaving at the very latest at about seven, and he couldn’t guarantee that they’d get to a particular station at a particular time, so it would be tricky for Quercus to book tickets, and didn’t Quercus understand that the M6 is not to be trifled with? At any cost? At any time? And Birmingham – who would drive to THE WEST of Birmingham? Who would do such a thing? 

So Quercus gritted his teeth, said nothing, and quietly booked a ridiculously early train from Devon to Manchester. He got up at 5.15 this morning, drove to Exeter, and got on said train. At 11.00, he was in Manchester. At 11.30 he discovered that, far from meeting him at the station as arranged, the car’s seller had sent ‘a friend’. And that the car, far from being in perfect condition as stated in the auction blurb, needed a new clutch. And that, while there was a V5 document* with the car, it wasn’t in the seller’s name. And it wasn’t in the friend’s name. In fact, the friend claimed it belonged to his mother. Who wasn’t with him. Or contactable. Or receiving the money for the car, as the seller wanted it paid to him, in cash, on collection. At this point, Quercus walked away, much to the seller’s (phone-based) wrath. So now he is stuck in Manchester, looking at £126 of train fare, or a £50 bus ticket for tomorrow morning. And he is still carless, of course. And he’s used a day of leave to do this. 

Also, I have a stiff neck which is bordering on insanity-inducing, courtesy, I think, of strange sleeping postures when the witchling came and slept with us for the last couple of nights (teething woes).

It is safe to say that today has not been one of glorious sunshine.  

*The UK thing which says you own the car and haven’t, well, pinched it, or cut-and-shut it, or anything else nasty or unsavoury.