It’s no good – I’m still feeling a bit down in the dumps. Last night I ended up ranting about lost dungarees (two pairs thereof), a lost hat (which I knitted, last winter, and which I’m very attached to, not least as it’s the first hat I managed which really worked, and it involved Noro yarn), general housework dudgeon, and the overwhelming feeling of never managing to finish anything.

To wit:
- housework;
- hunts for something-or-other I’ve misplaced;
- sorting out what the hell to do about my mother’s piano (currently being ‘rented’, where ‘rented’ = the rentee isn’t paying the money, and nor is she returning my calls, and I’m worried that when I do finally manage to contact her, she’ll tell me she doesn’t want the piano any more, which leaves me scrabbling around trying to re-home it, which is, frankly, a daunting prospect);
- the copy-editing I’ve got to do;
- the tax return I need to complete;
- the huuuuge list of crafty things which my brain tells me must be done if I am to attain the status of A Good One (mother, wife, general human being);
- the tiling I started weeks ago, which I’ve yet to finish because the next bit involves a tile cutter and I feel as if I need a longer stint at it than the small person’s snooze allows.

ARGH.

I just want to clear the decks, start again, have some energy, and I’m not really sure where to start, or why I’m feeling this so aggressively at the moment. The small girl is sleeping more consistently than she ever has, and generally life is good, if rather disorganised. We even came up with a solution to me ending up doing the grocery shopping every week (which gets a bit dull after a while); it involves Quercus going once every other week, and us getting a delivery of shopping in the off weeks. The irony? I haven’t sat down and done the ordering part, which means it’s not going to happen this week. It’s partly lack of time, but I’m aware that it’s also partly lack of enthusiasm – the time I do have free is very short, and largely in the evenings, when all I seem capable of is sitting, lump-like, on the sofa. I was going to say ‘all I want to do’ there, but the truth of it is that that’s really not the case; what I want to do is spring, gazelle-like, into action, a flurry of knitting, baking, creative, productive energy.

The small girl’s bedtime routine is fairly settled, but I am struggling to keep on top of it, to keep things on track, and she is going to bed probably a half-hour later than is ideal for her; we are not routine people in that this is a pattern which has been largely developed by her, and which we merely facilitate because it seems to suit her (and us, normally), but a half-hour is a big deal when you’re only twenty-six months old, and I feel shifty that her teatime often seems to be a scrabbling of frantic realisation that I have yet to start our dinner off, which means an even later meal than normal, and I just seem to be disorganised all the time. I want to sit down with her, and talk to her, perhaps while knitting, while she eats; I feel very strongly that it’s important that mealtimes are convivial, relaxed and communal. Don’t get me wrong: I am always in the room with her, and I do talk to her (and she to me, increasingly), but I am not able to give her my full attention because I’m normally surveying the three hundred things which still need doing, or which I’ve overlooked earlier in favour of a short stint online.

Our evening meal has slipped backwards so that we rarely sit down before eight o’clock, which, for me, means a very short evening afterwards, and a going to bed which feels hasty and anti-climax-like because I feel cheated of a Proper Evening, one in which Things Were Achieved. Also, increasingly, we’ve been sitting there, watching some load of rubbish on the Beeb’s iPlayer rather than eating at the table, and that normally means that we don’t clear up the kitchen after eating, and a daisy-cutter effect is thus encountered first thing in the morning, which doesn’t exactly set one up for the day, shall we say.

So, my plan is that today, when the small girl sleeps, rather than either sleeping myself (which, tempting though it is, doesn’t actually help my mood, really, and is so short as to be almost worse than not sleeping, sometimes), I will devise a cunning and rapid dinner for adult consumption, and I will have a tidy-up around the house as well as thinking of something creative to do with the small girl when she gets up (it’s very wet here today, so our default of going for a walk in the fields is probably not on the cards). Once that’s done, I will sit and cast on something knitting-wise; perhaps having started a project, it will seem easier to pick it up and get on with it in the evenings.

I am also declaring a fatwa on both Facebook (which in lots of ways I abhor) and shitty televisual programmes; after all, we got rid of our TV for just this reason, and both felt much happier in its absence. It’s so easy to waste your sodding life away while sitting there, watching some bloater cooking something you’re not remotely interested in, for someone you’ve never heard of, in a restaurant the prices of which you find morally offensive, or to read the profile of some friend-of-a-friend you’ve either never met or can’t actually recall either way while pondering their intense love of poodle crochet classes and upscale wheelbarrow decorating. In short, why am I doing this? This is not what life should be about. It’s not a lesson I want to teach the small girl, and it’s certainly not helping me or Quercus. It’s procrastination on a scale I’ve not encountered since my PhD days, when whole days passed with only a sense of increased desperation to show for them, and when I came to realise that if I don’t do things, I only feel worse for it. And if I’m not happy, our whole house suffers for it: the cooking gets crapper (with attendant guilt), the washing mounts up, the bedtimes get later, and poor Quercus gets that slightly hunted look which speaks of ‘she cannae take nae more, Cap’n – she’s goin’ee blow!’.

So, today, I will rip that sodding plaster off instead of picking nervously at the edges, and by god, I will take control of things, and get the fuck on with them. No pissing about online (and no, blogging, which has a tangible and cathartic result, does not count), and no sitting there feeling sorry for myself, and no despairing over The State Of This Fucking Place. Just progress, and creativity, and thus Ordnung.

And you? What are your frustrations in life at the moment, and how are you going about overcoming them (or procrastinating your way around them)?

This morning finds Devon drizzling and grey; predictable, of course, given that we are hoping to go off adventuring tomorrow. Having had three weeks or so of hard work, something involving a pootle, tea and a scone and a walk somewhere other than the fields or woods on our doorstep is called for. Deluge notwithstanding.

Truth be told, I’m feeling a little bit flat. I’ve lost my oomph, and I just can’t quite recall where I saw it last. (Though I think it might have been somewhere in Cornwall.) It’s not terminal, and it’s not disastrous; I just need some time off, and a spot of fun, and probably to finish a few of the projects that I’ve got on the go. Do you ever find that you start a nice list of things To Do, feeling all goody-McTwo-Shoes about it, only to find that where the list once relieved all anxiety about its contents simply in the writing of it, it has now become something of an albatross, swinging around your neck and gently poking you in the backside with its long and angular beak? Yes, well: that.

I have a list of crafty things that I want to do – and yes, I do want to do them – but very little is actually happening on them. This is partly because I’ve chosen things that I don’t really know how to do (a cabled jumper, for example, is probably not quite the best way to ease myself back into knitting after a summer-long break), partly because I’ve been doing quite a bit of freelance work recently (and that normally happens when the small girl is asleep, a precious hour which I could otherwise devote to such fun activities as, you know, cleaning, or making dinner [which, actually, is a fun activity for me, not least as it encourages me to get through those 52 Recipes in 2010, but still... Sometimes I just want to do something selfishly crafty, even if said selfishness is eventually destined for, say, Quercus or the small girl]), and partly because I’m a little lacking in the old organisation/motivation department at the moment.

I’m trying to avoid procrastinating, which means I’m spending less time online – I know that one of my worst habits as a PhD student was the pissing away of hours reading blogs in which I felt only limited interest, purely because my A-list had yet to update, so at least having experienced the crappitude that comes from having wasted a day, I know that I feel rather better – despite short-term crabbiness – if I just get on with things, rather than putting them off while glumly reading t’inter. So, I have started knitting a rather exciting hat for the small girl, with prompting from Ally, who donated wool and a kick-off, and I have drafted a new list (because obviously lists are my thing… ahem…) which is radically shorter, changing the original list to a list intended to cover autumn, rather than, well, now. I’ve also added some easy wins – lengthening the small girl’s felted dress of last winter, making some more felt acorns for her, getting up to thirty on the recipes challenge – which should spur me on a bit.

I’ve come to realise since finishing my PhD that I do seem to need Things To Do, to work towards, to achieve, rather than just being able to pootle through the days in a blithe and carefree manner. I think Coffeeslut‘s comment that I might be ‘unsuited to being / perceiving [myself] to be stationary while the world moves / seems to be moving on around [me]‘ is probably quite apt; I need activity, and organisation. Here’s to autumn coming, and with it, a new sense of vigour.

Happy Friday, interwebs: it is nearly time for a lie-in.

I’m thinking of switching to having the date for my post titles; you know how it is – some mornings, you just can’t assemble your random thoughts into the sort of order which a single title would cover, this being just one of those. Maybe I could add subtitles. Or is that too complicated?

Anyway.

Firstly, I’ve managed to whack my way through another ten or so new recipes in recent weeks, meaning I’ve got the smallest glimmer of a hope of completing 52 recipes in 2010. This weekend, we tried a lemon and lentil soup (v. g.), killer peanut butter fudge cookies (so good I am lusting after them now, at a distance of ten miles), and a mushroom and nut loaf which was really rather excellent. All keepers, definitely.

Secondly, our workshop now has a roof. Well, it has a protective layer of stuff fastened down with battening; the stuff can be a roof in its own right for three months, but within that time it will gain its fircone-like shingling, meaning it just becomes a part of the belt-and-braces approach to weatherproofing which Quercus has opted for with this project. The waney-edged boards arrive soon, so the walls will be clad, and before we know it, we’ll be reclaiming our stuff from a neighbour’s garage and there’ll be one less element of chaos to cope with. (At the moment, Quercus’s car forms a mobile shed – the boot is full of circular saws, chainsaws and brushcutters. As you do.)

Thirdly, Quercus’s mother departs the province today, after a stay of ten days. It’s been OK-ish – we had several near-misses in terms of open warfare when she wouldn’t leave something alone (to wit: ambitions for life, jobs, babies, childcare, living without money, What The Neighbours Think Of Us and The Situation With My Father), but it could have been worse, and by my standard measure of success (no-one died) we passed with flying colours. That said, the sheer quantity of time we’ve spent with her this year has made me think a bit. We’ve all found it really difficult having her about for so long – probably eight weeks this year – in part because we are ungrateful fuckpigs, but mostly because she is genuinely the most difficult person to get on with that I have ever met, which, coupled with extremely irritating personal habits (‘Morning Has Broken’, out of tune, ad nauseum, at six-thirty in the morning would be hard to take for anyone, I think, as would the continual use of ‘spend a penny’ when you go near a bathroom – woman, you are GOING FOR A WEE, like anyone normal), bring us close to the brink every time we’re together, and, what’s more, our normal tolerance levels haven’t really recovered from her first visit, back in March, letalone the recent and prolonged blows-upon-a-bruise visitations.

We have fallen into the habit of asking her to visit at Christmas, preferring to take our medecine at the start of the time off we get rather than for the New Year. We have yet to actually articulate this invitation this year, and she will shortly be off to Canada for about three weeks, meaning we’re going to have a longer break than we’ve so far enjoyed from each others’ company (because I’m sure we piss her off as much as she does us), so I wondered if we ought to get it in before she goes. But then… At the moment, the idea of her coming here at Christmas fills me with dread.

The thing is, while I can tolerate her, and manage her, and, with the odd flash of white rage, bite back the things I’d like to say (while restraining my arm from its murderous fumbling for the nearest heavy object) and so on, Quercus finds it much, much harder. She makes him so cross that he sometimes physically removes himself and goes for a very irritable walk, just to wear off the anger. He rants, nightly, about the many ways in which she is impossible. Worse than that, his relationship with her makes him feel immensely guilty: that he doesn’t get on with her better, than he isn’t more forthcoming when she’s around, that he can’t be himself with her, that he knows that NOT being himself probably makes it worse, that he can’t bring himself to be the person to whom he thinks she would react better, that he longs for her departure as soon as she arrives, that she tries very hard to help us, both physically and financially, that she can be very thoughtful yet still he feels as he does.

I feel a few of these guilts myself – she does a lot to help us, and she’s the only member of our joint families who does (though lordy me, when someone reminds you of this and actively asks you for thanks or praise, it doesn’t help, does it?). But the thing I feel mostly is that I worry that every time she comes to see us for a significant event, that significant event gets rained on slightly. The small girl’s second birthday was a good case in point – she was vile about something-or-other, and we had a very tense few hours while she got over whatever it was that had caused the vileness. Last Christmas she was so rude the very first evening she arrived that Quercus determined to ask her to leave if she hadn’t cheered the fuck up by the following morning. Does it always have to be like this? Apparently so. I’ve taken to challenging her head-on about the things she does, sometimes, i.e. ‘we seem to be at loggerheads here; have I said something to upset you?’ Sometimes this works, sometimes it causes only teenage flouncing.

It’s been better, though not unfailingly so, since the small girl arrived. Prior to her appearance, most visits included at least two threats to go home, while we are now down to a batting average of one or so, with only moderate use of guilt thrown in. So far, she has only taken her irritation with us out on the small girl once or twice, and she has only done something which we felt was openly not a good idea once, when she was trailing a small child, howling, up and down the lane to the car, to pack her things, rather than waiting ten minutes so that one of us could take over and she could just get on. The small girl didn’t understand what she’d done to warrant being pulled about, chided and ignored in equal parts; the simple answer was that we had asked her grandma to look after her when her grandma hadn’t wanted to, and it would have been rather easier if said grandma had just said no – the resulting child meltdown took far longer to sort out than we’d gained in child-free time.

It’s a difficult thing, letting the dynamic between the small girl and her grandma evolve without stepping in too often. I don’t want the small girl to pick up the habits of her grandma’s which drive us to distraction, and nor do I want her to see how annoying we find the woman. I had no relationship with my grandparents – two dead, two uninterested – and I do want my daughter to have a better sense of where she comes from, of her wider family, than I had; two people did not form a big enough support network when my mother died, and I have never felt more keenly the lack of siblings near my own age, or grandparents, or uncles and aunts, than I did at that time. But are irritating people better than no people at all? Sometimes, I am not sure. It’s a sort of ‘if you can’t be with the one you love…’ scenario, really. And the small girl does love her grandma, despite her quixotic nature. I suppose I just hope that she comes to see how irritating she can be (thus maintaining our sanity!) but loves her nonetheless, with the distance of a generation, with more ease than we have managed.

And in the meantime, here I am, busily contemplating pregnancy and babies and how that would alter our family as it stands, and what role Quercus’s mother would have in that shift. It’s a bit sticky, frankly. I still long for the huge family dinners, with ten people crammed around a ridiculously small table, or Sunday mornings with fourteen children of varying ages destroying the counters while assembling a very sugary breakfast, or midweek evenings with the stove lit and lots of people watching something entertaining on DVD, or winter walks with several dogs, a few antiquated relatives trailing sticks about the place and a riot of children poking streams, chasing cats and generally being beastly. Fun. Friendship. Respect. Laughter.

I don’t know that there is an answer to The Problem of Families, and Relatives In General, is there? Except one involving wood alcohol, anyway.

Anyway. On to less sticky things. Or not, as the case may be.

Lemon and Lentil Soup
Get hold of…
3 potatoes, diced
2 carrots, chopped
2 chopped onions
A goodly wodge of garlic, chopped
A slug of olive oil
A generous handful of herbs (parsley, sage, oregano, basil – whatever comes to hand)
A large mug of lentils
About a pint and a half of water
A stockcube
3 mugs of spinach/chard/sorrel/greens of some sort you can’t quite identify, which probably won’t kill you
The juice of two lemons, squished rather inefficiently with your hands
A spot of salt and pepper

Then…
Into the pan with the onions, garlic, carrots and taters, and fry them in the oil for a bit, until they start to capitulate. Whop in the lentils, water, herbs and stockcube, stick on a lid and boil it all up until the potatoes soften, at which point, in go spinach and lemon juice for another ten minutes or so. Make sure it’s all cooked through; take off the heat; blend to avoid wierdly stringy bits of spinach in soup context, which would be Just Wrong.

Cookies and nut loaf to follow.

So. After that depressing little wander through the familial labyrinth, tell me nice happy things (including the recipe for healing such maternal discord) this instant, gentle reader, in the box of commentage below.

I’m mid-camera change at the moment, and have thus yet to do battle with the outgoing camera in order to try to extricate some pictures from its grubby mits, but I just wanted to say how very exciting it is to watch our workshop coming together at last. It’s about two years or so since we worked out detailed plans for where it would go and how it would be built, and now, watching it actually take shape, I realise how nice it’s going to be. It’s not quite your average shed in that it’s HUGE, and so far its frame has been put together using free and recycled wood. Eventually, it’s going to have waney-edged boards for walls (the planks of wood with the curved edges of the tree left in place) and shingles (wooden tiles) for a roof; it’s a very Quercus structure, in short.

Yesterday we* clambered about on it, putting up the first two roof trusses, and slotting the beam which forms the apex into place. Ridge pole, I believe. It was interesting; there were Very Big Nails involved, and a lot of up-and-down, but very little swearing or getting cross; Quercus and I work pretty well together, and fortunately I don’t seem to drive him quite as demented as his mother does, which is reassuring. I’ve got pictures of various stages of it thus far; the floor supports are in place, and the walls’ studwork, and now two of the zillions of roof trusses are up – the overall impression is of an ark, frankly.

The bark is still on part of the wood because it came free from a local sawmill, so hadn’t been processed because they wanted to get rid of it. We’re going to treat it to help it remain solid against the wet Devon weather, but the wood chaps estimate it should last for twenty years or more even untreated.

That green amorphous blob is the table saw, hiding under a dumpy bag because the weather, despite the blue skies here, has been so unpredictable for the last month or so that you just never know when it’s going to tip it down suddenly… Gives an idea of scale, too – the apex is about eleven feet up.

See what I mean about the ark-like quality? It’s even more this way now that all the roof trusses are in place; more pictures to follow now that I am once more be-camerad.

In other news, pumpkins. Well, specifically, Hooligans. Quercus’s mother has grown a packet of these, and brought down a large bag of the upshot, which is to say, about ten little pumpkins of a most aesthetically pleasing nature. I chopped the lids off, whipped out the seeds and that odd stringy bit in which pumpkins seem to specialise, and in went a rather pleasant combination of cheese, lentils, beans and brown rice.

I’m hoping they keep well; we have another five or so to go, and next time I’m wondering about a nut, mushroom and brown rice thing for the stuffing business…

Stuffed pumpkins
Ingredients
Some pumpkins (!)
An onion or two
A large lump of cheese
About a mugful of lentils
About a mugful of beans, barley, split peas – whatever comes to hand, pulses-wise, really
Quite a lot of garlic
About a mugful of brown rice
Some herbs – I used basil, sage, parsley, thyme and oregano
A slosh of Tabasco
A stockcube
A couple of eggs

Then…
Boil up everything bar the pumpkins, the eggs and the cheese in a large pan, using enough water to mean the end result is a sticky-ish stodge, rather than something needing draining – you want to eat all those herby bits and bats, rather than watching them disappear down the plughole. When you’re sure the pulses aren’t going to poison anyone, remove said pan from the heat and grate in the cheese. When the resulting even-more-sticky mass has cooled a bit, mix in the eggs.

Carve off lids for the pumpkins and take out the seedy bit. I stabbed the sides a few times because, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and dobbed a little bit of butter on the edges here and there before filling the cavity with the cheesy lentil mixture and putting the lid back on. (Because I am greedy of a generous disposition, the lids were more sort of squodged on top than actually replaced, but this, I found, led to an agreeably crunchy collar of cheesy loveliness around the edge of the lid when cooked.) Pop the filled pumpkins on a tray, with a tablespoon or two of water to help the skins cook, and a few little dots of butter on their lids. Cook them at about 180°c for about an hour; they went very nicely with some opportunist baked taters, and some steamed courgettes. Having only encountered pumpkin in either a soup or a pie context prior to this, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it tasted quite strongly, and that its texture was rather like potato; I’d thought the filling would serve largely to disguise something a tad on the unspeakable side.

After this, a nice sit-down and a cup of tea is called for, as is a large slice of tiffin, which became my poor-man’s-Rocky Road yesterday when I realised that I simply wasn’t going to find proper marshmallows, as opposed to the ghastly Flump-style aberrations. So, I took this route:

Tiffin
Wossinit?
100g dark chocolate
2 tbsp honey
100g butter
A large pinch of cinnamon
A drop of Angostura bitters
About half a mug of sultanas
About half a mug of roasted walnuts
100g ginger biscuits, with a few digestives thrown in because I could

So…
Melt the chocolate, honey and butter together; I tend to ignore that whole ‘gently’ malarky and just blast the bastard in the microwave because I have no patience, and so far it’s worked just fine. When you’ve got a gorgeous silky mix of chocolate with which you’d quite like to just retire quietly to the shadows, spoon in hand, resist this temptation, and take out the resulting frustration on those biscuits, damn them. Pop them in a small bag and bash the blighters until they are fine crumbs. (Take that, you… you… biscuit!) Add in the nuts (I think pine nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds or really anything crunchy would work equally well) and the sultanas (which, likewise, you could replace with any sort of dried fruit you fancied, I should imagine), and then pour on the melted chocolate mixture. Mix it all in thoroughly, then turn it out into a 20cm square tin you’ve lined with something like foil or baking paper (which makes for a rather easier turning-out manoeuvre later on) and stick it in the fridge to set. When you want to cut it into pieces (assuming you get that far), whip it out and let it warm up a tad so it doesn’t crack when you cut it, and bingo: chocolatey stickiness of a rather pleasant, deeply un-labour-intensive nature.

So, pictures of woody bits to follow, and also of pumpkins, in theory, at least. Anyone got any other pumpkin recipes worth sharing? I’d love to see my pumpkin prejudices trounced once and for all.

* For once, not the Royal We which means Quercus, but both of us; positioning timber which is that heavy is simply not possible single-handed unless you have better access to your site, and probably quite a few lengths of rope for levering things.

1. On Friday afternoon, the small girl and I made our second batch of cheese biscuits. Once more, she did the washing-up.

2. We also racked wine into clean demijohns, adding sugar and a lemon while we were at it. I’m not sure it’s entirely legal, making wine with the aid of a two-year-old, but it was certainly good fun.

3. I got to sleep until eleven on Saturday morning. SLEEP. Did I mention that raveled sleeve of care malarky? Consider mine knitted, at least temporarily.

4. Quercus’s mother, while deeply irritating in many ways, arrived on Saturday, and brought with her (like the car-journey game) four nearly-completely-prepared casseroles, some dark chocolate buttons, four bottles of red wine of the sort we tend not to buy because we’re broke, a packet of geranium-flavoured giant chocolate buttons and a bag full of wooden bits and bobs for small person amusement purposes. She Is Not All Bad.

5. We have had a cloth-nappy weekend; the small girl, catching sight of a stray which had so far escaped being atticked, said ‘fluffy nappies! I like a wear one of them!’ and there has been no looking back since. So far, no rash; we’re still using disposables at night for fear of tempting not only fate but all sorts of urine-related gods, but it feels extraordinarily nice to hear a small girl saying ‘a blue nappy! wiv stars on it! I show Daddy!’, and to know that not only is this meaning we’re using fewer disposables (and thus emptying the bin far less frequently), but also we’re getting a bit more use from the cloth nappies, which I really loved, and the small girl is more aware of, shall we say, various processes taking place.

6. I took the small girl for a walk in one of the many fields around the Earthenhouse yesterday afternoon. While we were walking down the lane to get there, she said ‘Granny pop out of bed!’. On closer examination, this turns out to be a name for convolvulus; it’s so nice to find she’s picked up things like this. Her vocabulary now includes daffodil, sunflower, oak, beech, ash, root, stump, dandelion, daisy, elderflower, rosehip, acorn, cob nut, conker and field.

7. When I was a small child, I had a rather ugly white painted chair, sized accordingly. Said chair came to us when the aged parent moved north, as part of his cabinet reshuffle, as it were, and has sat in a neglected corner of the ex-dining room (if so small a room can be said to have neglected anythings) ever since. Yesterday, I pounced on it, sanded the blighter to within an inch of its life, paint-stripped the tight corners where I couldn’t get either the sander or sandpaper in, and then waxed it into oblivion. It looks completely different; proper wood colour is rather nicer than chipped white paint, and the seat itself is made of a piece with really nice grain, previously hidden under all that horrid paint. What’s more, said small girl likes it, which is probably the best bit of all.

8. For a long time, I thought ratatouille was a repugnant concoction of things which, unpleasant enough on their own, became truly repulsive in combination. My, how times have changed. Last night marked Ratatouille No. 2, and it was successful enough to mean large quantities being eaten by the small girl, and some being frozen for the hereafter, while Quercus and I were fit to burst.

Ratatouille
Ingredients
A tin of tomatoes or six large fresh ones
An aubergine (large, in this case)
Two or three onions
Two or three courgettes
Some mushrooms
Some herbs
Some Tabasco
Some brown sugar
Some garlic (by which I mean ‘a lot of’)
A good sprinkle of black pepper and some paprika
Slug of olive oil

Then…
Chop the onions reasonably small, and dice the aubergine. Sling them into a large pan with some oil, and give ‘em a good fry until they are nice and soft. Sling in the rest of the ingredients (having diced the mushrooms), poke them about suspiciously with a wooden spoon, pop a lid on and retreat for about twenty minutes or so, leaving the pan simmering reasonably briskly. Swig wine. Realise Some Time Has Passed. Return to find pan gently overflowing condensation on to the hob, causing a rather nice smell. Heap piles of brown rice into a bowl which makes your portion look less greedy, add a few ladelsful of the ratatouille, and grate a spot of sharp cheddar on the top.

9. I have 16,000 words of proofreading to do; for this, I am getting over £200. While the work is tedious, the money – the MONEY! is coming at a very good time, bearing in mind the digger hire we’ve paid for recently.

10. This morning, the chap I car-share with was waiting for me in the lay-by where I pick him up; normally, I wait five minutes or so for him, and that few minutes costs me any chance of a good space. Today, easy.

And you? What’s happy-happy in your life today?

À la manière de Blue Witch, a Friday Question: if you were a shrub, which one would you want to be?

Myself, I quite fancy being a ceanothus. I ask, you understand, because we’re starting to think about things we’d like to grow next year, and at this point I have to remind myself that there are things besides vegetables which would form a rather nice addition to the ol’ botanical kingdom – I love the mock orange, for example, and the pieris, despite my tendency to incline towards rainbow chard and beets. The idea is that perhaps if we think of various plants we’d like, we could pull our fingers out and grow them from seed, rather than buying them as fully-fledged plants.

So, what would you be?

In other news, stuffed courgettes (from the toe-curling cookbook I mentioned in my last post) are very lovely indeed, particularly with the addition of walnuts and potatoes; having friends round for an afternoon of chatting, eating, and fillling each others’ watering cans (if you are under three, that is) is also pretty good.

Less good?

The impending arrival of Quercus’s mother, who has only been gone for two weeks, and who will be with us for another ten-day stint. Not that I don’t appreciate the help, which is lovely and super-useful for Quercus, who is otherwise almost always single-handed on the house work, but still – ! Ten days. I mean… TEN DAYS. It’s quite a while to have anyone stay, particularly when your house is small and they are, well, a little challenging, personally-speaking. I have a plan, though: provide lots of food. And wine. I know – not the world’s most thrilling idea, but still, if an army marches on its stomach, I feel fairly sure that my mother-in-law does likewise.

It could be worse: at the end of this month, I am due to go and see my father, for the first time since he moved north. He’s been in his current house for nearly eighteen months, and I feel on the one hand a bit shifty about not having been before, and on the other, rather ‘well, what did you expect, given that you bought a house five hours’ drive from us, with no spare room, and filled it full of lunaticly annoying people?’. I will attempt to stick to the former attitude, though the latter keeps popping its head above the parapet when I least expect it. He seems relatively happy, or, I should say, as happy as you can be when your younger step-daughter has tried to kill herself in recent memory and is now seeming oddly compliant and happy following months of therapy regarding gender reassignment, while the elder continues to frustrate with attitude and lassitude. Juuuust the ticket if you’re inclined to the Old School Of Parenting, the one which goes something along the lines of ‘Put Up AND Shut Up’.

As you can imagine, I am not completely at ease with the idea of the impending visit. For one thing, there’s a five-hour drive, probably at night to see if the small girl makes a better traveller when it’s dark. And then there’s the old sod’s wife. Who in lots of ways is lovely, but my, she presses my buttons in terms of annoyingness. She advises, you see, when advice isn’t sought, needed or welcome; she just can’t seem to help herself. And she calls me, and always has done, by a shortening of my not-obviously-shortenable first name which is generally reserved for people I actually love, as opposed to people I am stuck in a liftshaft with, metaphorically. And let us not speak of the constant eulogies to which the small girl and I will be subjected: the wife is brilliant, the wife is artistic and SO PRACTICAL, and look at the tiling she has done, and didn’t she design this well, and have you seen the dress she made for herself when she was only eighteen months while dandling fourteen Romanian orphans on the other knee and speaking fluent French? And that’s before you get on to the daughters, who are both, depending on the time of day, musical geniuses destined for great things, incredibly talented artists, thoughtful, caring and helpful, and probably culinary greats too, come to think of it.

I think the worst of it is that I can stick the wife and the step-daughters, but what I find really hard is the person that my father has become since he’s been part of their family. He’s sentimental, fractious and distant most of the time, interspersed with moments of savage resentment and suppressed anger about the various bits of his new life which haven’t gone quite to plan (and there have been, ahem, quite a few). It’s not quite the happy new start that I’d hoped it would be when I decided to just Not Say All Those Things I Thought, when he announced he was getting married, and sometimes I wonder if I did him no favour in being what I hoped was tactful.

Urgh. This has turned into a bit of a rant. Let us draw a veil over it, and return to plants. Plants. Yes. Them. So, courgettes, then:

Stuffed Courgettes
Ingredients
For the courgettes:
Four large courgettes
Several onions
A big chunk of garlic
Some parmesan
Some ricotta
Herbs
A stockcube
Some ground almonds
Some flaked almonds
Some chopped walnuts
A slug of olive oil

Then…
Top and tail the courgettes, cut them in half lengthwise and scoop out the flesh from each half using a spoon. Sling it in a frying pan with some oil, some chopped onion and a few herbs, and give it a few minutes to cook through before adding the rest of the bits and bats. A handful of each of the nutty bits should do it, for those finding this recipe frustratingly vague; it’s vague only because it departs considerably from the original recipe because I couldn’t find half the things in the right quantities in the cupboard, and of course I hadn’t planned in sufficient detail as to have bought the things I’d need in advance. So, you’ve got a cheesey, nutty sauce with onions, garlic and courgette flesh, basically, with some herbs and a bit of stock thrown in for good measure. When it’s all heated through, pop the courgette shells on to a large tray, and heat the oven up to something suitably diabolic – 200°c or so should do it. Fill the shells with the cheesey mix, and drizzle a bit of oil over the top before cooking them for about twenty minutes. Which just leaves you time to make…

The sauce:
A tin of tomatoes, or about six fresh ones
An onion or two
Some garlic
Some herbs
A stockcube
A spoon of brown sugar
Some herbs
A slug of Tabasco
About five small potatoes, chopped into quarters

Then…
Fry the onion and the garlic up together, and then sling everything else in, basically; the taters take a little while to cook through, for that strange ‘there’s something other than water in this pot! I protest in the strongest terms!’ reason. When the courgettes are done, pour the sauce over the top, et voila: scoffalicious.

This last weekend, we realised that it had been some months since we’d had a proper day out which didn’t involve calling into a DIY shop of some sort, or going to visit someone who might be getting rid of indecent quantities of timber, or genearlly ferreting out something to do with building/demolishing/re-rendering some part of our vast empire. So, we determined to rectify this sorry state of affairs forthwith, and buggered off to Cornwall for a proper miniature holiday. You know: like a real holiday, but, er, shorter. And without accommodation. Or, in fact, being away for more than, um, a day. But still – a change is as good as a whatsit, and all that, and a change we did indeed manage.

The morning we spent getting lost finding our way to Pencarrow, a large stately house between Bodmin and Camelford, while the rain attempted to move from spitting to tipping. We realised about an hour’s drive from home that we’d come out armed to the teeth with a full change of clothes for the small girl, food, drinks, a flask, a nappy-changing bag and even a spare pair of shoes and jeans for me, but we’d completely forgotten coats for ourselves; fortunately, Camelford smiled on us, and a charity shop provided a fleece for Quercus while a hardware shop had a surprising range of lightweight rainproof jackets. We managed a picnic – despite having forgotten mayonnaise or butter for our otherwise bare bread – under overcast skies and walnut trees laden with green bombs, and the Pencarrow peacocks are as lovely as I remember them being when I went there as a child.

From Pencarrow we went to Boscastle, for a walk on the cliffs, around the valley, and through the village itself, for most of which the small girl slept in the sling on my back, waking just in time for tea and scones at a riverside eatery. Her initiation into the greatest of British traditions, fish and chips, took place later in the evening, at long past small-person bedtime o’clock; one of my enduring memories of this time will be of us sitting on the giant breakwater on the beach at Westward Ho (!), passing chips and morsels of fish to a small girl wrapped tightly in her father’s fleece, while she grinned at the wind in her hair and commented on seagulls approaching.

It’s astonishing the difference that one day off can make. We’ve all felt a bit like new people since Saturday, and we’ve all been much happier for it. There’s always something we should be doing, or somewhere we should be tidying, or something that could do with a wash/change/paint/sand/drill, and it’s not that everyday life hasn’t got lots of carrotty lovelinesses of its own, of course, but rather that sometimes, in order to appreciate them, it helps to be able to view them from a distance, I find; the carrots of proper daytrips are thus many and varied, in that you have a good day out, which is a carrot in its own right, but then you have the side-effect carrot of recognising your daily life carrots too. Gosh. What a lot of carrots.

We have determined to make these days off, these steppings-out from our daily lives, a more frequent happening, if only to give us time and space to remember how good our life together is, and how lucky we are to live as we do, in a place we love (even if it does drive us demented sometimes), with people who make us happy (and, er, demented).

So, talking of carrots, which we weren’t, really… I’ve been at the 52 Recipes malarky again, with the following:

Saffron-braised carrots with broad bean pilaf

Ingredients
For the carrots:
About eight large carrots, chopped as you fancy
A large pinch of saffron
A mug of veggie stock
A large onion, peeled and chopped
A generous sprinkling of cumin, coriander, parsley and thyme
A rather more timid sprinkling of Tabasco
Giant wodges of chopped garlic, so indecent in quantity as to make numbers futile
A slug of olive/sunflower oil

Then…
Basically, sling the lot in a pan, bring to the boil, and simmer for about twenty minutes or so, lid on in an attempt not to curry the entire house. (Or, you know, curry away: I myself quite like the smell of tandoori pillows at bedtime.) (I think some chard or spinach would add to this rather well, and possibly some potatoes too.  Otherwise it is rather… carrotty.)

For the pilaf:
A mug of broad beans
A large mug of brown rice
2 red onions, chopped
A handful of sultanas
A handful of pinenuts
A handful of chopped unsulphured apricots
A sprinkling of cumin

Then…
Boil the broad beans briskly for about five to ten minutes, drain, and park somewhere.  Sling rice, onions and cumin in a pan and add boiling water to cover the rice; bring back to the boil on the hob, put a lid on and switch off the power, and the residual heat should do the rest. Sling the rest of the ingredients – including the beans, because who would forget the beans? The beans which are part of the title? Not me – oh no – in for the last ten minutes or so before you eat, and there you go. The carrotty bit over the top of the rice goes really well, though Quercus tells me it’s lacking something. By which he means SAUSAGES.

(I’m spending a week cooking dinner from Cranks Fast Food by Nadine Abensur, because I’ve had the book for about eight years, and have only done the stuffed courgette recipe so far, because I find the writing style so off-putting, and, frankly, so deeply pretentious as to be quite toe-curling. Then there’s the fact taht every recipe in it seems to revolve around cumin, tabasco, tamari and something else that a delicatessen in Kensington might be able to order for you, but which your average supermarket probably hasn’t heard of. So, I thought I’d give it a bit of a blitz, to see if it’s worthy of its shelf room. So far, I like the recipes well enough, though I find myself changing ingredients here and there, and ignoring half of the method; the jury’s still out on its long-term residence here, though.

On the menu this week: stuffed courgettes; green beans, tomatoes and garlic; Boston baked beans; herby gnocchi (with a radically different sauce from the recipe one); something to do with pasta and, probably tabasco and cumin. Wish me luck… )

(Image courtesy of The Salty Spoon, because I have that very casserole dish, and because my camera, now six, is in the process of dying a slow and painful death; anyone got any recommendations for cameras which don’t break the bank?)

In between the bouts of navel-gazing which I do so, er, well, the small girl and I have also been baking. At the moment, the small girl’s favourite activities are mostly house-related – she cooks, bakes, cleans, and does the washing-up. If I had known that one could expect a reasonable return, in housework terms, on the investment in small people before the age of three, I’d've had a brace of them years ago.  Anyway, obviously this cooking-baking-cleaning is to be encouraged, not least because it means we do lots of things together that I really enjoy doing (though the cleaning… not so much), and on Sunday we managed to make our first batch of genuinely joint-effort cheese biscuits.  Viz.:

First we create the bedlam. Note presence of Nutkin, inveterate chef extraordinaire.

Then we spend at least half an hour washing it all up, many, many times.*

Then we sit back and marvel at what we’ve made. Not least as our child-friendly biscuit cutter set includes a star, a moon, a flower, a heart, and A PIG. The mind boggles.

Then we flog our wares to an unsuspecting Quercus.

The recipe we used was from Hugh Fernley Whittingstall‘s The River Cottage Family Cookbook, and was very successful, though we added A LOT more flour than the recipe indicated before the dough was vaguely workable.  The best bit, mind you, was getting to use the most excellent rolling pin set that LQS bought us the small girl, from the Early Learning Centre. They are all sorts of fabulous, and far nicer colours than on the ELC site. My favourite is the one with spots, which leaves a sort of crater-like set of circles and spots on the dough, making the moon-shaped biscuits we cut out very entertaining.

The original recipe has these as cheese straws, but we liked shapes better. It ended up  as something like this:

Cheesy Biscuits
Ingredients
150g grated cheese (we used strong cheddar, and ignored the ‘finely’ indication on the grating instructions)
100g butter (we used a soya replacement)
About 150 – 200g plain flour (the recipe thinks 100g, but that was just a sticky unrollable mess for us, perhaps because of the soya margarine)
A goodly sprinkle of chilli powder
The yolk of an egg (and very nearly the white, and the shell, in our case)

Then…
Bung it all in a reasonably large bowl and mangle it about the place until it forms itself into a nice ball of cheesey loveliness. Cover the entire universe in flour, then roll out the dough to, well, anywhere between half an inch thick and about three milimetres (why yes, I do think in feet and centimetres – how did you know?) before bashing the ol’ cutters through it as if there’s no tomorrow. Pop them on some trays, and stick in the oven at about 200°c for about ten minutes or so; HFW reckons twenty degrees higher, but our version looked like burning on the edges at that temperature, so we took the coward’s way out, rather than keeping our eagle eyes on them, and just turned the heat down. They lasted all of twenty-four hours, and I’m only surprised they were around that long, frankly, given our cheese-hoovering natures, as a family.

We also gave a vegan recipe a run for the first time over the weekend. I say ‘for the first time’, which is not to say that we’ve never eaten vegan food before, but that this is the first time I’ve used a recipe which was avowedly such, and the conclusion I drew was that, rather like my experiences with Cranks recipes, it was brilliant not least because the vegan bit was incidental to its general stuffaliciousness. It was this macaroni cheese, and yes, most of the reviewers are right about it.  I’m not writing the recipe out in full only because we didn’t really change anything, other than to approach measurements of ingredients with a blithe spirit which scorns the use of such mortal concepts as scales; I probably used twice the quantity of vegetables for the sauce, and I added a stockcube to the water in which they cooked. Definitely going into the repertoire, though, that one.

And before I forget, please to be noting of the tileage which is encroaching on the background of the picture. in which the small girl is washing up, above.  I started tiling this weekend, having had the tiles sitting in our bedroom (as you do) since, oh, the dark ages; so far, I’ve managed three rows, about halfway along the big wall behind the counters, but I have lots of sticky bits still to go, including tiling around the sink and – I shudder to think of it – the tap. But they’re ridiculously gorgeous colours, them there tiles, and I’m pretty pleased with the way they’ll look eventually. Plus, I can disguise any ineptitude in my tiling with the phrase ‘handmade’ and ‘artisan’, given that the tiles vary in size by as much as half a centimetre, and haven’t got a straight edge between them. Ahem.

Gosh. It’s Monday. Again. How did that happen, when we have most definitely not just had a weekend?

Oh. Hang on. Just a minute.

Right you are.

So. There was a weekend; it just doesn’t feel as if there was. That would be because we all got up at something starting with a six on both Saturday and Sunday, and because Quercus has been pulling twelve-hour days working on landscaping the garden, aided by his – apparently indefatigable – mother, and because having people who are Not Us staying with us for ten days takes a toll, even if they are the loveliest souls you could imagine, and because teething is just plain horrid, and because sticky hot weather which is obviously in need of a damn good thunder storm is, well, sticky and hot.

Yes.

The division of labour referred to in the title has been giving me pause for thought recently. When Quercus and I bought our first house (well, OK, technically he bought it, and I did a PhD), we divided the work on it pretty equally. We both had a go at plastering, and at stripping walls, and at painting, and putting up shelves, and building desks, and replacing woodwork, and sorting out gardens, and marvelling at the utter tripe that passes for decorating in some houses. We both got covered in dust, and lost bits of fingernail while opening tins or ferreting about under floorboards. We both replaced sections of walls while remarking the bouncy nature of surrounding structures didn’t bode well, and we both organised quotes for things that required Teeth* larger than those we possessed at the time. (Those Teeth have now been taken out, and replaced with a giant set of chomping nashers which are unafraid of, well, virtually anything, in house terms, given that we’ve lived with acros propping up the external walls of the house, with no running water, with walls turning to dust or mud depending on the nature of the neglect they’d suffered.)

But since we’ve had the small girl, that division has changed. Firstly, while I was pregnant, we were cooking up not just a small girl, but also the plans for the extension with which we would replace the single-skin-brick ‘kitchen’ and ‘bathroom’ (I use these terms very loosely in this context…) which were here when we moved to the Earthenhouse. I was also finishing my PhD, and I can honestly say that, having thought all those claims regarding ‘pregnancy brain’ were just ridiculous females making excuses for their general state of dizziness, I WAS WRONG – I have never felt fuzzier in my life than I did when pregnant, and there came a point where it was all I could do to waddle through the work I need to get done on my thesis. The very thought of discussing extensions, planning applications and whatnot brought on palpitations, or, more often, a comatose state.

The old extension. Note buggered roof and frost on inside.

Because nothing says rural living like mouldy walls and fabric-like ceilings, right?

Why yes, since you ask: a tarp is absolutely an acceptable wall material.

Beginning to move into the new extension.

Note fairy lights, for where there are little lights, all is right with the world.

Men’s and Wimmin’s Work collides: bench saw and fermentation.

Just before this push on the garden.

Of course, we did talk about these things, because they were important, and needed decisions and whatnot, but I suppose that’s when the shift started.

And now, it’s largely Quercus who bears the brunt of the vast scale of the work our house needs to make it truly the home we want. (For now.) I have helped with things like lime rendering, and with dumper truck-driving, and with limewashing, and bathroom tiling, and various odds and sods like painting and sanding, but mostly, it’s been Quercus who’s out there slogging at it for horrible lengths of time, and it’s Quercus whose hands hurt from overuse of an SDS drill, or of a mixer, or of a breaker of some sort, and it’s Quercus who dropped the mixer on his leg yesterday because he’d been working too hard for too long, and I feel incredibly shifty.

Well, that’s the short version.

I spent the weekend with the small girl, doing things like sorting out the laundry, or making food, or attempting to cheer said girl up in the face of (we assume) molar machinations which rendered her mood less than upbeat. We made some felt balls on Saturday, and a sort of Anglo-Saxon felted crown on Sunday (all thanks to the very lovely Claire at Whispering Acres, who sent us a gorgeous assortment of goodies, including Kool-Aid, roving of all colours and textures, and even a book, about a month ago, and which we’re only just getting to grips with now). We made some bread (the quick recipe involving no kneading remains a favourite – seriously, ten minutes of actual input – all told – and just some time for it to rise and cook, and you’re done). We tried out a vegan version of Macaroni Cheese (which was lovely, and will definitely be added to the repertoire). We provided ice lollies when the heat was too much for the physical work needed on levelling the garden (which, at about four feet higher than the lane it abuts, was in dire need of some shoring-up if we were to avoid a not-that-small-given-the-size-of-the-lane mud-slide, and let’s not even get started on how much earth has been moved about the place in recent weeks).

The rational part of me knows that all these things need to happen, and that it makes sense that I am the person who makes them happen, because, well, first, Quercus is stronger than me, and fitter than me, and second, his mum actually chooses to do these things rather than looking after the small girl; I think that, while she loves her very clearly, she does find it tiring looking after her for five mornings a week, which is what she has been doing while we’re in this push of work on the house. So, when it gets to the weekend, she is quite glad to hand her back to me, and just help Quercus with things which most grandparents wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole – last night, for example, they were mixing up concrete at half-past eight, while I finished cooking dinner and sorting out the chaotic kitchen). At least some of my shiftiness is prompted by the sight of a sixty-something woman digging giant heaps of rubble out. It makes me feel like the very laziest of women to be floating about the place with the small girl, while everyone else seems to be doing Proper Work. It’s stupid, really, because, again, the rational part of me recognises and affirms the fact that looking after small people is a tremendous job, with huge responsibility and the potential to create either vast spaces of joy and fulfilledness or overwhelming depths of misery and discord, yet still there is this not-so-little voice telling me that I’m a shirker.

It doesn’t help, of course, that poor Quercus was up this morning at five, and was working with the digger by a quarter-past. Nor does it help that his hands are very achey at the moment, and he’s quite battered with various things which he’s hit or whacked or scratched or burnt in the couple of years, while I sit here proffering lotions and potions which only serve to make me more aware of the stark divide in our general daily tasks. I suppose it comes back to the familiar story: things traditionally viewed as Wimmin’s Work are not, by and large, valued as Work which will bear close comparison with Men’s Work. I am woman: hear me iron. Er…

I find that split deeply toe-curling, though. Quercus and I have always tended towards a reasonably ‘traditional’ (for want of a less loaded term) division, large-scale house renovation aside, in that I have always loved cooking, baking and generally attempting to create a feeling of home, while he genuinely enjoys such delights as chopping wood and digging potatoes. And I very much dislike the idea of a feminism which views these traditionally gendered activies – baking, making – as unworthy of card-holding feminists; rather, I embrace the recent trend in trying to change the way such activities are viewed, to reincorporate them into the overall picture of What It Is To Be Human, Never Mind Female, to show that such work is just as important as any other. I’m just having a hard time remembering to believe what I claim to know. Ya boo sucks to Traditional Gender Identities. Or something.

*Anyone who reads Blue Witch may be familiar with her Big Teeth; let’s hope that familiarity remains at a ‘by reputation only’ level – !

D’you know, I almost think I like Fridays better than either Sundays or Saturdays. Everything is still to come, and there is that vast vista of time, stretching out before you in a most appealing and luxurious manner. Friday feels virtuous in that I can make the extra effort, do that little bit more, in the certainty that tomorrow will be more relaxed, and a little bit more life-as-it-happens-orientated. We’re very lucky in the Earthenhouse: we still work part-time, the pair of us, so that we can spend lots of time with the small girl, and thus our mornings and afternoons move at a more relaxed and self-determined pace than can be found in many households, but still, of course, the pattern of work is ever-present, and means that one of the three of us must be in a certain place at a certain time. Not so on Saturday and Sunday, though, and that feeling of tiiiiiiiiime is a very lovely thing to behold.

This weekend, we have hired a three-tonne mini-digger and a dumper truck. With these, we are doing some fairly major work on our garden. This week, Quercus has taken down three corrugated iron sheds which dominated one side of the garden, breaking up the concrete bases as he went, as well as moving about three hundred bricks which we’re going to reuse from the old extension, and rediscovering the slabs which used to make up the old patio (and which we’re reusing this time around, but with a smaller patio so that we can also have paths made of decent slabs). So much stuff has gone to the metals merchant, too – an old bath, the old sheds, various bits of leftover pipe and even some bits we found kicking about in the earth.

The garden, while still chaotic, is at least clear of the various things which have just been sort of stored there for the last couple of years, which is nice, and we are just about to spend a couple of days shoving earth about the place to level out some of strangeness in the garden, as well as preparing for the wooden shed which Quercus will build to house all the tools and whatnot which we’ve acquired in the last few years. This shed will be smaller and prettier, and built, nearly exclusively, from reclaimed timber, a lot of which we salvaged from a house development in Exeter. It’s deeply smug-making to get things which people are throwing away and give them new life, to say nothing of the financial bonus of not having to shell out several hundred pounds on timber.

And you? Any plans for the weekend?

I can’t decide whether it’s just nostalgia or if I’m in danger of veering into rather morbid territory, but for some reason, ever since the immediate monumental crappitude of my mother dying had passed, I have found myself playing a small mental game about the ways in which my life, and the person I appear to be, would be recognisable to her.

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.

It’s been ages since I’ve had a working laptop, a spare half-hour, an internet connection, and the will to do something more active than staring at my navel for some time, but finally, that moment has arrived.

So, here is a quick round-up of the things we’ve been doing lately, which includes, of course, the small girl’s second birthday (June 1). I can’t believe my girl is two – it seems as if she has been a part – a defining characteristic – of my life always, yet at the same time, it’s but a blink of the eye since I was marvelling at the feel of her moving about inside me, watching the odd outline of, well, who knew what appearing against the side of my ever-expanding belly as she made herself that bit more comfortable.

We spent the week preceding her birthday at Quercus’s mother’s house, where the small girl enjoyed herself chasing about in a remarkably tidy garden while I sat beneath a copper beech tree and sewed things, including a dress (below) for the small girl made from dyed fabric we bought for table coverings at our wedding dance (I still have nearly a bolt of that fabric left) and various (slightly abortive) dresses for the doll I was making her for her birthday. (Ye gods, who knew that making dolls’ clothes would turn out to be such a dark art? I thought I was on the home strait when I managed to stitch on the doll’s head without putting it on back to front or something; let us not speak of the giant backside I created when I inadvertently over-stuffed the body section without realising that actually, all that spare fabric wasn’t spare, but was supposed to be the whole of the torso, not just the legs… Um…)

We arrived back in Devon, armed with a grandma who was going to help with both small person amusement and various delightful building-project-related tasks, to find that our absence had given Quercus the time to undercoat all the external woodwork, dig large trenches for drains to go around the outside of the house (we’re using this perforated pipe stuff which is supposed to take moisture away from the base of the cob walls; given that cob is just earth and straw, really, we don’t want to be adding too much water, as living in an earthen house is one thing, but no-one wants to live in a mud pie), fit guttering and downpipes to the extension, clean up the roof with a pressure washer (the lime got everywhere when we were rendering), re-hang the front door, sand it back to its original wooden state, fashion a small oak bed from the off-cuts left after building the kitchen cupboards for the small girl’s new doll AND clean the house virtually top to bottom. Many, many bonus points were awarded, needless to say.

Her birthday itself was wet, unfortunately, but we managed a nice little walk aboot, and there was much cake-eating (apple and vanilla, with lemon icing and two rather natty candles with little stars on them), present-opening and wrapping-paper-flinging. She is still getting used to having new things to play with; we tend to find that things are often put to one side for several weeks while one possession occupies pole position, and then later a regime shift takes place. Bluebell, the doll being tucked into Quercus’s oak bed here, has just come into her own after I caved and bought some gorgeous dolls’ clothes from the Bishopston Trading Company in Totnes (where I spent a very happy day ambling about with L-Q-S and her River Man, over from Ireland for a brief tour of various parts of England, including an as-usual lovely lunch in Willow, probably my favourite eatery ever); the clothes are exactly the right size, and are just as lovely as the full-size clothes the BTC churns out. Mostly, though, I am stupidly grateful that, for once, I bought something, and it just worked, and it didn’t need adjusting, replacing, returning or otherwise translating AT ALL. (Even if I have got just a slight hint of maternal guilt at not producing these things myself, all the while dandling the babe on one hip, weaving a few lentils into my own reusable sanitary towels and whistling the odd bar of all four parts of a Stravinsky string quartet).

Apart from this, the house is now once more a golden colour all over – part of the latest wave of Sorting Things Out included fixing the render caught by the hard frosts last January, and adding a coat of limewash. That coat needs to be wrapped in several more coats, and quite possibly hats, scarves, mittens and muffs, of limewash before we’ll be happy that it’s as weather-proof as it’s ever going to be, but hey, at least it’s a step in the right direction. The tricky thing is that we need dryish weather for limewashing, but not of the baking hot August-like variety we’re experiencing at the moment. It was twenty-five degrees this morning by ten o’clock. I mean, that seems a tad on the hardcore side to me, but then it’s well-known that I’d probably be happier living somewhere where ice proved a viable building product. (Blame it on having fair skin; it’s hard to get enthusiastic about weather which requires either the donning of something nice and sun-proof, like, say, A WARDROBE, or the frequent and lavish application of substances which greatly resemble axle grease. Oh, fair skin – why? WHY, I ask? English Rose? My arse. My family has Swedish roots, but that hasn’t helped my sodding skin tone, any more than my father’s black hair and olive skin did. Weedy little genes he must have, that’s all I can say.)

So. There you go. And you?

Yes, this does represent a pathetic and probably doomed attempt to catch up to my target in 52 Recipes in 2010 terms; somehow, a breaking laptop appears to have knocked me off kilter blog-wise, and it’s taking me a while to get back on the horse, not least because I now feel I have such a backlog of things – really important things, like the small girl’s BIRTHDAY and the progress we’ve been making on Earthenhouse (which is significant and immensely cheering, since you ask) – that I don’t quite know where to begin; as I’m not posting from my laptop, though, I haven’t got access to photos, and, really, what’s a birthday post without pictures? Hence, this post, as an ice-breaker.

Ahem.

Perhaps it’s a response to a week spent at my mother-in-law’s house, where salad = lettuce, tomato and cucumber, sliced, and plonked on a plate with a jar of mayonnaise handily to one side, but this last couple of weeks has seen us jumping on the salad bandwagon in a hitherto unknown manner. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that we don’t eat salad, it’s just that Quercus and I tend to prefer our salad with pretensions, and eating lots of plain lettuce went some way to reminding me just why that is: without dressing or bits and bobs to encourage me, lettuce and I suffer from a mutual lack of interest. So, instead, here are some of the things we’ve been noshing our way through lately.

Lentilmus
Ingredients
A large mug of lentils, red, green or puy, boiled until they won’t kill you, with
A stock cube of some variety (unknown, in this case, as all the bloody wrappers look the same)
Probably six cloves of garlic, chopped
A handful of herbs
About 3 tbsp olive/sunflower oil
About 2 tbsp mayonnaise
About 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
A good sprunkle* of black pepper

Then…
Boil up the lentils, herbs, garlic and stockcube until the lentils are soft but not mushy. Drain them and leave them in a colander to cool off a bit, before chucking the other things in, mixing well, and bingo! A lentil-orientated version of hummus.

Pasta Stars
Ingredients
As much cooked and cooled pasta as you fancy (we had some tiny stars bought yonks ago in a French supermarket)
Chopped tomatoes
Chopped basil
Grated courgette

Dressing:
2 tbsp natural yoghurt
1 tbsp mayonnaise
2 tbsp sunflower/olive oil
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
Good sprunkle of black pepper
Squirt of tomato purée
Splosh of water

Then…
Sling dressing ingredients in a small box or bottle and shake maniacally until you realise that a spoon may be called for. Stir, resentfully. Resume shaking. Give in, resign self to small yoghurty bits and pour over pasta, tomatoes and courgettes, kidding self that pepper disguises all errors.

Coronation, er, Salad
Ingredients
About half a mug of leftover pilau rice
Chopped onion, tomato, apricots, cucumber etc.
Oh, and pinenuts
A daring tablespoon of mild curry powder
2 less darings of yoghurt
A slug of olive/sunflower oil

Then…
Mix it all up into a large sticky mess, wonder what on earth you’re doing, realise it actually tastes delicious despite visual misgivings, and scoff the lot.

Other current salady infatuations include adding grated apple to everything, and ditto sultanas, chopped unsulphured apricots and sunflower seeds. And you? What’re you stuffing down gleefully as the salad season gets under way?

*Sprunkle, n: An inflation-linked sprinkle. Origin: colloq., Devon. (Ahem the second.)

Number of new MacBooks gracing our kitchen table: 1

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?

Laptop broken! Insanity setting in! Fear for future of self and family but getting blighter looked at on Friday so keep things crossable crossed please. Not least as replacement is something like £700.

Soon to come, internets and laptop permitting:

Birthdays, and smugness thereof courtesy of handmade presents and the rather excellent reception said goods were accorded;

Cooking, the doing much thereof, with recipes to boot;

Dolls, the concocting thereof;

Cob houses, and the large trenches appearing around them (or, er, it, specifically, it being our cob house in question).

And you?