This last weekend, Quercus’s mother came back to visit, and, many hands making if not light, then lighter-than-it-would-have-been-otherwise work, we succeeded in dragging ourselves back from oblivion and into some semblance of order, for which read: we rotovated about a quarter of our garden.

Now, that probably sounds like fuck-all, but when you think that said chunk of ex-verdant botanical delight was actually:

- largely covered in lime render;

- wood pile (by which I mean about four tonnes of large logs, waiting to be chainsawn [chainsawn? chainsawed?]);

- home to three bins, two dumpy bags (previously filled with sand, a goodly portion of which had made its way all over the grass, completely obliterating any resemblance to plant life of any sort), a host of assorted pieces of timber, some dead-or-dying potted plants which had also been rendered, mostly, and an old cement mixer;

- also home to Jerusalem artichokes, which are so incredibly hardy as to have grown through three feet of solid Devon clay around the other side of the house; this side, they were just large sticky-stalky bits, having been ignored for over a year, but there was a nice deep pit there too, where we’d bothered to rootle some of the artichokes out at some point;

- full of stacks of old tyres, in which we grew (well, planted and ignored) potatoes, beans, herbs and chard last summer…

… you’ll perhaps see that this was quite a clean-up. I can’t believe how nice it looks out there – it’s just bare soil for now, but we’ve put down a mixture of clover, camomile and straight grass seed, and hopefully a month or so of leaving it to its own devices (provided we get some rain reasonably shortly) should make for a nice place to lounge around in uncharacteristically civilised fashion later in the year. I am debating doing some planting with the small girl – we have seeds kicking about for tomatoes, rainbow chard (which I love love love for its colours, and for the ongoing nature of its production, and for its hardiness in warding of the rampaging snail population, the vast majority of which seems to live in our garden) and possibly some flowers of some sort (though equally I’d like to do amaranths again); part of me thinks we should just focus on getting the house sorted (we have ambitious plans for the rest of this year… for a change), but part of me knows that in order to remain sane, I seem to need to reaffirm my connection to the physical world of creation. Wow. Sorry about that; a phrase that wanky doesn’t normally succeed in passing the bullshit warning lights which inhabit my brain, but that one snuck under the radar somehow, probably by shouting about knitting and waving a ball of wool at my brain as a distraction technique.

Ahem.

Anyway, wanky or not, I do find that I am at my happiest when I’m achieving things; getting this swathe of garden sorted out felt like a very positive thing indeed, and not least because in order to get the lawn area roughly level, we broke open both of the plastic compost bins which live in the chickens’ area. Having grown up with parents whose approach to gardening was a cyclical crash-and-burn experience (in which the hedge got to twelve feet and Dad started to feel that perhaps the time had come to get out a large pair of scissors), I still find it miraculous that you put all those peelings and hen-cleanings-out and odd bits of card and whatnot in a large plastic box and then some time passes, and then? THEN YOU GET COMPOST OUT OF IT! It’s witchcraft, I tell you. And our bins are both empty now, so the witchcraft begins once more.

So. Tyres of veg, of flowers, of bits and bats, and possibly tomatoes in the greenhouse (if I can be bothered to get in there and clean it up; it’s a right state, having been neglected for over a year, and we’ve been letting the chooks in there for the last few days to begin to get a grip on the creepy-crawly population…). Anything else that small children might particularly appreciate growing, chaps?

It’s a funny thing, really, that getting up ten minutes earlier should make for a better morning when mostly, what I’d like to do is sleeeeeeep. Still, though, that’s what I’ve discovered since going back to work after nearly a month – ten minutes makes for a much more peaceable morning. Time to have a cup of tea before pushing off to work, even.*

This morning in particular I found myself pondering about the many aspects of my life in which I am more than normally fortunate. Last night, the small girl slept through the night; anyone following my recent ‘woe is me!’ posts about sleep, the lack thereof, will know what this means. So, that was the first lucky bit.

The second good bit was that, had the small girl woken in the night, Quercus would have gone into her, settled her back down again, and staggered back to bed; he is a very lovely man indeed, and I am constantly delighted by how lovely he is with the aforementioned small girl. The third smug-making thing was that our morning started, as do most mornings, with me going into the small girl’s room, extracting her, warm and stretching, from her bed and returning to our big bed for a drowsy feed, which normally finishes when she breaks off and demands ’round and round!’, the cue for tickling and general baby tormenting to begin. (Though I should add that this session is probably responsible for her new bathtime behaviour – the nerve! The nerve of it! – which consists of chasing me around the bathroom shrieking ‘tickle! tickle!’ while attempting to catch MY TOES. Now that, THAT was not in the plan – !)

Fourth good thing: when I left for work, the small girl was far more interested in the idea of Quercus reading her Julia Donaldson’s excellent Tiddler than she was of me departing. Fifth thing the lucky: I get to leave work at 12.30 because our working arrangements allow us to share looking after the small girl at home, rather than using a nursery. (I do think lots of people could do this, but just don’t think of it, that said; I have colleagues earning far more than we do who express amazement at how much my husband must earn in order for this to work. Not so, my friend, not so.) Sixth thing: walking into my building at work, I could see right across Exeter, with the cathedral tower rising against a crisp and slighty misty morning, and the pale lines of Dartmoor in the background. Seventh thing: fresh coffee with crushed cardamom – gingerbread in a mug, I tell you.

And you? What’s good where you are?

* I used not to be a morning person AT ALL, but somehow these days, I really enjoy being up before everyone else. I think this process started when Quercus’s job meant that he was leaving for work at 6.30 or so; that’s probably seven years ago now, but it introduced me to the quiet of the day, when I used to sit at the kitchen table working on my MA coursework while watching the city wake up through an indecently large Georgian sash window.  Now, I look out of small-paned windows which we chose ourselves, and which are fitted into the walls of a building which Quercus built; the surroundings have changed so much, but the quiet calm of those first few moments have not.

THANK GOD THERE IS NOTHING ACADEMIC HAPPENING, THOUGH. There. I said it.

You know you’ve crossed a few lines when you find your garden full of an unholy mixture of pallets, static caravans and knackered old cars with only one lock working. (Let us not speak of the repair bills we’ve forked out this year on Quercus’s sensible car, the car which replaced the avowedly not sensible Citröen CX, which cost a fraction of what this bastard replacement has needed; it is all the fault of said “reliable” replacement that we have had, in the last few months, variously, a multi-coloured Ford Mondeo, a Peugeot 405, a people-carrier thing, and several other semi-buggered courtesy cars from the garage up the road.)

But when you then find yourself contemplating – seriously, I might add – the purchase of a van, you know you’re in trouble.

Yes folks: it looks like we’re going to sell the bollocking car and replace it with a van, size, description and specification thereof yet to be decided. I suppose it’s merely a part of accepting that generally, cars were not designed to haul tonnes of rubble about the place, and, in an ideal world, their lives don’t include queries about just how much timber you can get in the front, or whether the axle can take a concrete lintel without complaining.

We are pikies. It’s simple.

Some day, I really must rediscover the concept of a garden.

When my GP told me I could two and a half weeks off work because I was blatantly ill and exhausted, I felt like I’d been given the best present in the world: time. Time is what I always seem short of, these days – time to sleep, time to catch up on avoiding midden-esque status house-wise, time to give the small girl the sort of childhood I so want her to have (insert sickening images of wheat fields and kites, conkers and bonfires etc.) time to give Quercus the chance to finish work on various bits of renovation or construction, time to let him sleep, time to be awake and active and fun for the small girl, time to make dinner, to try to remember that if I look hard, I have still got a creative bone in my body. Time, in short, to do anything except wish I had more time.

Yet here I am, on the other side, and I feel as if I’m back at square one.

Of course, it’s all too predictable – I set myself sort of targets, when given any chunk of time; things which I will get done in that time, states of mind to which I will move in that time, levels of cleanliness or completion which will be achieved in that time. And then, if I don’t manage all of those states, I feel a bit rubbish about it, if I’m honest, which is about where I am now. I ended up having not two but three weeks off, which, added to the leave I’d already booked from work, means I’ve had about a month of freer time than normal. The things I really wanted to do were to see if Quercus going into the small girl at night would rejig our blatantly-not-working-yet-we-keep-doing-it-because-we-can’t-think-of-anything-else approach to her night-time wakings; we managed about a week of this (and it did seem to be helping; she goes back to sleep much more easily for him, and doesn’t expect feeds, of course, from the paternal bosom in the way which she – naturally enough – does from the maternal alternative) before she caught something horrible at a toddler group, and I simply hadn’t the heart to leave her to her daddy’s tender mercies (no matter how tender they truly are), when I knew that a feed and a cuddle from her mama would sort her out much more rapidly in this instance. So, cue a return to the original pattern – up a couple of times each night, much wailing if feeds were not offered, much knackeredness during the day on my part.

Then of course I caught the infection thing too – cue third course of antibiotics this year (and yes, I know they’re not very good for you, but I can’t see I have much choice, given that my immune system seems to be immune to nothing except a hard day’s work).

So, I went to Quercus’s mother, to escape the situation with the kitchen here (no work surfaces, constant dust and noise while Quercus worked his arse off to get the rest of the cupboards finished and fitted, over a very long period if working child-friendly hours) and to give him a decent working day which didn’t have to stop at five-thirty for the small girl’s tea and bedtime wind-down. And then the small girl had a bad bout of teething, and we got even less sleep, together with the normal frustrations of being away from home, under the weather, crabby and surrounded by constant – if well-meant and caring – twittering (and I mean that in its original sense).

So, here I am today. The kitchen is all but finished, which is a very good thing, but I am struggling once more with the constant sleep deprivation. The small girl is getting over whatever it is that she’s been fighting off, but is still a bit pathetic, and the normal activities I’d go for when she’s a bit listless but doesn’t really want to go out aren’t really on the cards because the worktops are covered in tung oil and thus not fit for small bottoms to sit on while baking is undertaken.

Part of me knows it’s rubbish to assess myself by standards of What I Have Done With This Time. I have read Naomi Stadlen’s excellent What Mothers Do, and I believe it wholeheartedly. Wholeheartedly. Except when applying it to myself, it appears. I so, so, so hoped that this time would just let me feel caught up. That the small girl would just sleep through the night on her own, without needing a parental nudge in that direction. That I would spend mornings in happy child-related chaos, and afternoons quietly knitting while the babe snoozed upstairs. This appears to be the day of mourning for the Month That Never Was.

The plus side:

The kitchen is so nearly done. There are cupboards, and I am putting things in them. The attic is half-empty as a result, as are the sheds.

I finished the small girl’s cardigan, and have started a second.

I bought lots of lovely beads and buttons at a shop in West Sussex while staying with Quercus’s mother; these are both playthings for the small girl, and objectively justifiable as crafty bits for me, which gets them extra points.

The not-quite-so-plus:

I’m still knackered, and I’m unutterably sad about it. I feel that this constant tiredness casts a shadow over what is in many ways the best (if hardest-work-requiring) time of my life. And I just don’t know what to do about it.

Tomorrow I go back to work. I’m dreading it, not because I loathe my job, but because, after a month of absence, people will probably ask how I’m doing, and, mostly if people ask that sort of thing, I cry, at the moment. I don’t want to do that. I also don’t feel ready to go back to that sense of treadmill which dominates the week when I’m too tired to be doing the things I have to do; it doesn’t take much for things to feel fine, but likewise, a few bad nights and I’m struggling.

I’m hoping that I just need to get a grip, and that, once the kitchen is genuinely finished, things will seem brighter. There is a list of things I need to do – tax-related stuff because of self-employed work, some copy-editing, booking the cats’ vaccinations – which is genuinely so daunting at the moment that I am employing tactics I developed during particularly  black patches on the PhD, evasion ploys which allow me to push unwanted information to one side, pigheadedly ignoring it until my mind thinks it might cope with it. The funny thing is, if I read someone else writing this sort of thing, I’d probably be saying ‘get some help! you clearly need it!’, but I still feel that this will pass, and I will be OK, and we will get there, and all the other things one normally chants at moments like this.

Ugh, in short. I think it’s time for some Earl Grey.

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?

I find myself in the fortunate situation of having had my doctor give me a note which tells me to refrain from work until February 22. This, dear reader, is largely because I was approaching Def Con 1 in batshit* terms last week, which is to say that, on top of yet another bout of low-level illness, I’d had very little sleep and quite a few doses of Big Fat Toddler Tears (they being the bit where gentle grumbling turns into ‘wa-ha, wa-ha, wa-haaaaaaaaaaa’, with fully fledged tears rolling down the indignant little face). So, I found myself going out of the room and bellowing ‘why won’t you go to sleeeeeeeeep?’. Not a happy situation, but my own, dear reader, my own, at least in passing. So, the next day, I took myself off to the doctor, because I felt the need to vent at someone other than Quercus, who has had enough venting to install an entire system. And lo! the result was time off, which felt like the most enormous present I’ve had in quite a while.

Quercus’s mother came to visit, bringing stews, casseroles and large bars of chocolate (about which I was relatively abstemious, in line with my “a little bit of everything but less than that, you greedy cow” approach to what I eat), and she babysat for us on Tuesday, so we were able to go out on our own in the evening, for the fourth time since the small girl entered our lives over twenty months ago. So, extra sleep, things to eat which I didn’t cook, and the visible nature of our progress towards a finished! kitchen! AFINISHEDKITCHEN! has meant that I am not feeling batshit any more. So far, we’ve been making the most of this breathing space by focusing our efforts on the construction of the kitchen; as you can see from the pictures, the cupboards are coming along, and shortly there will be that blissful bit where I get to put things in the cupboards, and to organise ingredients into boxes, and to shuffle things around so that the nicest mugs are at the front of the row. I so love organising cupboards; it probably says something worryingly Freudian about the way my brain works, but what can I say: it soothes my soul. And there is going to be plenty of soothing to do – our attic space, which we only gained as part of building the kitchen and bathroom, is stuffed to the gunwales with kitchen paraphernalia which we haven’t actually seen for the best part of five years, given that it was housed in the shed, all in boxes, before its recent promotion to loft living. Ahem. I have a notion that sometime soon there may be a boot sale in our future.

A knock-on effect of the kitchening is that, rather than baking, I’ve been knitting – I’m on the second of the sleeves for the small girl’s cardigan, and have finished the back and the front pieces. It’s chunky wool, so is knitting up disgustingly quickly, which is just as well, given that my patience is never exactly plentiful. I’m also finding the hardwood needles I bought for this pattern rather pleasing to work with; the yarn slides easily, but not too easily, across their gently cool points, and I rather like the twiddly turned bits at the non-business end. I’ve been fortunate with the pattern, too, which I found for free on Ravelry, and not least because some very kind and deeply knowledgeable knitters initiated me further into the bewildering world of abbreviations and slipped stitches passed over, which is to say that they translated some badly-worded pattern bits for me, and hopefully I’ll finish the cardigan over the weekend – my first actual garment which isn’t a hat or a scarf or legwarmers.

I’ve also finally managed to turn an old woollen jumper of my father’s into a felted dress for the witchling – a soft blue-grey, it felted straight off in a hot wash in the machine, and it was just a matter of cutting the bits out and stitching them together (using the antiquated sewing machine, which is going through a relatively amenable phase, the unpredictable length of which only serves to heighten my suspicions regarding its having developed a personality). I tried several times to catch a decent picture of the small girl wearing the result, but so far she’s too quick on her feet; I’m taking her repeated grins and strokes of it as an indication that she likes it, and my maternal heart was so pleased at this that it threatened to beat itself inside out. My favourite bit is the felt stars I added to the front; again, rubbish picture, but that’s what those blurry pink and yellow bits are, honest, guv.

Also a work in progress, though it never feels that way, really, is the development of the small girl’s speech. Words are positively tumbling over themselves in her haste to articulate them – three-word phrases, emphasis, repetition: we have the lot. It is such a delight to converse with her; every month that has passed has found me thinking that this is it – she cannot get any sweeter, and this is the single most sweet age that there could possibly be, in any child, at any point, and then, THEN, I find myself rethinking as the next moon changes, and something new wanders into our lives courtesy of a very determined pair of size 3 feet. Possibly while clutching a percussive instrument of some sort. (And yes, technically, and I shit you not, the ol’ Joanna counts as a percussion instrument.)

Oh, and of course it’s Valentine’s Day on Sunday. So, time for some heart-related craftiness, methinks – our tenth together. To my mind, nothing says ‘I love you’ like a lie-in, and some eggy bread on rising.

* Batshit: a term generally used to indicate maternal insanity, brought on by a combination of Not Getting Out Enough, Not Sleeping Enough, and Generally Beating Oneself Up About Perceived Maternal Failings Brought On By Points One And Two.

… there will be a brief interval, during which I shall finish copy-editing two theses, one on the history of art, the other on nineteenth-century poetry. We are also fortunate in that Quercus’s mother is with us for a few days – I cannot express sufficiently how nice it is to have someone else to bring you tea, provide a tissue for the small girl’s nose, do the washing-up and generally provide a much-needed third pair of hands, while Quercus works on the big cupboard which will, when complete, cover about half of the red wall in the kitchen.

Also, there will be chocolate malt cake. Oh so very yes.

This month, we have mostly been trotting about in rather large quantities of snow, at least for this corner of the world. (This has meant more than usually pictureque views, and disproportionate use of the camera, naturally. But have I sorted out my hard-drive space issue? Have I buggery.) The chickens have had vast pots of porridge carried down to them by the small girl, and we have trolled around in wellies and millions of layers of woollen things.

Outside, we have walked and talked our way round dark Devon lanes while hoping not to get clipped by a van, as happened on Boxing Day, and we have watched the various comings and goings of the sheep who live on the hill behind our house – one of my favourite sounds here in Earthenhouse is the noise of many, many sheepy feet approaching as they pass our house en route to (literally) pastures new, in the cider orchards up the lane. Speaking of the orchards, we have also been out to admire the landscape in the snow; I am always entranced by the symmetry of rows upon rows of apple trees, whether cloaked in blossom or snow crystals. We also managed to rescue a poor sheep who had fallen down an open land-drain; it looked as if the cover had simply cracked in the cold, and the sheep, not realising that the ground wasn’t as it is everywhere else, simply dropped down into a challengingly sheep-sized hole, getting him(her?)self firmly wedged.Quercus hauled him(her?) out, and (s)he legged it, bleeting resentfully, though hopefully not at our intervention. The sheep around here seem fortunate in the home they are offered in the orchard fields. (As an aside, I would love to have some sheep. My particular favourites are the dark ones, preferably with big horns and a tail. Also, goats. Oh yes.)

Inside the warmth of the house (thank god for the woodburner; every time I find myself feeling hacked off at the prospect of lighting it, or cleaning it out, I remember the time we spent here with no heating at all, and lo! once more it takes on a wholly reassuring aspect), we have sat ourselves on oak counters and marvelled at the grain and the smooth sheen of newly-waxed wood (let us not speak of the utter shiteness of hard-wax oil), all while eating sultanas. We have also watched as our kitchen began to take shape; after months of planning, Quercus has been hard at work on and off since November, time permitting, and the result is a custom-made oak kitchen, beautifully in tune with the house as a whole, and my utter delight at the moment.

The worktops have holes and rippley feathered sections, and are finished a few tones darker than the cupboards beneath.Working out how best to protect them from daily use has proved something of a challenge; we have ended up with spirit dye for the colour, followed by tung oil, largely because this combination appears to be the only one you can fix up later on without having to sand back whatever finish you’ve gone for so that you can start afresh. The joy of unloading boxes of stuff, stored for months if not years, is just around the corner; today Quercus has fitted two cupboard doors, and he has worked out a cut-list for starting on the large cupboard which will occupy over half of the red (cob) wall.

In a further move towards some degree of civilisation, we acquired a cunning laundry airer whatsit (and yes, that is exactly what they are called), and I am not ashamed to say that it has revolutionised my feelings about laundry. Not tripping over the sodding airer thingy in the sitting room is a huge improvement, as is not finding Wixon eating one’s socks at six forty-five in the morning. Whenever I walk under the airer and find it empty (which is rare at the moment), I feel almost jealous of the drying time that we are missing out on – I mean, things could be up there! Drying! But worry not – I am coping. Just. (We’ll just agree to draw a veil over the maniacal glint in my eye on beholding items needing washing, shall we?)

The images which will stay with me the most are probably those of the small girl taking her first bewellied steps while clutching Quercus’s hand; she has been walking confidently for some time, but there is still something about snow and wellies which gets me every time. I felt the excitement as if I had never before seen snow, simply because she hadn’t. It is a constant source of joy – and amazement – to me, this sense of the new in the familiar. Long may it last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answers, anyone?

So, here we are in 2010 – how very nice it is to see you all, as it were. This evening, Quercus and I went out for a quick walk around the field behind the house – it has been very cold here in Devon, and the frost is thick enough on the ground that there are spikes of ice sticking out at outlandish angles from each blade of grass. We haven’t had snow, but the frost in the rising moonlight was crunchy underfoot, and the stars were bright overhead, and we are told that snow may even appear tomorrow or the day after.

Tomorrow is twelfth night, and this being one of the traditions that appears to have crept into our lives together, we will disband our Chrimbly tree, removing in the process the eighteen felted hearts and, er, one star that I managed to get stitched before giving up for this year; we went for the minimalist approach, using only the felty things, lights and some particularly attractive fircones as decorations. The good thing about losing the Christmas tree, which I am always sorry to see go, is that we will have serious floorspace available to us in the kitchen for the first time in aaaaages. Quercus has fitted oak worktops during the Christmas break, and we spent the days after New Year waxing them and polishing them with hard wax oil, a slightly confusing substance which behaves like neither wax nor oil, and which requires approximately half a decade to dry. Or go off. Or harden. Or whichever term implies best its ultimate, er, setting. Having worktops, together with cupboards underneath them, means the kitchen now resembles an Actual Proper Kitchen In Which Cooking Might Not Be Outlandish, particularly with a fitted oven! and a hob with wanky touch control thingies that neither of us really understands! to complement the cupboardage. Next up is a large oddly-spaced cupboard on the right-angled wall, but that’s sort of the next stage, so let us not get too ahead of ourselves, eh?

Largely, the festive whatsit was quiet and delightful this year. Notable exceptions to this rule went as follows:

- Quercus’s mother told him he needed a haircut as her opening greeting, literally as she walked through the back door (to which she goes automatically, and which she opens without knocking unless we, Lucia-like, thwart her Mapp-inspired progress by locking the door, something we delight in managing), which was particularly irritating as we had actually had a cut booked for him but the hairdresser had cancelled because she wasn’t very well. Also irritatingly, she told him his glasses need changing because they’re scratched; he’d been to the opticians the weekend previously and is awaiting new lenses as we speak.

- One of the presents she very kindly gave us was funds for a wooden hanging airer affair, the sort you suspend with cunning ropes and pulleys, shimmying it up somewhere nice and warm and OUT OF THE WAY whenever clothes have the temerity to need washing. We bought the blighter, and blow me if we didn’t fit it the very same day it arrived, largely in a bid to avoid our usual ‘oh yes – must do that sometime’ procedure, a well-rehearsed number which usually includes a six-month lead-time. So, there we were, congratulating ourselves on a job disgustingly well-done and with more promptness than is perhaps decent, when up pipes Quercus’s dear mother with ‘but of course the washing won’t actually DRY there, will it?’. No, because clearly the effect we were hoping for was not one of drying, but of an INDOOR WATERFALL, carefully crafted with prayers to the gods of wet laundry.

- Eclipsing any irritations offered by my delightful mother-in-law, however, was my experience of van versus elbow, which took place on Boxing Day. We (we being me, Quercus, his mum and the tiny daughter) went for a walk in glorious December sunshine. We followed the Highway Code, walking on the right side for the conditions and taking general note of any traffic around (which was not considerable, it being Boxing Day, and the lanes being tiny and icy) and wearing suitably bright clothing (in my case, because I am naturally colourful; in Quercus’s mother’s case, because other people’s retinas are there to be attacked). Unfortunately, this did not prevent a van driver hitting not one, not two, but three of us, though astonishingly, and hugely thankfully, the tiny daughter was completely unharmed. Quercus had a big bruise and two large grazes to show for it, and I had a partially dislocated elbow and a bruise the size of Calcutta which has yet to disappear. Stiffness, general aches and pains and the continued purpleitude are the ongoing whatsits at this point; for the other party, apparently either a mandatory driving improvement course and accompanying fine or prosecution is likely. We have litigiously engaged a personal injury lawyer.

The delightfulness still outstripped the moments of homicidal mania, however, particularly where the tiny daughter’s recent acquisition (a red rocking moose) was concerned. Other splendid moments were created by the rapid consumption of far too many mince pies (though I still find that the mince pie drawer remains reasonably empty,* in my case, begging the question as to whether or not one might find any more about the place…) and two entire trays of homemade Rocky Road (for which I blame Nigella Lawson, of whose work I had remained blissfully unaware prior to a moment of weakness in the few days before Christmas, and an unfortunate availability of her back catalogue on the Beeb‘s iPlayer dooberry).

Also, and I feel this warrants an entry of its own, really, I found myself the recipient of the very best present I could have wished for, but wouldn’t have, not wanting to tempt fate: the witchling’s sleep has improved. We haven’t done anything horrid, and we didn’t end up night-weaning, but for the last couple of weeks, things have been much better. Of course, now that I’ve written that down and made whichever part of the universe which had until now been looking the other way, busily destroying nations and whatnot, I expect the attention will snap back this way and sleep will once more become but a distant memory, but I just wanted to record for posterity that things have been particularly lovely for a little while. Long may it last.

And you?

* I tend to think my stomach has various drawers, departments and other organisational sectors; sometimes, for example, the savoury drawer can be stuffed to capacity, while the sweet drawer is happy to accept four servings of pudding, a bar of chocolate, and the promise of a ruptured something-or-other still to come. Is this just me? I think not.

Cue loud exhalation, and a look of drunken stupor brought about by AN ENTIRE NIGHT’S SLEEP. Yes, you read that correctly: AN ENTIRE NIGHT’S SLEEP. WITHOUT ONE INTERRUPTION. For some reason, the tiny daughter slept from seven until six-forty without a peep. We, the parental we, were most grateful. And today we’re almost punch-drunk with the sleepiness of it all. In my case, in a nice way; in Quercus’s case, well, let us just say he is busily caffeinating himself as we speak. I’m still hoping, as my sort of first-response thing, that the sleep thing will just resolve naturally rather than requiring the sort of interventionary changes I mentioned in my last post; I don’t want to night-wean and I don’t really want to do anything which involves lots of crying. I’m not going to think that this might be the start of that change, because the tiny daughter has slept through the night many times previously without it heralding a general regime change, but hey, at the same time, I’m still going to be bloody grateful for any extra sleep I get, and for anything which delays the onset of the batshit state which appears when we’re all a bit tired and emotional (without even a hint of alcohol).

So, thank you all for the lovely words and entertaining tales of woe. The moment of utter, crapulous woe of shitery-nasty has passed on this end, and we are feeling a bit better, collectively. For one thing, the lime, while interesting, is not completely buggered; our friend Chris, who is a lime specialist, reckons it’s completely salvageable, though not until any chance of frost has passed. This is good in two ways: way the first – IT’S NOT COMPLETELY BUGGERED!, and way the second – WE CAN’T DO ANYTHING ON IT NOW, which means no firking about in freezing conditions with fingers blistered from both cold and lime burns. Yay! for no burns.

In the meantime, work on the kitchen toddles along. Quercus now has wood for the worktops, and we have wax for finishing them and hard wax oil (!) on order. We’re sort of aiming to have the worktops in position for Christmas, though I’m not sure if we’re going to manage that; at least the oven is now hooked up, and working, and most exciting in that it heats up in about five minutes, which, compared with the Baby Belling of Doom, is nothing short of a minor miracle.

So, here are some jolly pictures, so lighten the doom and kid you all into thinking that I am completely on top of things, with creativity oozing from every pore. (Let us not speak of the reality: it is not creativity but stupidity and, for variety, idiocy which oozeth in this house.)

I am still marveling at the hat that I knitted. I can’t believe I actually managed to follow a pattern, for one.

We’ve been making lanterns from watercolour paper soaked in oil; horribly incendiary in nature, but rather dinky, nonetheless.

Reading continues to be the witchling’s favourite passtime (and, just to ensure that universal balance is maintained, that choas on the right is the ever-present washing stand, which probably represents my least favourite passtime).

Once upon a time, I thought that Chrimbly decorations such as these would be such fun to make; blanket-stitching the hearts together and stuffing them for a padded look is indeed quite fun, but the stars! Oh, the stars! What was I thinking? So. Many. Stitches. So. Little room. For stuffing.

So, moving on from the doom and gloom, we’re slowly remembering that generally, we can handle the shitty bits and bats because life still has some delightful moments despite the flaking limewash. It’s on to Crumphole pudding-making and general mince pie-gorging now. So what have you got left that you’d like to do before the cessation of hostilities?

The shit:

- The fucking lime render is not taking the recent frosts well. For some unholy reason, the fucking fucking fucking limewash is flaking off, and the north wall of the house is encased in hard frost that looks as if the wall has had buckets of water thrown at it. Most of the limewash on this wall is going to come off, from the looks of it, and patches of it are in trouble across various other walls. I don’t know why. We have worked as hard on this project as we are capable of working, and it’s dominated most of this summer and autumn. I am beyond sick of it. We thought this bit was fixed; there are so many things to fix on this house, and we thought this was one of the things we had  - finally – managed to sort. Not so, it seems. Fuck knows what we’ll have to do. I think at least some of the render beneath the limewash will be compromised, to what extent I am not sure, but I fear we’ll end up having to redo some of it. I can’t even speak about it – I am just so fed up with this fucking house, and the number of fucking things which continue to need work. One thing gets fixed; four things break.

- The car is in for yet another bout of work. We had it back for one day after the fucking ignition switch told us it needed replacing by stopping the lights and wipers working from time to time, and the lever which allows the tilt and rake of the steering wheel to be adjusted snapped off, leaving the steering wheel unlocked and wandering, Wacky Racers-style. This, after suspension work, new tyres, a cambelt, more suspension work, a drive shaft and various other bits and bobs, takes the piss – we’ve only had this fucker for six months, and, bearing in mind we bought it to replace Quercus’s CX, which he loved but which he felt wasn’t reliable enough or affordable enough to maintain, it’s been nothing but trouble since it arrived. Fucker.

- Dad has sold his house, and continues to talk about how hard-up he and his wife are, in sort of ‘we’re all in the same boat’ terms. To clarify, we’re skint. We have a mortgage, and we have a broken house which we are trying to fix ourselves, to save money, and because we want to do things properly. He gets more than my monthly salary in a pension, ignoring the money he has until now received from his tenants. His wife gets well over my salary in maintenance from her ex-husband.

- My stepsister has attempted to kill herself and is now in a psychiatric hospital being evaluated. It looks like she’ll be there for some months. We’re not really sure why, or what’s going on with her, and it seems like she feels the same.

- I’m knackered. The witchling is teething, apparently two nasty teeth at the same time, and has been waking up quite a lot. We’re contemplating night-weaning, when these teeth are through, because, at eighteen months, we’re starting to think that unless we get some sleep pretty soon, we’re going to continue catching all the bastard illnesses that come our way, and the witchling will remain an only child, neither of which is what we’d like, ideally. I feel like a shitty parent for contemplating the weaning (even if it’s only at night), and it doesn’t sit right with me, really, despite the tiredness. But then I also feel like a shitty parent for being knackered, constantly ill (and of course missing lots of time from work, which then in turn makes me feel like a shitty worky-person), and reasonably un-self-starterish and uninspired in terms of doing things other than those things which absolutely must be done to keep us going, i.e. grocery-shopping, housework, and other such fancies. To be the parent I want to be, I need more sleep, I think. I want to be that oasis of zen-like calm who whacks out creativity at the merest whim while dandling a baby on one arm and mowing the lawn with a handknitted yoghurt pot. Instead of this, I’m more like a walking zombie on damage limitation (though not all the time, I should add – we do manage creative things, even though I feel crap about this at the moment).

- I have got to go to a supermarket tomorrow due to a spectacular lack of planning.

- We went for tea and mincepies with some lovely people down the road today. They have been in their house for six months. It only needs a coat of paint. I think I hate them. Predictably, they had bought a Christmas tree, a very pretty Christmas tree, from the farm up the road. We can’t afford said Christmas tree. The tiny daughter loves Christmas lights, but I don’t know if we will manage it this year – £30 upwards is a shitload of money. The aged parent said some time ago that he was sending us a cheque for £100; it has yet to materialise, and experience has taught me not to rely on this sort of thing.

- December 14 marked nine years since my mother died. This time of year always calls on me to walk a very careful path between ‘ooh isn’t it lovely to have winter and cooking and presents and solstices and whatnot’ and ‘I want my mum – I know I’m an adult, but I just want my mum; things would all be better if only I could have my mum back. Now would work’. I’m feeling the latter quite acutely at the moment.

The not-shit:

- We got the new oven and hob wired in. It’s a different world. The oven: it heats up in less than ten minutes.

- I have only got to work three days this week.

- We have the wood for the worktops in the kitchen, and the wax to protect them.

- I have finished Christmas shopping.

- The tiny daughter remains adorable, despite the nightly wakings.

- The cats are actually using the two-tier basket, bought in a bid to regain control of the sofas, which now lives near the stove.

I’m not really writing because of most of the ‘the shit’ list, but I’m still here, and when this lot of shit has passed, I’ll probably get back to writing more regularly. That’s my intention. For now, I think all I’m going to do is whinge, so I’m going to try not to do that, because, while wallowing can help in the short-term, as a naturally optimistic person, I think I need to a) find a practical solution to at least some of these things, and b) concentrate on the positives. So, in the meantime, how about you all distract me with entertaining tales of festive jollity? Or, possibly better still, amusing anecdotes featuring recoverable disasters?

The aged parent has just departed after a very pleasant visit which would have been improved only by the absence of my wretched cough, now in its third week and countering attack from a second course of antibiotics and steroids. We are busy on the kitchen – Quercus is machining lengths of oak as I type, and we have the carcasses of the base units in place, together with the floors for them and the side panels which divide them in two and whatnot – and I’m not in a very writerly space as a result; mostly the witchling and I have been going out for lots of little walks (she walked about a mile the other day, and was still faintly protesty when I suggested that she might need carrying for a bit towards the end), doing ridiculously sticky activities involving glue and coloured paper and – in my less sane moments – glitter, and generally enjoying the best bits of winter together. I am also delighted to have found a picture I drew for her when I was pregnant – there was a gap on the page left for the baby’s name, as we didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl when I drew it – and have started to finish it off, using some v. gorgeous watercolour pencils I self-indulgently bought some time ago.

Other than that, it’s knitting (on the second sleeve of her cardigan now, and have done the fronts and the back), blanket-stitching felt hearts and stars to go on the Chrimbly tree (which is assuming we either rob a bank or steal one, frankly, given the prices they’re going for this year – they mostly seem to start at about £30 for six foot, which seems a tad scary…), and the continual dusting involved in woodworky things.

Egad.

Yuck. Still coughing. Still taking nasty doses of steroids to shift uncharacteristic wheeziness. However, in a bid to avoid pathetic self-pity and whingeing beyond the call of duty (or something), I am trying rather to focus on the nice things in life at the moment, which include the following lovelinesses:

-  Stripy tights for my birthday. Today: blue, purple, black, two shades of red and some pale yellow.

- Clipper’s Assam tea with vanilla.

- The knowledge that the tiny daughter’s first pair of wellies will arrive shortly. They are red, and they look like ladybirds. Yes, I have no shame. And no, I don’t care.

- Somehow the house is tidier than it has been for weeks; we reached a down point where, all being in various stages of ill-health, the place was a tip, we were eating far too much pasta, and the washing was getting a bit epic. Then, realising that sometimes one needs to do something other than sleep or feel ill if one is to remain sane, we managed to sort of claw back some organisation, and things have felt much better ever since, despite the persisting coughs and whatnot. The longer I live in a renovation project, the more I value empty spaces and not having to tidy/clean/wipe up around Stuff.

- Along with managing to get organisation back, we’ve also gone back to weekly menu-planning; yes, I am now officially middle-aged, and no, once more, I do not care. We’re eating a more varied diet again, which can only be a good thing, as pasta itself cannot be an entire food-group, now can it?

- I’m also starting to do a few crafty bits and bobs with the tiny daughter, who turned eighteen months on December 1. She likes sticking things on, and colouring things in; anyone got any suggestions for good crafty resources for small people? We’d appreciate suggestions; current projects I’d like to try include the Martinmas lanterns I’ve seen on various Waldorf-influenced blogs, and probably something involving hands and painting. Is that lunacy?

This morning I found an onion. Well, what had once been an onion, if I’m honest. It had wedged itself inside the top of the hoover’s stupid hose thing and hidden there while putrefaction set in. It’s understandable, in a way. Here we are, knee-deep in sawdust and removing mouse entrails from under the table saw, and it’s week two (or three, I forget) of the kitchen-building extravaganza. I would quite like to hide in the hoover while putrefaction sets in. I’m trying to be all stoic and British about it, but sometimes it’s a bit challenging, if I’m honest. We’ve been living in a house which many would consider fairly buggered for about five years now, and while the new extension has meant lots of bits which were very revolting met their timely demise, its construction has also introduced levels of chaos which we’d never encountered with the old, known-if-revolting-quantity version.

Of course, when you decide to self-build an extension which, when finished, accounts for forty per cent of your whole house, you sort of cast aside minor considerations like, oh, spare time, and surfaces which aren’t covered in debris of some sort, and that happy (if unrecognised) time when you weren’t familiar with the entire Screwfix catalogue. The old extension was tiny, damp, freezing, and covered in mould. The new kitchen is fifteen by seventeen-odd feet, with a notch of about, er, bathroom doorway size. (I am not a surveyor. Dimensions do not always come easily to me, and Quercus is on the ginger wine, so any estimate/memory he might offer will have been pleasantly eroded by this stage.) The old bathroom was five feet square, while the new one is about seven by nine-and-a-bit feet, and it has built-in storage galore, so that’s the empty space I’m quoting, not the space into which one fits the usual crud encountered in bathrooms. We have a lot more space, and a lot more sense of space, courtesy of the high ceiling that having a single-storey extension – the roof-line of which is just under the second-storey thatch – creates.

The thing is, though, that when you’re living in the place that you’re renovating, it’s a bit of a bastard keeping a sense of it being your home as well as a site. If we could just bugger off and live in another house while doing this one, it would be so much simpler, not least because the rest of our house is pretty tiny (our sitting room, for example, is about twelve by nine feet, and it’s the biggest room in the original house, while the dining room is about eight by nine, with the understairs cupboard taken out of that). Instead, the entire house gets routinely coated in the dust which one or other of the many processes involved in replacing the old, the buggered, the just abysmally manky. First, there was the dust of taking off old render and exposing cob walls which hadn’t seen the light of day for probably fifty years. No – wait. First there was the dust which knocking out the ghastly fireplace created. From a foot-square aperture to the inglenook which now houses our woodstove, via several tons of dust, debris, and old render (sensing a pattern?), we decided that going back to the original opening would not only give us more space (it’s not useful space, but in a house where every space has to be used, in the normal way of things, for built-in cupboards and innovative storage solutions designed to mitigate the sense of smallness that one otherwise encounters, some useless space is actually a luxury), but would create a fireplace worth really getting to know, rather than one which was just functional.

So, that was dusty. Re-rendering was, well, a post in its own right, as I’ve already written below. Building the extension wasn’t dusty so much as being quite interesting with a tiny baby; I think back to this time last year, when the tiny daughter and I were hopping in the bath with no walls between us and the kitchen and no back door. Oh, and when the walls were all studwork and this interesting green plasticky stuff which acts as a vapour barrier in timber-frame builds. And now we’re into the bit where Quercus is spending every spare minute machining wood and working out joints and whatnot, and I’m sort of faffing about with a duster from time to time while looking mildly distressed and noting the mould on the windowsills which is there, I think, largely because we can’t easily reach said windowsills to clean them, and the building isn’t really getting what one might describe as normal use, because we can’t open windows (see aforementioned reaching issues), and about two-thirds of the entire space is taken up with tools or materials. (Currently, getting to the sort-of-installed sink involves climbingto one side and then cautiously stepping around a pile of oak planks about twelve feet long and three feet tall, before navigating the perils of the sticky-outy corners of the table saw.) The kitchen, as in the functional part in which we prepare food, consists of a four-foot re-used worktop from the old extension propped up on chipboard; the two-ring Baby Belling Of Woe lives on one end, and underneath is a riot of cat food, poultry supplies, vegetables and goats’ milk, together with the (useless and ridiculously loud, and that was before the onion moved in) hoover and sundry things which have yet to find a permanent home. We have one – admittedly large – cupboard for storing food, crockery, pans and cleaning stuff. It’s bedlam in there, and I try to avoid ever looking in the very bottom part of it, because if I were a creature with lots of legs and a worrying tendency to click upon moving, that is where I would be, for sure.

I know one has a natural tendency to think that the proverbial grass – in this case, the day when we finish this house – is greener, and that if one can just get on to The Next Bit, life will suddenly become simple, straightforward, rewarding and purposeful, but sometimes I do think that surely, life must be simpler than this when you’re just not doing work on your house all the time. I’d just like a year or so, after this bit, of Just Living. Doing things like planting the garden up again. Growing veggies. Being worried when we forget to water the tomatoes. Maybe even ironing. (Actually, no. No. Sorry. What was I thinking?) You know, just normal, ordinary stuff. Not even the fun stuff. (Because in fairness, we do have a lot of fun, and I’m sure that we not only went round twice in the queue for our allocation, but maybe even beat a few people up and stole their quotas too when it comes to laughing.) Oh, for the day when this bit is finished. Keep your fingers crossed, folks – the plan is to try to get the kitchen units built and the new oven installed by Christmas (which would be just as well on two fronts: first, the roast dinner I misguidedly undertook on Saturday took THREE FECKING HOURS TO COOK, and second, the very lovely electrical superstore from which we bought our cooker wrote to us this morning to alert us to the fact that our year’s guarantee is about to expire. As we’ve yet to see if the fucker even works, it’d probably be a good idea to find out while it’s under warranty, non?). If so, I shall celebrate with a veritable orgy of cooking. If not, I shall do something involving ginger wine, tried patience, and that fucking Baby Belling, I daresay.