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?

Hello. Quercus here.

Well, now that I am all alone, or rather just accompanied by paws and claws, I have taken the liberty of hijacking the tiny white box to ramble about what’s happening here. It’s been very hot here, and spending all day outside has had a curious effect on my skin – I sensibly slathered myself in sun cream, but was unable to reach a section in the middle of my back, and forgot my legs altogether. The resultant blotches may take some time to fade. I have never been a very shirt-off type of person, but in this heat doing hard work all day it seemed like a good idea. Plus I thought the only beings around to see were the cats; Pyewacket turned up her nose in disgust and retired to the pile of sawdust under the chainsaw trestle, and Wixon is too stupid to form an opinion.

So far I have worked for three rather long days, getting up at 5.30 one day and working through until the light started to go. For my own reference and to make me feel good, I have so far broken up the concrete paths all round the house and moved them to the now even more enormous rubble pile outside the back door, despite the temptation to put it all on the Witchling’s newly -laid lawn, which would have been a damn sight more convenient, sanded the render off the porch woodwork, scraped, sanded and cleaned every window in our tiny house (all nine of them; this was actually rather a big deal as they were covered in render and I had to take all the casements out as I went, then reinstall them), cleaned and sanded the fascia / soffit boards, then painted them, dug out a gatepost which was a devil of a job, and started putting guttering up.

Gosh, I’m boring, aren’t I?! Possibly the most irritating bit of it was this morning, when I painted the fascia / soffit boards. Usually the Earthenwitch does painting, particularly when it’s fiddly bits, as she is better at it than I, but I had to do it this time as it had to be finished before the guttering went up. I had primered it the day before, so this morning hoped to do the first of two top coats. We had coughed up our life savings and plumped for a Farrow & Ball number called Railings, in exterior eggshell (well actually the Earthenwitch had sat on me while reading my debit card number out to the nice man on the telephone, leaving me gasping for air and for reeling from the realisation that I had just spent £48.50 [that's a lot of dollars, for our American readers] on 2.5 litres of gunky dark paint; Messrs. Farrow & Ball must be laughing all the way to their extraordinarily large piggy bank), and I had just begun to apply it, up at the top of a very tall and wobbly stepladder, when a bloke appeared round the side of the house. I came down, and he explained that he was a tree chopping chap doing the rounds for the electricity company, and that one of the poles in our garden had about 6m more ivy on it than was allowed. I was delighted that he was prepared to hack it about instead of me, so after a pleasant conversation about wood which they might chop and I might collect, I went back to my painting. The Farrow and Ball had grown a skin. It was OK though, as I stirred it back in. I went back up the teetering ladder and continued. Almost immediately our neighbour appeared, along with two year-old boy and aged hound, who proceeded to make his way indoors to polish off Wixon’s breakfast (much to his horror). They chatted for a minute, then disappeared just as another neighbour, who is an electrician, dropped by to talk to me about some work we need doing. The skin was forming again. I continued, only to be halted five minutes later by a delivery van with bits of house for me, and then again two minutes later by the neighbour / boy / dog, passing the other way. The last straw was when a building supplies lorry turned up with more stuff for us, and I had to pause to direct the chap craning sand over the hedge. Mind you, he was my favourite driver – an animated Italian, who gesticulates wildly and talks almost incomprehensibly while beaming in glee at everything you say.

In the end the Farrow & Balls-up went alright, but took a lot longer than expected.

I have to say it’s very strange to be here on my own. I don’t really like it, although the heavenly bliss of uninterrupted nights (even if I do get up obscenely early) is enjoyable. But I miss my baby. Where is the little voice that demands “pruuuune” at the end of breakfast? Where are the tiny feet that run around upstairs? Where is the little bare naked baby who runs away at bath-time? And where is my garden helper? I miss her enormously. Oh, and I miss the Eathenwitch a bit too.

Right – I’m off for tea. Pizza again (gave up bacon sandwiches after eating nothing else for a day and a bit, and then being very sick; too much salt). Cheerio.

I’m off to West Sussex for a week, with the small girl. We’re abandoning Quercus to his fate, which is to work on the house and finish various things off, in favour of an extra pair of hands to entertain personages of a diminutive stature (his mum), in favour of tidy gardens with sprinkler systems which are just asking to be played with, in favour of growing tomatoes in need of pollination help in the form of being rattled about each day, in favour of SOMEONE ELSE DOING THE COOKING. In short, it’s a sort-of holiday which gives Quercus the space to work without worrying that he’s causing utter chaos for the rest of us.

Other things: sourdough bread. Well. The small girl and I used Hugh F-W’s recipe, and though we followed it to the letter, I was surprised that the resulting loaf wasn’t more… well, different. Admittedly, given that I wasn’t using organic flour because I hadn’t got any, I did end up having to boost the starter with a scrap of yeast – could that be why, to all intents and purposes, it seemed an awful lot like, well, normal (in a homemade context) bread? I’d love to give it another go, as I hear all sorts of good things about sourdough, and so far, while it was nice, it wasn’t exactly the revelation I’d hoped for. Suggestions? Recipes? Pointers? In the meantime, I’ve been making that spelt recipe I posted a while back quite a lot – the only problem I have found with it is that, I think because of the ratio of water to flour, the top tends to flatten off during baking; I need to fine-tune quantities and rise time, I think, but the crumpetty texture is intriguingly beguiling. Crumpbread. I mean – !

Still other things: it’s the small girl’s birthday in a little over a week. She will be two on the first of June, and I have no idea quite where that time has gone. Last week, she cracked (if that’s the right verb) her first pun – a small fish finger-puppet was stuffed down her dungarees while an enormous grin formed on her face, and she then said, giggling so much that it took me a minute to work out what she was on about, ‘fish it out! fish it out!’. She is increasingly chatty, day by day; a friend told me that a two-and-a-half-year NHS check-up includes the questiof of whether a child has a vocabulary of c. 200 words – I should say that the small girl’s vocabulary now extends to something like 500 words easily. She speaks in phrases of up to about six or seven words, and often offers words I didn’t know she knew. Her company is a delight in so many ways, and we are having tremendous fun together, more-so than I’d ever imagined possible at this point. I’ve been making a few things for her birthday – so far, a small mattress, with washable quilt and pillow covers to go on a little wooden bed which Quercus is making for her various soft toys, and a set of napkins with a table cloth to supplement the tin tea-set we’ve bought her – and this week, while I have the unusual luxury of childcare in the form of the much-loved Grandma, I’m going to try my hand at making a Waldorf doll. I’ve never done this sort of thing before, but I’ve armed myself with various supplies, internet tutorials and ‘The Children’s Year’, which I read about here and couldn’t resist, so keep your fingers crossed that I don’t mangle it too badly, and if the results aren’t too horribly unexpected, I may even go so far as to post a picture.

I still have a birthday crown to make, using up some felt I’ve had kicking about for aaaages, and hopefully I’ll get through that in the coming week as well. Oh, and possibly some trousers for the small girl, and a summer dress, given that we are having improbably summer-like weather (I won’t go so far as to say that it is now summer, as this is Devon, which is in England, which makes really virtually any mention of the s-word the kiss of death in terms of ongoing, settled warmth without some hideous drawback, like rampant humidity or thunder or some-such appealing meteorological phenomena). Let’s hope the sewing machine continues its current mild manners, or the small girl’s vocabulary may be subjected to some developments I would rather postpone until at least, say, three.

Other, other things (ahem): the orchards which surround Earthenhouse are in blossom, and it’s a real sight to behold. Acres of careful rows of little stumpy cider apple trees, all weighed down with millions of dusky pink flowers, and humming with bees (some of whom live in hives at the back of the fields). The small girl and I rather like walking between the rows, surrounded by the busyness of said bees and the fragrance of the trees. The best bit, of course, is when Pyewacket and Wixon come with us too – other people walk dogs, but not us: we have walking cats.

(Since you ask, which you probably didn’t, the bonnet is made from a scrap of Kaffe Fassett’s lovely ‘Roman Glass’ fabric, because it is just tooooooo good. The colours! The circles! The – *passes out*)

I leave you with news that the caravan has finally departed the parish, after nearly a year of worrying, chivvying and general bollocking about with both its owner and the one-time friend who arranged its appearance here. We are not missing it, unsurprisingly, and I am still boggling at the situation, to say nothing of the fact that we still have a few things belonging to the one-time friend which, I imagine, he may at some point want back, but which he (apparently) can’t be arsed to come and get now. Irritating, but not eight foot by twenty, so surmountable, in the general scale of things.

Right. See you all on the other side, and have a lovely week.

I’m hoping to post the odd (probably decidedly so) picture of our house and the life we’re living in it as we crawl out from under the shadow of large-scale renovations and the general exhaustion which seems to go hand-in-hand (for us, at least!) with having a small child. Well, actually, we’re not quite crawling out (of either) yet, as we’re about to head into another phase of Big Work (this being finishing off the exterior and contemplating such lunacy as interior re-plastering [our ceilings are falling down; what can I say?]), but, like Mon, I like seeing snapshots into people’s lives beyond the words they choose to put up on the screen (hence this is also part of her Through the Keyhole series, which kicked off yesterday – do join in, as the more the merrier for those of us nosy enough to want to know if our kitchen is alone in its midden state; I think it’s a Saturday thing in theory, but I’m too shite to have managed it yesterday).

So here is what I see when faced with the kitchen sink (which makes me hugely grateful every time I come near it, for a multitude of reasons including [but not limited to] having a sink! a real ceramic sink! which isn’t stored under the piano in the dining room!, having taps! real, shiny taps! which give out water! wet, drinkable, clear, reliable water! [older readers may remember our well shenanigans... let us draw a veil over that], the fact that the sink is not piled full of washing-up waiting for my approach in order to adopt its darkest, most sinister laugh while it points out the lack of washing-up liquid because we have a DISHWASHER WHICH WORKS AND EVERYTHING).

The plants you can just about see are lavender, a tradescantia, an unidentified chap called only ‘small foliage’ by its garden centre vendor, and an obscenely pot-bound lemonbalm, found in this unhappy state (well, not really unhappy – perhaps mildly discontented?) because there is nowhere in the garden to put it, given that most of the space outdoors is still broken.  Which reminds me – I really want to put up some pics of the latest garden developments, which have given us some workable lawn space for the small girl to play in, and a rather nice wild plum tree which we hadn’t noticed, really, in the chaos which was there before we rotovated. That next, perhaps, though I’ll probably forget (again).

Here is a better impression of the view we get from this side of the house, which faces down the garden:

(This is not the garden, I hasten to add, but the field behind the garden. There. Glad we got that all cleared up.) The sunlight is stretched and lazy this evening, causing the shadows to reach far across the field as a storm-cloud blows over towards the east,  and it’s quiet here – all I can hear is the hum of the oven (the week’s granola, sourdough bread adventures, coupled with rhubarb crumble [and a topping I keep meaning to post here, come to think of it], baked taters and a ham with bayleaves and a herby cheese sauce, since you ask) and the birds telling us all about their troubles and joys (which now include two new feeders around the other side of the house, partly to redress the balance of the bird-free garden which arrived when the chickens departed). See the colour of that earth? Our walls are that colour, underneath their new clothing of lime, and someday, I hope to have a cob oven in the garden which won’t be rendered, to remind us of the earth which gave us our house.

Right. That din-din-din-dinner is calling to me, and as it’s now eight-thirty, I feel inclined to respond. Let me know if you’re posting pictures, and I’ll nosey mosey along to look at them.

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

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

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

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

Current preoccupations:

Children, the number, timing, and nature thereof;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An unexpected by-product of sorting out the caravan situation has been meeting its owner, who I’ll call J, because, er, that’s his initial. Yesterday J came down from somewhere deeply northern to get the caravan ready for transportation on Wednesday (short story: J has given up on David, who moved it here originally, and who was supposed to move it once more, and hired someone to do it instead), which involved persuading the rusted-on wheels to come off so that new tyres can be fitted, and a general check-over of the electrics to make sure no-one will catch fire when this courier hooks things up when he’s ready to move. (At least part of my brain is thinking of Wagon Train at this point, and the oft-repeated ‘Heeeeead ‘em up; moooooooooooove ‘em out!’ Is that so very wrong, I ask?) Anyway, while we were farting about sorting out wheels and using large persuaders of the hammer variety in order to achieve this, J and I talked about houses. Largely, we talked about the sorts of houses that constitute architectural porn for me: strawbale and other natural building types. J, it transpires, is doing a PhD which looks at various aspects of strawbale builds; I had no idea that he was interested in that sort of construction, as the only things we knew about him, really, before this, were that he knew David and that they both have engineering backgrounds. So, it was cool to find ourselves comparing reading lists on cob, and on strawbale, and talking about render guns while using the phrase ‘feebly hydraulic’ with straight faces and without having to explain what that means, an occurence which is not exactly regular, shall we say.

The best thing about the conversation was that it reminded me of how lucky we are to live in an earth house, and how unusual it is, and how the roof – it is made of straw! Straw! (Well, reeds, actually, but hey.) Seeing the house through someone else’s eyes can really help when things seem a bit daunting, as can remembering how far we’ve come in a relatively short time; it’s only been since the small girl has been with us that we’ve been doing the major work this house so badly needs, after all, so, in twenty-two months, we’ve rebuilt about a third of the house, refurbished all the original windows, re-rendered the whole of the outside, and limewashed it, together with the usual DIY stuff that that all warrants.

And one day, I hope we will do more of this, but without the tedious fixing-other-people’s-dubious-and-sometimes-openly-shit-decisions bit, which is to say that I’d like to build our own house. I tend to um and er between cob (which I know and love, but which takes a bloody age to do, in that you have to build up layers and wait for them to harden before you can go taller or your walls sort of flop outwards in a process known as ‘ooging’ [as an aside, isn't that just the best word you've heard all day?]) and strawbale, which I’ve seen (we helped render a strawbale barn in North Devon when we were learning about lime rendering) but not really worked with, but which seems attractively quick in construction terms, and which offers similarly organic curves and a reassuringly thick wall to boot, and which, when combined with a timber frame, seems to equal the reassuringly sturdy nature of cob. I mean, a quick Google shows some of the possibilities, and the pictures here are just a taster, really, of what you can do, and on a low budget too. This picture is a strawbale house, and there are all sorts of things about it which I love, not the least of which is the curved side and the alcove thing they’ve got going on. The idea of a house as an almost sculptural thing appeals to me on a similar level that pottery gets me – you mean I can make a house? Like, a pot, but much, much larger? Oh yes. Oh, so very yes.

Also, the strawbale/cob ideas give me hope that one day, we might live in a roundhouse. Or even something with a rounded section. See? I can be flexible. Indeed, something like any of these pictures would do nicely. I harbour dreams of acres of woodland, a small stream for Quercus’s hydro-electric tinkerings, and the predictable raised beds and polytunnel combination. I see chickens and goats, and probably more than one small girl, and space, and quiet, and ordered chaos, and a kiln, and a cob oven, and a wood-fired hot-tub. And sometimes, I can see it all so clearly that it’s easy to find what’s in front of me a rather watered-down replacement, with the work needed being endless. So thank you, J, for reminding me that the watered-down nature is just because this is part of the process, and in order to get to Place B, we need first to finish Place A, and to give ourselves time to recover from the finishing thereof, before we start on the next thing. And in the meantime, it’s OK to dream, right?

So, while I daydream, I present for your visual edification, some natural building delights.

OK, so this one might be a tad on the petite side, but there is something I have come to really love about living in a house which is the size you need, rather than the size you want, if you know what I mean. Our house has two bedrooms, and hopefully we’ll be here for a little while longer; the footprint of the original house is about eighteen by ten, I suppose, so it’s not exactly huge, but I quite like the idea of being hunkered down in a little house which, with a careful approach to storage, can just about contain the stuff of life but does so in an unusually space-sensitive manner.

There’s something about the wedges of wood used as shelves here that I really like, and again, there are alcoves galore – the nature of cob being such that, if you fancy a hole somewhere, you just dig the blighter out. Ahhhh. Versatility.

This one vaguely reminds me of a boot-shaped house in the manner of the old woman with all those childer kicking about the place; it definitely gets my mythical house vote (although for true mythical houseness, have a gander at Simon Dale’s gorgeous house of loveliness, over which I have surely slavered before).

In many ways, this house is the closest relation of our own; it’s cob, it’s in Devon, and it’s thatched. Yet it also seems a world away in that the main house has a sense of space and airiness which our own, with its low ceilings and small floorplan, hasn’t. It’s a modern take on an old style, I suppose, and I think it works pretty well (particularly as there is a solid cob spiral staircase in there).

And you? What makes the ideal house for you?

Thursday is one of sometimes two nights a week when I am an orchestra widow. Quercus has been playing a rather large brass instrument (the tuba, since you ask) since he was small enough that he could probably have fitted inside its bell, had he wished to, and I have always felt strongly that he must continue to do so despite the usual call of the wild, which is to say the outland we laughingly call the extension. (It’s not that wild these days, honestly, yet the habit persists in thinking terms – I still see the things that need doing as much as the things that are already done, apart from during those brief moments when I manage to recall quite how far we’ve come – from hardboard interior walls and perpetually running-wet walls complete with a plywood ceiling and single-skin brick external walls…!) So, tonight he has wended his merry way to a rehearsal, where he will no doubt be tackling all sorts of musical delights. Or at least counting for a very long time. Which is something brass players excel at. (That, and relying on their neighbours to remind them of their cues when they forget to count altogether and doze off instead.)

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

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

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

My.

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

And how is the internets tonight?

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.