Sunday breakfasts are something to which I really look forward. Quercus and I have long enjoyed the delights of Riseholme scones (a pretentious name we created for sort-of drop-scones, made with self-raising flour and indecent quantities of seasoning, named after one of the deeply self-conscious villages E. F. Benson created in his Mapp and Lucia books), and in the last couple of years we’ve also discovered the fantasticness of granola. Particularly the Hollyhock variety, which I learned about courtesy of a nice stint on Cortes Island a couple of summers ago. This morning, we’re rediscovering muesli. Not that nasty dry stuff that comes in bags from the supermarket, though. Oh no. I remember when Quercus’s Cortesian aunt offered me muesli while we were staying with them (did I mention the fact that they had an outdoor, wood-fired hot-tub? WOOD-FIRED? HOT-TUB? There is just nothing wrong with those phrases, is there?) and I responded in a distinctly luke-warm manner, until I found myself asking what was causing the zesty smell of lemon that hovered nearly permanently in their kitchen. That would be the muesli then. This morning I whipped up a new batch. It involves grated apple, the zest of one or two lemons, cinnamon, almond slivers, coconut, natural yoghurt, soy milk, cranberries and a ton of oats. Ye gods, how is it possible that something so simple can smell so utterly deelish? Well, who cares, in short, as long as it does? 

This morning, breakfast was onion bagels, pieces of banana and camomile tea. The witchling likes variety, see? (Nappy rash still raging, incidentally, for those of you kind enough to comment; thanks for the suggestions – we’re taking her to see our doctor again tomorrow, but I’m not holding out much hope. The simple fact is that the disposables don’t make her sore, and the cloth do. Again with the pissed-offedness. I’ve also been making Doc Witch‘s yoga cookies; full marks, is all I can say. Utterly moreish, and in a sort of ‘and I’m not even that bad for you’ way.  

The best part about Sunday breakfasts, you see, is that they normally take place over about the course of the entire morning, and are interspersed with lots of new pots of tea, coffee or chai being proffered, and various sit-down sessions, and the odd bit of playing on the floor, and then maybe a wander down the garden to feed the chucks some titbits, a conversation with a cat here and there, and maybe a spot of cooking for later in the day (today cookies, and the leg-work of a savoury tater bake thing for dinner later). Life is so fast, most days; we have to be a bit on the ball, especially as I am now working part-time, and quite a lot of our life falls into a sort of finely-tuned rhythm. Five mornings a week, from eight until twelve-thirty, I have my professional hat on, while Quercus has his Daddy hat on; come one o’clock, I return, armed with a bottle of expressed milk, and switch to my Mama hat, while Quercus pulls on his professional jacket and heads off to work until five-thirty or six, depending on how much he wants to work a four-day week. This bit is still in its infancy – I only started again on Thursday – but it does mean that we have to be in certain places, doing certain things, at certain times, where previously I’ve been floating about, as and when, hither and yon, and all that. So, all the more reason to celebrate Sunday mornings, and a return to the sanity of life as it happens, rather than life as other people demand it be. I think it’s important to really appreciate the times we get where we can do as we like, be what we want. All the more-so now we have the witchling; one of the things I hope she remembers when she’s older is that her childhood was not hurried – we made space and time to just be, whenever possible. So important, that. After all, what’s more important than wandering about with a baby peering over your shoulder from the comfort of a recently-acquired brown velvet sling, making cookies, swigging camomile tea? Nowt, I reckon.  

About a week ago, I came across Organix apple and plum cereal bars for small people; they are sort of like flapjacky things, but without sugar, or at least without sugar as sugar, if that makes sense. The sweetness comes from raisins and fruit concentrate. Anyhoo, the witchling nibbled one down quite cheerily and I realised that if she were to continue nibbling at that rate, we would soon need a second mortgage. So, I fiddled aboot a bit this weekend and came up with the following:

Flapjacky Whatsits
Get mits on:
A large handful of sultanas
A large splash of fruit juice concentrate (we had some of this one in; the large splash was probably about, say, ten tablespoons’ worth)
Probably about 5 oz of oats
Probably about 2 oz plain wholemeal flour
A grabbing of dessicated coconut (and by grabbing, I mean a fistful, I suppose)
A splash of sunflower oil (say, five tablespoons’ worth)

Then…
Blend the sultanas together with the juice concentrate and the oil, then whack the other stuff in and mix it all together into a reasonably flapjack-like consistency; I threw in a bit more oil and a few more oats here and there, just to get it to the right whatsit. Then stick it in some sort of tray (I used a rather odd little muffin tray thing that I found in the back of the cupboard, looking rather forlorn), and bake the bugger for about twenty minutes at 180°c. I was very surprised by how well the first attempt turned out; definitely means I won’t buy the Organix ones again, as lovely though they are, they’re also £2.65 or something similarly hideous.

Somehow this week has been quite busy; I’ve been drafting two articles for this and that, and sorting out things like applications to go part-time (Quercus), as well as going in to work for half a day, which felt very strange after so long away, and not entirely good, predictably. I don’t really want to go back; people keep telling me that I’ll enjoy the adult company (they’ve obviously never worked in an IT-related job…) and it’ll do me good – I remain unconvinced thus far. We’ll see, I guess. It’s a necessary evil given the £6000-odd I’d have to repay in maternity money otherwise, but it didn’t make it any easier to leave the witchling, even though it was Quercus who was looking after her.

Right – must go and rootle pizza out of the oven; tonight: sweetcorn, mushroom, pepperoni, various bits and bobs of cheese, and the essential ingredient – sunflower seeds.

Hello. Quercus here.

I have comandeered the little white box with tiny keys for the purpose of writing about recent events. Dr. EW and the Witchlet have been in Sussex since Thursday, being looked after by my own dear mother in her house of utter cleanliness and order. I think this was probably a very good idea as the water pipes freezing did seem to be the final straw. Poor Dr. EW – she has has a lot on her plate recently and could do with a bit of centrally-heated care and food not cooked on a Baby Belling.

Things have been moving on a little at this end. The plumbing pipes did eventually defrost, and thankfully there were no leakages due to the fact that all our pipes are plastic. Lovely David (who called him that? I mean, really…) has even got the hot water working again, solving a nasty airlock problem by joining the hot and cold pipes together to use the mains pressure to flood the system again. All very technical, but it works now. The best bit really is that the bit that froze was not where we thought it was – we had thought it must be the bit of plumbing that goes in the ceiling (it is all hidden in the depth of our timber-framed walls, but over the door and windows it hitches itself up into the roof) but actually it was a bit which was left uninsulated where our power cable came in. So that’s all good really.

Lovely David is now finishing off the electrics. We really value this because a) it means we will have lights in our kitchen for the first time (hoorah!), b) we can get it all signed off as legitimate for the kind building regulations gentleman and c) it’ll be one less thing to worry about. Huzzah! We have plumped for those lights you get on a stringy thing, because they look fairly unobtrusive and were very cheap in our local Wickes store. Funny place, Wickes – I never really go there but when I do I always find something I hadn’t expected to see there, or something very cheap, or both.

The piece de resitance though is the fact that we now HAVE A BACK DOOR. Did I mention that we have a back door? A proper one. Let me expand on this a little. When we started building our extension in May 2008 we built the new, larger building up around the outside of the existing one. This enabled us to retain our old kitchen and bathroom while building chaos reigned only feet outside. Holes were dug and foundations laid, walls erected and Quercuses worn down by toil. When we got to a certain point we had to demolish our kitchen to make way for a new wall, and the bathroom hung on like a snail on the edge of a cliff while all around builderly things went on. Then came the day when the bathroom was taken apart brick by brick with a small but serviceable sledgehammer, and the new building outside revealed. Of course this was challenging because only the bare structure was there, and no door or windows were present. The door from the main bit of our house to the old kitchen effectively became our back door, the line between inside and out, even though it had no lock. We lived open to all for a while. Then some clever person who was not me decided to get the old back door and jimmy it into place in the new location, blocking up holes in the sides roughly with wood offcuts. A need for a catflap was identified after our furry companions were seen heading for the local chippy, and shortly after a cat-sized hole was cut in the door, complete with ears. And so it was for some time. Windows were fitted and eventually sealed tight, and render on the outside provided futher protection from the elements. Months elapsed and as winter came an artic gale blew through the kitchen door.

So this is why Dr. EW will be very pleased when she escapes from my maternal relative on Monday and returns home to find her new back door. She does not know anything about it, and as she has no internet access in Sussex, them being very backward there like, you are privileged to hear the news first. The new door was found in a reclamation yard (Toby’s in Newton Abbot, since you ask). It was supposed to be a stable door but there has obviously been a lack of interest from equine consumers in recent years, for out of over 2000 doors in the yard not one was of that sort. I know. I looked at them all. Many of the reclaimed doors were in poor condition with a bit of rot or mildew, and hardly any seemed to fit our short, fat doorway. Many were the wrong size to an extent that could not be fixed; others were just plain hideous. I thought a good second to a stable door would be to have a door with glass in the top, so that we can easily see down the communal tip that is our garden and into the field to the side. I looked at the glazed doors, but what you seem to pay for is the glazing and not the door itself, and mostly the glazing was broken or hideous). Many had only a small pane, and I fancied something with a large bit of glass. Eventually I realised that I was due very shortly to see a nursery which the Witchlet may attend, and that this place was some distance from the charming (not) town of Newton Abbot, so I had better make my mind up pronto and hotfoot it back, seeing how fast the car would go with a trailer on the back (about 120mph officer…) (I jest).

In the end I chose a solid old chunky door. It had obviously been an internal door and had no glazing, but I bought it for £60 and am in the process of making it into a rather nice back door. I have removed the top panel and a nice piece of double glazing is on order, to be installed when it arrives. The rest has been sanded and will get a good dose of wood filler. It has been chopped to size and tomorrow I’m finishing fitting the frame and lock. Frames and the like do take me ages to get right, but I want it done and dusted for when Dr. EW gets back on Monday. It even has a catflap now, so the furry felines won’t have to hitch a lift to the chip shop.

There we go then. Dr. EW reports, wheezily, that life in Sussex would be better without a horrible cough and a very little girl who has been VERY CROSS today.

Cheerio,

Quercus.

(‘Bits and bats’ comes from my ex-supervisor. Do you know, it’s been over two weeks and the knowledge that he is now my ex-supervisor still hasn’t quite sunk in. It is just too fantastic to be true.

Anyhoo.)

I’ve started redrafting some of my archives from the ol’ blog, so cunningly back-dated posts will be appearing in the archive list here too, making me feel less fly-by-night here. It’s funny, reading back over things I wrote over four years ago, and I was sorry not to have my back story, as it were, when I moved blogs, so in a way, the demise of Journalspace has resolved one or two things for me, I suppose; I hadn’t wanted to get rid of my presence there after I’d moved because I thought it would make it pretty obvious that I’d moved elsewhere, when what I wanted was for anyone reading to think that I might just have stopped. Or is that just my twisted psychology? Anyway, rhetoric, rhetoric. I’m particularly glad, in a sort of masochistic, pokey-stick-in-eye way, that reposting things is giving me the opportunity to use categories for things like recipes; most of the time, I’m quite happy posting in a completely unstructured chaos of tripe-like witterings free-flowing manner which scorns the restrictions of style and the petty boundaries of organisation, but it has dawned on me from a few questions people kindly left after I moved blogs that it would be handy to be able to lay my hands on certain entries without having to remember which sodding keyword works best in the as-yet-untried search box in the sidebar. (The JS one was surprisingly good, but I haven’t had chance to fiddle with the WordPress one yet.) It also means that you, gentle reader, are in the much improved situation of not needing to know how my tortured soul works when it comes to retrieving something you might have found interesting – you can just click on the ‘Provender’ thingy, and baddabing! there it will be. (Or not. I am not 100% on remembering to add the sodding category, now that I’ve got them there, all shiny and new and organised. See? It’s clearly an EBSAC error. Also known as ‘error between seat and computer’. Just no accounting for it.)

In other bits and bats, the new chooks are settling well. As soon as I complete my highly technical camera repair (i.e. the bit of blu-tack holding the lens cover open needs rewedging), I shall take some pics of them. We have plumped for Nightshade and Cobweb. Did I already tell you that? Possibly.

In still other news, Quercus and I spent about ten days around Chrimbly feeling really grim – we succumbed to a rather unpleasant ‘flu-like thing within twenty-four hours of each other, allowing just enough time for me to endure the hell of pre-Christmas ‘quick! a year-long siege is about to take place! pile your trolley high because NOTHING WILL BE LEFT! and the shops will never re-open!’ supermarket shopping with the witchling in tow – my, how we laughed. The good bit was that the witchling didn’t catch it, despite us both hacking all over the place around her. We washed hands every other second, and generally tried not to breathe on her, but still, my hopes weren’t high, so I was delighted that she managed to remain in rude health. (Did I mention that her current reaction to the sight of her grandmother is to raspberry, before chortling in the manner of Sid James?) The decidedly unfunny part of this tale is that we have now shaken said evil ‘flu-like thing off (and to an extent I can’t really complain: this is the first evil ‘flu-like thing (shall we go to EF-LT now, for ease of typing?) we’ve had for four years, though its timing, which, I think you’ll grant, was rather regrettable, does get it extra points, I feel) only to find that, just as the cough begins to wheeze its last, Quercus has developed a new and just as exciting version for Round II. He is now languishing in bed. Quercus does not do Man ‘Flu, either – he is disgustingly healthy, generally, and laughs in the face of coughs and colds which would floor your average chap. If I wasn’t married to him, I would find this level of health positively affronting; as it is, I merely thank the gods that it means we don’t catch every single thing which makes its way through his colleagues. But if he’s got it, I think, sadly, that we’re in the countdown to me getting it. I am making Desperation Soup now, just in case.

This evening, Quercus had one of those makes-you-question-our-society-and-indeed-humanity moments. Coming back from Exeter, he was overtaken in a thirty limit by someone who pulled in so sharply that he thought they were going to clip the front of his car. Instinctively, he hooted them. The car, a taxi, braked very hard, stopping so sharply in front of him that Quercus locked up the wheels on his car as he too braked. I should add that Quercus, while reasonably warlike when I met him at twenty, is, and always has been, a very sensible driver – he doesn’t overreact, and nor does he seek out trouble.

Anyway, the taxi driver then drove at ten miles an hour for the rest of the stretch of road they were on, braking excessively, while his passenger leaned out of the back window, hurling abuse and throwing cigarettes at Quercus. After that, they reached a roundabout, and things appeared to revert to normal – the taxi pulled away normally from the lights that start the A30 out of Exeter, and Quercus thought they were done.

Not so.

Having driven, oh, say, five miles, normally, and some distance ahead of Quercus, the taxi then pulled into a layby, only to pull out immediately behind Quercus, so close that once again he thought he was going to get shunted. The taxi then dodged in and out behind him and in front of him, swerving aggressively as if to shunt him from the side and force him off the road, for the next four miles, before following Quercus off at the exit one takes to get to the Witchery. Quercus had still done nothing – hadn’t reacted, beyond slowing down when the taxi pulled out behind him, in a bid to get him to overtake, and leave him alone.

The taxi followed him off the A30 and round a roundabout, along another thirty limit (completely in the opposite direction from where we live; Quercus, by this stage, was very worried that the driver would follow him home, particularly as he is currently sporting a ‘For Sale’ sign, complete with our phone number, in the back of his very distinctive car) for a couple of miles, before disappearing when Quercus put his foot down as the thirty limit ended. Quercus drove around for a few miles, again nowhere near the Witchery, and then came home, armed with the registration number, and called the police. Who say they will look into it and get back to us. Hmmm. We’ll see, I suppose; my experience of the police in things like this is not fantastic. It scares me to think that one has always to keep one’s eyes on the floor, ignoring people who break speed limits and drive like maniacs because they might just target YOU this time, and there appears to be nothing that reasonable people can do about it.

For as long as I have known him, I have been slightly in awe of Quercus’s ability to eat. Man, he can really eat. Vast quantities of potatoes – mashed, boiled, or roasted, the quantities don’t vary – together with sausages which are only in single figures because they are sold in eights, and bowls of ice-cream piled genuinely high enough to make most ice-cream vans look amateurish – these are images from Quercus’s childhood which continue to hold true in his adult life.

And because of his prodigious appetite and catholic tastes, I have never made a big deal out of the very few things that he doesn’t like to eat.

Except.

Except.

Except for the fact that it has always been slightly boggling to me that Quercus, man of pudding, man of afters, man of ice-cream sundaes, does not like custard. DOES NOT LIKE CUSTARD. So, apple pie and… NOT CUSTARD. Apple crumble and… NOT CUSTARD. Stewed rhubarb and – yep, you’ve guessed it – NOT CUSTARD. I mean, I know there is a place in this world for cream and the varieties thereof which are frequently found in the west country (where cream is clotted, largely), but still – custard! Glorious, yellowy, vanillaishly deliciously custard. Or not, if you are Quercus.

Consider, then, my surprise when he revealed today, after we have been together for nearly a decade, enjoying what I believed to be a relationship based on mutual trust and honesty, that he likes doughnuts filled with custard! (As an aside, I didn’t even know that doughnut came other than with jam, or with bits missing in the middle.) NOT JUST CUSTARD, previously rejected as a heinous substance unfit for human consumption and causing the most intense expressions of disgust in one person of my acquaintance, but COLD CUSTARD.

Clearly, a new era has just dawned. There will be no allowances made from this day onwards. Custard it is. Custard it shall remain.

You were only twenty when I met you, and once you’d got past the terror invoked by a short person with a lot of blonde hair and a speech rate of thirty words per second, we got on quite well, really, quite quickly. I bought you a Horace Silver CD as a birthday present after I’d missed your birthday party, and some time soon thereafter we were as one, living in each other’s pocket from the very start. Here we are, quite some time later, and we have a daughter, two insane cats, some chooks and a chaotic little house that is stuffed to the gunnels with our plans, our dreams, and, frankly, rather a lot of mess (just who is it that keeps breaking in at night, making a disaster area of our entire house, creating shedloads of washing-up, and then silently departing, I ask?), and I couldn’t imagine a better partner for what my life has become.

Happy birthday, Quercus.