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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m probably the last person on the planet to make this discovery, but Spotify! Spotify! is really very good, isn’t it? I have been using it all morning, listening to past musical fascinations and obsessions, and as I listen to this, I think of that, and as I find that, I remember the t’other. It’s quite habit-forming. You know how it is when you have a tune stuck in your head, on and off, for a decade or so, and you can never quite remember how it goes after the mid-point or something, and then you find it on the radio and suddenly all is restored? Well, I’m finding it rather like that, only to the power of a very large number indeed. (Gosh. A maths reference. Steady…)

All this mp3 malarky has made me think about the albums (see how old I am and marvel!) that have been significant to me in one way or another. So here is a reasonably random selection of favourites, and a quick waffle about what makes them so, at least in my case.

1. David Bowie, Station to Station: I love this album. I bought it first when I was about thirteen, and going through what can might be termed a rather extreme relationship with Mr. Bowie (for ‘extreme relationship’, read ‘complete geek about it’). I have often thought that the use of headphones and – at that point – a Walkman can establish a particularly intense connection with music, particularly when said music is blasted into one’s tiny brain at a volume loud enough to demolish approximately half of house. Perhaps that is the reason that I know every last lyric, every ludicrous geee-tar moment, on this album. Equally, perhaps that’s why I genuinely don’t hear it as a 1970s sound aesthetic, which, I suppose, it probably is. It remains a favourite because I now find it oddly comforting, probably because I associate it with being a teenager, and with trolling about with my mum in her slightly nutty little car while she did slightly nutty things as she drove.

2. Royksopp, Melody AM: Whenever I hear the first track of this disc, ‘So Easy’, I am transported to the first trip the aged parent and I undertook in the First New Car We Had Ever Owned. Well, I say new; it was actually six months old, but bearing in mind that prior to that, our cars were normally not only not the current model but not the one before that either, this thing seemed like a whole new breed of vehickle. I mean, for one thing, you didn’t have to use a clothes peg to keep the choke out while the engine warmed up; for another thing, the choke was automatic! As in, no room for interestingly revvy moments when one forgot to retrieve the aforementioned clothes peg, and no overfilling of the petrol tank because the fuel gauge didn’t work, and no need for a hammer when attempting to close the sunroof! Ah, happy days.

3. Joni Mitchell, Blue: this takes me to either La-Que-Sabe‘s sofa, where we sat and talked of things witchly for hours while upstairs the Sabelets slept quietly, unaware of our chocolate-scoffing ways, or to Earthenhouse in any evening of last November, when the witchling was going through a phase of sleeping the first stage of the evening in a small cot in the sitting room while Quercus and I quietly pottered about, eating dinner and chatting in the half-light thrown by the little string of flower-lights which live at the top of the bookshelves. The quiet calm of Blue seemed perfect falling asleep music; she slept through the entire album, waking only as it finished.

4. Jamiroquai, Synkronized: I’m back in university accommodation, living with Quercus for the first time, contaminating our entire flat with strong wafts of incense and blasting ‘Canned Heat’ on Quercus’s frankly most excellent stereo.

5. J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations (perf. Glenn Gould): I hear Glenn Gould singing along in the background, and I think of my mum, telling me about his tendency to play from armchairs, as we sat in the car park of the school where she taught. She had just finished for half-term, and I had come to hear her play duets with her partner, a professional pianist with whom she had a most unusual relationship.

6. Maurice Ravel, Complete Works for Piano (perf. Werner Haas): this finds me lying on the bed in my room as a first-year undergraduate (before I met Quercus); I listened to ‘La Vallée des Cloches’ and ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ almost obsessively, probably partly because I missed my mum so much when I was first away. She sent me a recording of herself playing various Bach preludes and fugues, and she had learnt ‘Le Tombeau’ as I did my A-levels.

7. Steve Reich, Electric Counterpoint (perf. Pat Metheny): Quercus hears this and thinks of British Columbia; for me, it’s driving back from Wales with him, after our first holiday together.

8. Gustav Holst, The Planets Suite: I bought a passel of CDs when I had an insurance claim settled just as I started university; I still remember walking into the shop, in Canterbury, and shelling out what seemed like a shedload of moola on music – this, Werner Haas, Glenn Gould and a few others. It’s just one of those snapshot moments, somehow, mentally. (Preferably I’d like to cheat here, and add the St. Paul’s Suite – the memory here is not the obvious one [we used two movements when we got married], but rather of driving west on the A30 dual carriageway with La-Que-Sabe in the back, talking about music as we tried, the day before the actual wedding, to work out what we’d like to use.)

9. Thievery Corporation, The Mirror Conspiracy: for most of my first degree and a good portion of my MA, I worked for Star Child, a small shop selling incense, herbs, general witchy jiggery-pokeries, and music. Oh, the happy days – sitting behind a counter, and obscured from view by a haze of incense so thick you couldn’t cut it with a spatula, I read most of my academic reading list in the quiet times, and worked my way through various witchcraft books when trade was brisk. Still ranks as one of the best jobs I’ve had, I think, if only in that it provided such very excellent access to such very excellent things.

10. Rachmaninov, Symphony No. 2: just because it’s so beautiful that it almost ought to be illegal. In fact, it probably was at the time.

And you?

Earthenwitch likes:

:: bare feet on warm grass, the smell of ground coffee, her daughter’s hands in her hair, crunchy towels, trays of blackberries laid out to freeze, bags of soup frozen into individual portions, getting parcels through the post, sending presents to distant friends, the sound of rain bouncing off the lane, mushrooms chopped in quarters (stalk and all), early mornings with mist on fields, the smell of camping, thin-nibbed black pens, sticking her hand in bags of corn, the sound of the washing machine in the evening,

Earthenwitch dislikes:

:: pegs which don’t, the smell of dust, subtitles which tell a different truth, receipts, fluorescent lighting, coffee pots which let grounds through, baby books which tell no story, soap, verbose recipes, letters beginning ‘Dear Firstname Secondname’, boiled potatoes, underlined signatures, books with upside-down spines, read receipts, mobile phones which do anything except make a ringing noise, dusty plants, that substance which collects behind the tap.

And you?

Yesterday Quercus, the witchling and I went out to pick yet more elderflower. On Sunday, the solstice, we started off four gallons of elderflower wine. I took the witchling out for a walk while Quercus had a lie-in (it being father’s day), only to return with enough honeysuckle for another gallon – this is an experiment, as we’ve not done honeysuckle before, and there are dire warnings about all but the very ripest flowers (if flowers can be ripe) being poisonous, so if this blog stops being updated in about six months, you’ll know why…

Our second picking trip brought home a big bag of elderflower, gorgeously pollen-dusted and blissfully fragrant, which we then proceeded to ignore in the evening, having said we’d sort it as soon as we got home, in favour of sitting on the sofa and watching Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (we started out saying ‘ooh – we should so watch this more often! It’s a lovely film!’, then reached the bit where everyone gets blown up and remembered why we don’t watch it more often…).

Guess what we’re going to be doing tonight, then? Yup – another four gallons of de-stalking flowers and whatnot. The smell makes it more than worthwhile, particularly as it gives us chance to sit in the kitchen, gawping at our newly-painted-red wall, and remembering the months we spent without plaster on the wall, and with cob dust collecting all over the place as a result. Cob dust. So very… dusty. And so very… red, in our case (Devon has very, very red earth). And, of course, as we pick, we listen to music. I suggested the idea of a music swap in the post below, and a few people have asked for a theme for playlists; on balance, I think the best plan I can come up with is to say how about music that just works for you? Here is a rough idea of what we’ve been listening to lately:

Joni Mitchell – we listen to a LOT of la Mitchell chez nous. Oh yes. From ‘My Old Man’ to ‘Free Man in Paris’, it’s all good.

Thievery Corporation – every. single. album. Even the slightly dubious mix ones.

Bach – particularly the Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould.

Steve Reich – ‘Electric Counterpoint’ is one of my favourite pieces of music.

Gotan Project – ‘Queremos Paz’ always makes me think of driving across southern France and marvelling at fields of sunflowers.

Debussy – particularly the String Quartet.

Horace Silver – the first CD I ever bought Quercus was ‘Pieces of Silver’.

Cali – ‘Je m’en vais’ is an utterly fab song, and one which I can listen to for hours.

So, there you go. Illustrative of this week, at least.  If you don’t fancy the idea of the CD swap, then how about some listening suggestions in the comments box? Go on – be a devil.

(Quick update: just to clarify, what I’d like best is to do the actual CDs you think are worth a go – I burn you something, you burn me something, we all make tracks to the post office et voila!)

As part of my ‘look at all the lovely things you’ve got! You certainly don’t need [insert material object A, B, C, or, indeed, any letter to Z], now, do you, you greedy troll?’ approach to spending no money, I have been surveying things already in my hapless grasp. It’s not going badly; my credit card statement for last month was £40, and that was spent on fuel. A new perspective on things you’re already very familiar with really helps, it seems – I started looking at things anew when I resolved to stop spending money on everything except genuinely necessary stuff, and I realised that however many years of having a little, albeit a very little, spare cash have resulted in some possessions that I hope I will always have, things that really kick aesthetic arse (at least in my not-so-humble opinion) or which do their job so very well that you don’t care if they’re hideously ugly. Though I don’t seem to have included those things here. Ah. Anyway. I digress. Here we go:

1. The casserole dish that Quercus bought me for Valentine’s day this year. I didn’t see it coming; we normally agree a token sum, the surpassing of which results in immediate death a very stern look, and I think that sum was about £3 this year. I can’t really say that I looked sternly at him when he produced the casserole d’amour, however, because that would be a very large lie indeed – I was too busy hyperventilating and drooling.

2. My jewellery box. It is made of reclaimed yew, by these very lovely people, who not only let Quercus pick out the very piece of wood he wanted the box made from, but accommodated his delusions of grandeur designs for the overall shape of it and for the numbers and style of drawers and hidey-holes. He appeared with a large cardboard box at about three in the morning on the night we got married; we’d spent about four hours clearing up the hall we’d had a dance in, and were both in that strange combination of exhilaration and tiredness which one can only achieve having been awake for about thirty hours straight. I hadn’t realised we were doing presents, so felt shifty because I hadn’t got him anything (well, I had, but it was a pair of wellies; come to think of it, this exchange sums up our relationship quite well, I realise); I’d hankered after a box like this since seeing them for the first time in 1998 (this was 2005) at the craft fair which takes place each summer on Exeter’s cathedral green (should that be capitalised, I wonder?). Every time I take something out of it, and, as a habitual earring-wearer, that’s pretty much every morning, I am struck by the gorgeousness of its colours, its textures, which vary from the roughness of original bark to the smooth polish created by hours of very, very, very fine sandpaper, and by the loveliness of Quercus.

3. My slippers. These come from the very lovely folks at the Sunshine Coast Slipper Co., and were bought when Quercus and I were in British Columbia a couple of years (!) back. They are fabulous. Simple. I fight a constant battle to avoid abusing them by walking outside in them, as they are tough enough to do so easily, but I’m aware that it’s a slippery slope from a quick nip round to get the washing to never, ever, taking them off until one day I find myself in the supermarket wearing them, with unwashed hair, mad, staring eyes, and security men closing in from all sides.

4. The very lovely turquoise Raku clock which lives in the sitting room. It came from a small shop in Tavistock, and I absolutely love the colour, the texture of the glaze created by the raku firing process, and the general shape of it. Raku involves shoving pottery, coated in an appropriate glaze, into sawdust when it’s still very hot from the kiln; the fires and gases created by this are what cause the varied effects of the end-result’s colouring. The clock people used to have a website full of such lovely creations as to make one slaver rather unattractively, but, fortunately for both my bank balance and my potentially drool-covered chin, it appears to have vanished. (Though I could get quite keen on these, which they sell in the same shop.)

5. A rather extravagant bigonia which liveth in the sitting room. It was a tiny cutting from a friend about ten minutes ago, but by god these things grow! I love the red leaves – they just seem so wrong. I also rather like the pot it’s in, which came from Trago Mills, which might seem rather surprising to those of you familiar with their work, but I suppose into each life a little sunshine must also fall, or something.

6. Utensils. I love both the pot and its contents. Wooden spoons and spatulas, particularly the arbutus ones we acquired on Cortes Island, really do it for me; I rarely use anything else when cooking, and, rather wankily, I have favourites which I am quite superstitious about using – if I’m doing, say, a birthday cake, I really prefer to use the small arbutus spatula, as if it somehow imbues said comestible with super-powers. (I know. I know. Up the medication already, woman.) I also love this jar; officially, it’s a Rumtopf, and I wish, how I wish, that the aged parent hadn’t dropped the beautiful glass lid on the floor, as, if he’d only managed not to, that jar would be stuffed full of a rather appealing alcoholic substance even as we speak.

7. Books. I know – technically this is cheating, as this isn’t strictly one thing. But I don’t care – that’s the joy of being a hypocrit, you see! To know you’re wrong, and to do it anyway! Or something. Ahem. Moving on. I s’pose favourite books would include the moste excellente Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, The Pursuit of Love (both long-term loves), and, I am slightly (though clearly not too) ashamed to admit, at least for the present, Twilight.

Two together for this one: 8. The stove. Oh, the stove. A Woodwarm 6, for those of you who’re interested. Fan-bloody-tastic. Throw wood in it. Dry washing over it. Stare into it (it’s far more interesting than TV ever was). Cook on it. Steam puddings on it. Which brings me to: 9. The kettle on the stove. This came to us from Quercus’s mother, who once had a red Aga (very lovely but hideous to run because it was an oil-fired chappy); the kettle is very flat-bottomed (would that the same were true of myself) for use on Aga hotplates, but works equally well on the stove. I love the shape of it – it’s so simple-looking, not least because it has no switch.

10. A painting of Paris which my mother watched being done when she was there for six weeks with her school’s production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, for which she organised the music. It always sounded like a very happy time for her; she spent a few months in Germany the following summer with lots of the people she’d been in France with, and nearly married a German man she met during that time. How different her life would have been had things followed that path. It’s peculiar, but I particularly like the khaki colour of the mounting; my father had the painting remounted (still in the original frame) for her many years later, and the colour sets off the picture really well, in my view.

I could add a million things to this list. My wedding ring, the Tiffany lamp Quercus bought me for a birthday present a few years back, the patchwork cushion one of my newly-acquired stepsisters made me the Christmas before last, the various strings of little lighties that are strewn about the house, the sun-emblazoned cushion my mother gave me when I was fourteen. And you?

1. Each night, after the family bath, the tiny daughter is carried upstairs by one of us, and I sit down with her, in the ridiculously comfortable Poang chair (is it wrong that I found myself thinking that the purchase of said chair represented An Act of Overt Adultness?) for her bedtime feed. It takes about a quarter of an hour, normally, unless she is particularly hungry or half-asleep, and when we’re approaching the last furlong, I bash the footstool on the floor three times using my feet, which is Quercus’s signal to get out of the bath and leg it up the stairs. When he arrives, I wind the tiny daughter, and he lifts her from my arms into his own, snuggling her close into his neck for a last cuddle before he wraps her up in her favourite blanket and settles her into her nest. This is both one of my favourite sights, and a favourite moment – the bit when, sitting in the gentle darkness, I watch her little rump, legs sticking out because of the slightly bulky nighttime nappy, floating up into Quercus’s warm embrace.

2. The hens as they wait by the chicken gate, which separates their run from the rest of the garden (the only way to minimise hen devastation, though, frankly, at present, their attentions could do little to worsen the state of our garden – it’s complete chaos thanks to a combination of utter neglect, building work, and natural bedlam caused by a near-stream which comes right through the sheds when it rains, which, this being Devon, is quite frequently); they gather there any time they see – or indeed hear – one of us near the back door.

3. The lights of the dashboard of my car; I think it’s supposed to be a sort of grown-up grey, but to me it looks like very pale violet.

4. Pyewacket peering over the top of the driftwood larder, an occurrence which always prompts speculation as to quite how she manages to get up there (it’s seven feet tall, and there are no obvious paw-holds).

5. Dark clouds blowing in, a little like this:

6. The stark outline of dead trees.

7. Wixon’s fly-killer face. This involves Wix spotting a fly – or indeed a beetle of virtually any sort, for he is not a fussy cat, in this respect at least – and beginning to chase it. The beginning always goes the same way: mouth half-open, constantly chattering his teeth as if snatching miniature flies from the air in anticipation of his nearing slaughter. The noise which accompanies it is even better – a sort of snap, snap, snapping, complete with little grunts of satisfaction (or frustration, depending on his progress).

8. Spotting Quercus in the back of the orchestra as the tuning begins, and then seeing him flash his eyebrows in appropriate moments during the concert itself, often while playing.

9. Cobwebs decked out in dew.

10. Beech woods, at pretty much any time of year. Preferably those ancient ones, with the odd-shaped hedgey-mounds overlaid with moss to the extent that you can’t really see what’s stone, what root, and what tree

And you?

(Absence due to nothing more exciting than freelance editing work, going into (not freelance) work once a week, invading relatives, and shedloads of DIY. Oh, and yesterday, a day to ourselves – the tiny daughter, Quercus and I went to Tarr Steps on Exmoor, and wandered about in the glorious sunshine, stopping to eat a picnic in indecently warm weather.)

1. The witchling’s hair. It’s a mixture of calendula (from the shampoo we use), various herbs and oils (from the blend I made up for her before she was born), and, well, witchling (though it’s not the same as that newborn smell, which I thought was to be attributed to far too many maternal hormones or something, before I encountered it myself).

2. The smell of the cats’ fur when they’ve been out in the cold nighttime air. I like to snuffle my face into their fur as they warm up and start purring (well, Wixon virtually never stops purring, but still, you get the idea); Pyewacket smells like old powderpuffs, and Wixon smells like dark naughtiness (which is about right).

3. The puff of woodsmoke that comes out of the stove when I open it to throw in a log; this only really happens when the wind is in the right direction, as normally our chimney vents like nobody’s business; you need strong wind from the south for anything to make it out into the room.

4. Washing drying over the stove.

5. Lemon zest.

6. Ground coffee (which I love, though I still wish that it tasted as good as it smells).

7. Valerian.*

8. Leather.

9. That Chrimbly smell you get when you come downstairs to a room with a real Christmas tree in situ.

10. The smell of damp cob – earthy, musty and a little like an old church.

And you?

* This is an all-time favourite, though I’ve tried to avoid getting into oils and scents for this post – there are just too many!

1. The gentle scraping of the witchling’s teeth against a piece of apple as she learns how to bite.

2. The whir-click of the well pump kicking in when the tank gets low, up in the roof.

3. The plolp, plolp, plolp of demijohn traps as fermentation gets underway.

4. The cracking and snapping of newly-chopped kindling as the stove lights.

5. The churning of the washing machine, now filling itself without the need for me to stand over it with a watering can! Ah, the joys of mains water.

6. The crunch of stalk as the witchling and I pick daffodils brave enough to emerge despite a recent cold snap.

7. The quiet bubbling of the kettle on the stove.

8. The rain thrumming against the rooflights in the kitchen.

9. Wixon’s super-loud purr as he gets in the way of my iBook.

10. Quercus’s terribly out-of-tune whistling as he wanders round the kitchen in search of tinned tomatoes.

And you?