Ooooh, it’s been a long time since I did anything anyone could call actively witchcraft-like, but in the last few days, despite being crabby (yes, more-so than normal) and stupidly tired, I have been Thinking. Perhaps it’s the windy weather, blowing in hints of the year to come. Perhaps it’s the vivid dreams I’ve been having, showing the wheel turning. Perhaps it’s rediscovering pictures of the circle of toadstools which appeared at the end of the garden, suggesting secret midnight activities involving starlight and flames. Perhaps it’s the obscene quantities of chocolate I’ve been eating, turning my blood to cacao. Ahem. Anyway. Whatever it is, I have been remembering the time when I worked in a certain witchcraft-orientated shop, and thinking about all the things I learned while I was sitting behind the counter in a nearly-empty shop for hours at a time. And I have been thinking about all those candles burned, and all that incense wafted, and all those oils accrued (for lo! there are many, many oils in a small set of wooden drawers in the living room), and the general presence of low-level witchcraft that prevailed during that time. Perhaps it’s having a little bit more sleep (last night poor Quercus drew the short straw, and ended up sleeping in the lounge, on a massive pile of cushions, while I took the night-shift with the small girl; in a way, he got the upper hand, as he didn’t have to get up for Teething Duty at three a.m., but of course the whole sleeping-on-cushions bit isn’t ideal, and I think I ended up with more sleep than normal because I had the whole gargantuan bed to myself). Either way, this morning, it feels like things are afoot, and something has shifted, and shifted for the better.

Bell, book and candle, this-a-way.

And in the meantime, I have finished the watercolour pencils drawing I started for the small girl before she even born, and Chrimbly brought me a new set of double-pointed needles and some beautifully variagated Noro yarn to play with. It is time for a new list of projects, methinks; this witching feeling that has crept up on me appears to be taking a creative direction.

1. A cardigan for the small girl. (No. 1 was finished, but it’s on the small side due to my being rubbish at maths, and having to do sums which pushed my brain in ways it just doesn’t enjoy, all because I wanted to use some wool I happened to have in my stash, rather than going out and buying the stuff specified in the pattern.)

2. A Noro hat for me. Myself. All for my very ownses.

3. A sweater for Quercus. I would really love to knit something for him; so often, my creativity is focused on the small girl or the house, but Quercus is the axis on which my world turns, so it seems only fair to clothe said axis in something appropriately woolly. I’d like a jumper with a roll-over neck and no welt, which is relatively easy to do, and which uses double-knitting wool. Anyone come across such a thing? Comment, do.

4. I have it in mind to paint a small but significant set of stars on the small girl’s wall. If things go to plan, we will be re-rending the inside of Earthenhouse this summer, so now is the time to try out such things without having to commit to them forever; we have a very lovely book with illustrations which I could copy quite easily using the aforementioned watercolour pencils, and the small girl does love a star or two.

5. A spiral for the kitchen wall. Longer-term readers may recall the spiral which lived on our wall before we rebuilt the kitchen – hopefully this one will get to stay a little bit longer. When I was little I wanted a house full of music and laughter and bright colours; that spiral said all the right things to me, and it said them in three languages.

6. I must find me a chest of drawers, narrower than a metre, and tall enough to be useful. We have a short wall in the extension, and I would very much like to use it to get Quercus off the hook of making drawers by finding drawers which fit, and doing something to make them fit in. Drawers, though. They tend to be wider than this, damn them. So, the search continues. And then, oh then, if I find some, I’ll get to Put Things In Them. I love doing that. And organising cupboards. Oh, unpacking things. I’m really looking forward to rediscovering the contents of our sheds, most of which belong in a kitchen. (I know – I need to get out more.)

Right. On that note, off to do something productive. And you?

Right. It’s official. I have decided that the best way to rediscover my mojo, currently missing in inaction, is to just pretend it’s here. It’s not quite the same, but levering oneself off the sofa isn’t pleasurable even when one has got more energy than the average sloth, so I figure I’ve got little or nothing to lose, except a few extra minutes of lounging, and that seems to be contributing to the problem rather than alleviating it. So, today, I have ordered an external hard-drive (yay!, largely because taking action in this, er, active manner means that I no longer have to think about such deeply boring things, and can now return to filling my head with more fascinating and useful information, such as, um, recipes for Swedish apple cakes, and, er, knitting patterns), bought a ridiculously reduced pair of shoes on t’inter (that’s reduced in price, I hasten to add; I have not suddenly developed a passion for foot bondage) to solve the stupid lack of shoeage that I have recently developed, sorted two lots of laundry (so much less horrid since we have done away with the laundry airer and replaced it with the cunning hangy-from-ceiling thing – I am almost enjoying laundry, which just might constitute the eighth wonder of the world), and made two batches of biscuits with the tiny daughter. That’s ‘with’ as in ’she helped’, rather than ‘now available in new daughter flavour!’. It seems that the small girl may well have inherited my love of all things kitchen witchery: she spent an hour stirring the mixture, putting in individual pieces of mixed peel, and shaking in what can only be described as a veritable spronkle of cinnamon. End result: one very sticky daughter, one VERY sticky counter, and something like a metric ton of biscuits. Not bad, eh?

Tomorrow I shall make a bid for freedom by sticking the small girl in the velvet sling and going for a walk with her. At the moment, most of our walks involve her doing the walking, and one or other of her parents sort of idling along, although when she’s on top form, I reckon she’s managing about two miles an hour, which, on legs approximately a quarter the length of ours, is not bad going, by my reckoning. But… it’s not exactly strenuous for adult companions, shall we say, and, as previously mentioned, at this rate, I shall be hiring myself out for use as a traffic island. Unfortunately, I need exercise. Don’t get me wrong: mostly, I loathe the very thought of such a thing. But… in the quiet of my secret mind, I confess (to the entire inter) that I do love that feeling when you’ve walked five miles, and have another two or so to go, and you’re into your stride, and your legs feel as if they’re walking for themselves and you’re not really putting in any effort and you could go on forever.* And perhaps it’s the Sagittarian in me, but I often feel better for getting out, getting fresh air, a change of scene. So, that’s the plan tomorrow – go somewhere, preferably by the sea, and walk for at least forty minutes, at a good quick pace, while carrying about twenty-four pounds of baby. Good for the soul, and not so bad for the ol’ cardiac whatsit either, I hope.

On which note, I shall retire to my chaise-longue. It’s not good to rush one’s recover.

*Or until someone offers you a nice bun and a cup of tea. I’m only human, you know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answers, anyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The shit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The not-shit:

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

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

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

- I have finished Christmas shopping.

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

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

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

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this previously, but it occurred to me yet again today how very much I appreciate one aspect – at least! – of being an adult: the ability to create one’s own traditions, and to develop one’s own routines and rhythms to support both those traditions and one’s ordinary, everyday life.  When I was little, my parents were not big on routine, nor on tradition, I realise. We had very few things that happened routinely, and fewer things to which we returned each year, say, or each season; this, perhaps, explains why I find such things so comforting. We never went grocery-shopping routinely (and indeed both parents seemed slightly scornful of such a concept), meaning we often had last-minute dashes out for dinner ingredients;* more routine, if one can call them that, were the spontaneous day-trips of three-hundred-mile roundtrips, which normally started at ten in the morning, meaning late arrivals and even later returns home. My parents spent a lot of my childhood playing for folk dances, which meant I spent many evenings half-asleep behind stage curtains, or curled up in the back of the car, quilt spread between amplifier kit and a stray violin case; Morris men late on summer evenings, chucking those mysterious sticky-things about the place in a vaguely sinister manner, ploughmen’s dinners, drafty tents and midges circling half-empty pints of cider – all things I associate with life before the age of, say, ten. My father enjoyed being centre-stage – he still does, though he does less playing of this variety now, preferring orchestral stuff – and being out preceding one’s reputation doesn’t really sit well with a shopping list and a meal rota. My mother’s part in this chaotic existence was largely determined by the fact that I just don’t think she was very interested in having established patterns of existence. She longed for them, in some ways, I think – the security of knowing what will happen and when – but just couldn’t quite summon up the enthusiasm needed to turn ideas into reality. When she and I lived on our own after the aged parent moved to London to live with his then-girlfriend, my mother was a different woman – much tidier, much more organised. I wonder now who was the chaos-perpetrator, and I think it was probably my father, though to my knowledge she never made a conscious decision to step away from that.

Aaaaanyway, the point is that I think the reason I love order, and rhythm, so much, is that I experienced very little of it as a child. Now, I ground myself through the patterns which shape our lives. Quercus, the witchling and I start each morning curled up in our big bed in a largely dark room, hiding, feeding (in the witchling’s case), and generally waking up as slowly as possible. We finish each day with stories, the quiet dark of lamplight, and a bevy of kisses, as this is the witchling’s current fascination. Our days follow the same pattern, awash with constantly evolving patterns reassuring at once in their adaptability and their reliability. In the ten years we have been together, Quercus and I have evolved seasonal patterns too – Christmas, for example, now includes a cake made with dark chocolate, fruit and spices, a tree which arrives on the solstice, and Pfeffernüsse. We have non-chocolate-related calendars, homemade stockings, and far too many satsumas. Homemade puddings and mincemeat biscuits, this year mashed into submission by the witchling’s tiny fists. A real tree, and fircones, biscuits and felted hearts and stars to go on it.

It’s so, so, so nice to be the person who decides when and how we do these things. Not to have to wait and hope and wonder if things will work out the way you’d like, but to take charge and make it so. (I can never say that without thinking of that chap in Star Trek.) Part of me appreciates the notion that the witchling, as a very small person, seems to thrive on the gentle repetition of our daily lives, but part of me is aware that she is not the only one. At the moment, it seems that the spontaneity I experienced as a child was enough to be going on with; the routines we have evolved seem to support me every bit as much as they do my child. Does this mean she’ll be a thrill-seeking travel addict, I wonder? Is it as simple as a step away from what one experiences in one’s own childhood? Probably not, given that Quercus’s early childhood was pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum – he can’t remember a week where no shopping was planned, nor a journey made without preparation – yet he too thrives on the existence of certain rhythms.

And you? Do you do things differently each day, each week, each year? Do the traditions of your childhood reassure or restrict you? Do tell. I am all agog. (Can one be partially agog, I wonder?)

*Ironically, this lack of routine is now such a well-established thing in relation to the aged parent that one can almost call it a tradition.

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

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

Egad.

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

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

- Clipper’s Assam tea with vanilla.

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

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

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

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

It was my birthday on Friday. Mostly, the day consisted of gloating over the rather dandy selection of presents which, er, presented themselves, together with far more cake-eating than is generally advisable, and a spot of pottering around the shops in Exeter (something I do increasingly rarely, though I’m delighted to find that a small shop to which I’ve been going since I first came to Devon in 1998 remains a dead-cert for me; it probably says it all that its defining feature when you walk through the door is the colourful nature of its goodies) followed by a walk at the sea as it was getting dark. These days, the witchling is a sufficiently confident walker that this means a hand held by each parent, and plenty of swinging over puddles. I couldn’t say for sure, but I suspect our glee probably equals her own.

Yesterday we did my official birthday treat, which consisted of a trip to the Yarner Trust’s Christmas fair, up in North Devon. There was some lovelies on offer, including a felting kit which may have made its way into my sticky grasp (and with which I am hoping to create some felted dreadlocks to add to my collection; I never have taken the dreadlocked plunge, despite still lusting after my very own head of dreads, and given the witchling’s love of twiddling my hair, I don’t think the time is quite right at the moment, so I settle for felted dreads bound in amongst my hair in a – mostly futile – attempt to contain the follicular chaos), and we had a very nice lunch in Boscastle before walking the witchling down the harbour and back in the increasingly pouring rain.

The only slight downside to all this is that we’re all in varying stages of a rather unpleasant throat/cough/cold thing, for the second time in a month; the witchling felt more and more pathetic as bedtime drew near, and I felt rather shifty for having taken her out – I often find it hard to decide when to just think ‘to hell with it – out we go, and we’ll all be the better for it’, and when to just stay put and fester indoors. I tend to think fresh air and whatnot is no bad thing, and if I’m not well I do find it easiest to occupy ourselves by going out, rather than kicking about the house.

I’m really, really ready to get past this bit where we’re catching everything going, mind you – this autumn has been a bit of a joke, health-wise. We’ve gone from rarely being ill – I think the year before the witchling was born, we were completely cold-free, despite working in large open-plan offices with huge contingents of germs just waiting to pounce on one’s unsuspecting immune system – to barely recovering from one thing before the next one appears. I’ve just purchased a large and intimidating-looking bottle of Floradix, a vitamin-mineral-tonic-thingy which, if the taste is anything to go by, appears frighteningly good for one. I’ve also stocked up on extra fruit and veg – we normally manage veg with every meal, but other than apples, our fruit intake could be better, so it’s satsuma binge time. I suppose it’s the chronic tiredness that makes us easy targets for germs, but it really is getting tedious; I suspect my cough may indicate some sort of bronchial nonsense, which is just utterly loathsome. So, anyone out there got any suggestions for fighting this sort of thing off? My normal weapons – ginger, honey, lemon, garlic, fruit and veg and Eating Properly And None Of That Junk You Think Will Give You Energy – just don’t seem to be keeping things at bay…

Urgle. No idea where the last week went, apart from the bit that I spent in West Sussex, isolated from the pernicious influences of the internet and all that sparkles therein. This made me realise, once again, how much time I spend pratting about online when I should be getting on with the things I constantly moan about not having time for. Gods, what a sentence. I spent evenings reading (three entire books knocked off in the space of five days, which is pretty good going, even by my speed-reading standards) and knitting, with the result that I’ve finished the back and half of the front of a cardigan for the tiny daughter, and I’ve decided to keep up this rather lower-profile internet useage. For one thing, it makes me value the time I do spend online, rather than just obsessively hitting ‘refresh’ on my feed reader, and it also means that we’re back to spending evenings DOING THINGS together, rather than slumped in front of some film or other, courtesy of various websites. It’s funny – when we got rid of our telly, both Quercus and I felt good about it, not least as we’d hardly watched it for months. But then, when I’m tired and not getting much sleep, I seem to gravitate towards the internet in much the same way that I would have used television in days gone by – not activity, as such, but a sort of real-life-is-paused thing that lets you off the hook of living. Well, enough, says I. I reclaim the time I spend reading Go Fug Yourself (which is mostly about people I’ve never heard of, anyway), and I claw back the hours lost to Facebook and Twitter (which has never really caught me in the way it has others, but which is still handy for procrastination purposes), and I brandish knitting needles and crafty bits and bobs, and I depart the parish to prepare bits of card for the tiny daughter and I to attempt to transform into an advent calendar later on. (And no, I have not turned to the church for comfort in my hour of need, but I do like to celebrate seasonal whatsits, and the notion of advent calendars thus appeals to my generally-ridiculously-excited affection for midwinter.)

I hasten to add that I don’t consider this blog, nor my reading of other people’s blogs and the commenting thereon, to be part of my problematic nonsense time online; genuine interaction I value very highly, but pratting about on sites in which I’m not even really interested, simply because I can’t be arsed to get off my backside and get on with things, despite feeling shitty about not doing so, is just not on. So there. Also, I am determined that the tiny daughter shan’t be exposed to the internet to the extent that it becomes part of the background noise that other people experience as the constantly-on television; the last thing I want is for her to feel that she’s not interesting enough to be put before the compulsive checking of email. So, it’s back to basics: no iBook if she’s awake, apart from the odd phone number-checking moment, or things of that ilk.

Right. As you were. And coming soon: oak kitchens, the building thereof; multicoloured tiles, the drooling over thereof; chocolate fudge, the vast consumption thereof; and many more such nonsensical things, as the fancy taketh me.

How are you all?

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

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

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

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

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

Finally I managed to achieve the impossible: remembering – on a day where the rain wasn’t quite as stair-rod-like as it has been in recent weeks – not only to find the camera, but to recharge the batteries, and to take pictures of the house while there was (sort of) sunshine to set off the newly-lime-washed walls.

Of course, I digressed, and ended up with pictures of the toadstool (?) ring which has sprung up among the long grass further up the lane, and of the storm clouds closing in from the west, and of the sunshine which lurked about the trees despite the impending downpour, and of the tiny daughter, snuggled up against my back while wearing possibly the world’s sweetest little red velvet coat (complete with bear ears, though don’t ask me which sort of bear is red velvet and approximately 2′ 4″). But hey – digression is something of a habit after years as an arts student, so I’ll let myself off, and continue to bask in the smugness of having uploaded various pictures for posts I haven’t even written yet. That never happens.

We managed three coats of limewash before we declared for now; I think the spring will probably see us adding another two or three coats, just to be on the safe side, but at least we’re (reasonably) happy that the lime render is now weatherproofed for this winter, and, while the windows are creating miniature lakes on the windowsills each morning, the damp should begin to ease up a bit now that the walls are at least able to breath in one direction. Next summer we’re going to render the inside of the house too; the walls are currently clad in a thick layer of very damp and crumbly plaster (the nature of which will remain unclear until we take some of the wallpaper off – it could be lime, it could be gypsum), and then some deeply unpleasant wallpapering. Most of the horrendousness of the wallpaper is aesthetic, I confess, and we dealt with it in the short term by simply painting everything white, but of course that does little to solve the fact that our walls are wearing rubber gloves, effectively, instead of enjoying the breathability that cob needs. So, we’ll plaster the walls with lime, and replace the ceilings (some of which are now very tentative indeed), and paint with something nice (possibly more casein distemper, which is just lovely to use, and which, I learn from the wonders of Google, one can make oneself, should one care to travel even further down the route of knitting one’s own lentils while bathing in homemade granola).

So, from crumbling render and cracked cob walls, we move to the wondrousness of walls which are clothed in sunlight. (Just don’t get me started on the prospect of the combined appeal of a render gun, low ceilings and interior spaces; for me, the pain is still too near.)

Update

Quercus left a comment on this post saying how I hadn’t really explained how utterly miserable a task re-rendering a cob house is. You know, I think he’s right. I didn’t mention the muck – constant mud, everywhere, mixed with the sandy grit needed to make up the render, and a light dusting of sort of dried slip over most surfaces, including your arms, hair, face and ankles, despite a full-body suit of the sort used for farm inspections – and I didn’t mention the woe of passing a loaded render gun (weighing probably thirty pounds) up a scaffold tower when balanced rather precariously on an up-ended plank in order to reach as high as possible so that Quercus, himself at full stretch leaning down, didn’t fall into the waiting barrow of render perched just beneath the scaffold. I also didn’t mention the noise of the compressor, which sounds like a small lorry, running for hours on end, and pausing only to squeal in an alarming my-belt-is-going manner from time to time, just to freak its non-compressor-savvy owners out. I also didn’t mention that we’ve utterly broken our garden – we had one patch of niceness left before the rendering, where the tiny daughter and I used to sit when Quercus was doing something more fun, like, oh I don’t know, knocking the old render off the house or chainsawing wood for the winter or something, and that patch ended up being the second spot we used for mixing up the render; it’s covered in a reasonably thick layer of lime slurry, and there’s no way it’ll be turned around by the spring, I fear.

But.

Still.

We did it all ourselves (mostly Quercus), and we saved ourselves £20,000 in the process, as well as learning a hell of a lot about our cob house that we wouldn’t have known if we’d just paid someone. (To say nothing of the fact I’d be writing this from behind bars, post-necessary-bank job.)

I’ve seen a new meme floating around the atmos in the last few days, one which focuses on what people are reading, and what their little ones are reading too. I’m not feeling collected enough to join in officially, but I did want to witter on about a couple of books, so this seems an apt time to do so.

The tiny daughter’s favourite thing is a book. She also likes her lighthouse (which, consisting of wooden rings of different colours, is one of my favourites too), and her wooden hedgehog (which is also wooden rings, one each of red, two shades of orange and yellow, but with the added bonus of varying numbers of holes drilled into them so that in order to fit on the hedgehog’s base, the alignment must also be sorted out the right way; this has kept her going back for more when I think other stacking toys might have become dull by now), but still, if she’s ever bored or fractious, a book is the first thing we go for. Recently, her ability to look you in the eye, attempting to keep the tell-tale grin off her face before she beetles off around the corner to run away and hide, has only added to the utter joy I feel when we sit down to read together.

Current favourites are Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper, No Matter What by Debi Gliori, and Keep Love in Your Heart, Little One by Giles Andreae and Clara Vulliamy. Of course, they’re partly my favourites, too – the illustrations for all three are just so scrumptious that I want to climb into the pages and set up house there. I mean, look at these, from Keep Love in Your Heart:*

Big is even wearing striped socks. What’s not to like?

As for reading material of a more adult nature, well, I’m struggling at the moment. I read Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves and really enjoyed it; in fact, I intended to do take part in A Clever and Intelligent Discussion of It in October, but somehow that fell by the wayside. Since then, I’ve read A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly, and enjoyed that too, but now I’m back to re-reading H. Potter (currently, The Deathly Hallows), and I could do with some recommendations. Recent enjoyments have included (and I feel I should feel shame at this, yet I don’t, somehow) the Twilight saga (saga – !), but I could do with something a little meatier to get my teeth into, I think. Suggestions, anyone?

* Yes, I am aware of the slightly cloying nature of this title, and yes, there was a time in my life when I probably would have vomited at the very mention of such a phrase, but hey, such is life – I’m a hypocrite.

A while back, I mentioned the chocolate ginger cake I made for Quercus’s birthday. Oh, the chocolateyness of it. Oh, the gingerification of it. Folks, it was, put simply, such stuff as dreams are made on. Anyway, in the absence of anything remotely interesting to say about anything else, I thought I’d offer it up here, on a virtual plate, for your cooking – and scarfing – enjoyment. Of course, anything ginger gets a get-out-of-accusations-of-piggery-free card, courtesy of it being the time of year when one catches all sorts of nasty cough-related bugs, and ginger being a most lovely way to attempt to ward such nasties off. Of course the second, it’s also a very good way to worm your way into your loved ones’ affections – providing cake is always a winner, no?

In other news, well, still coughing. Today I caved and started to take the antibiotics. I’ve been coughing for ten days; enough is enough, I suppose. It’s all very tedious. Never mind. There is tea; there is ginger; there is, then, hope.

Chocolate Ginger Loveliness

Get mits on:
200g dark chocolate;
200g brown sugar;
200g butter;
A tbsp self-raising wholemeal flour;
Three large eggs;
Four of those knobbly bits of ginger you get in a jar of preserved ginger, together with a good ol’ slurp of the liquid too.

Then…
Melt the chocolate with the butter in a manner which doesn’t involve the woodburner, a lot of spitting butter, and the too-late realisation that washing is within spitting range. Stick the ginger into a small bowl and – assuming you’ve got one – blitz the hell out of it with one of those natty little hand-held blitzy things which are probably officially meant only for blending soup. Warning: ginger really travels in this situation. Sling the resulting goop in with the sugar, then stick in in the melted chocolate and butter mixture, before beating in the eggs and the flour. Select a tin of your choice – ours was a slightly battered square number – about eight inches across, and stick it in t’oven for about, well, the timing is probably highly oven-specific, to be honest; our oven being the shite pile of crapness that it is, it took about forty minutes, but a decent version might manage to cook this to perfection in half that. The idea is that the top looks slightly cracked, but the inside remains a sticky gooey loveliness. You get the idea. Anyway. Retrieve from oven. Poke suspiciously with soon-to-be-burnt finger, and indulge in any loose bits (purely for research, you understand), before scoffing as much as you think you can remove without being detected in your gluttony.