In a rather half-arsed manner, I have been attempting to take part in Karen‘s ‘Pimp My Menu’ project. I say half-arsed, because so far my part-taking has consisted of thinking ‘oooh, what a good idea’, and making an ill-suited chocolate cake. (Though this is the bit where I throw dirty-yet-mildly-vindicated looks at Turquoise Lisa, who is no better than I am, with her packet curries and her biscuits.)

However.

Here beginneth a new phase. Karen’s idea was not just to try out new things, but also to revisit old favourites passed over in recent times because of laziness/habit/short-term memory loss, and in that spirit, I have been revisiting pizza. Ahh, pizza: champion of sofa-dwellers the world over. Also, I learn, pretty good for small people to poke at (the dough, that is).

Ours goes thusly:

Pizza

Wossinit?
Base:

10 oz self-raising flour (As an aside, does the US have this? All my American recipe books say things like ‘all-purpose flour and baking soda’ or something similar.)
A good slug of olive oil
A fistful of oregano
A fistful of garlic, either chopped and fresh, or dried and powdered
Enough milk (be it goat, cow or soya) to achieve a workable doughy texture (I think mine was about half a pint, from memory.)

Then…
Whack the lot in a bowl and mix it with your sticky little paws. (If they weren’t sticky when you began, they certainly will be very shortly.) Oil a nice greedy-looking tray (ours is about fourteen inches long, and, say, eight or ten wide), and pummel the resulting doughy concoction into submission; the thinner the base, the shorter the cooking time to avoid doughy hell, and the crunchier the results. It is shaming to confess that I now rather like the squareness that our tray results in, and even pass over our round (and specially designed) pizza tray thingy.

When you’ve reached a suitably flattened look, or, rather, when the base is suitably squashed but you live on, courtesy of a glass of red wine, turn your attention to the sauce (and lay off the other sauce, at least temporarily, if you are to avoid burning the aforementioned sticky fists on something warmer than you’d like).

Beg, borrow or steal…
Sauce:

A slug of olive oil
A chopped onion, of the large persuasion
A tube of tomato purée (or a tin of tomatoes, drained and probably de-seeded if you want to be all particular about it)
A stock cube or two
A good wodge of oregano, mixed dried herbs, garlic powder and whatever other herby things suggest themselves
A teaspoon of honey, to take the edge off the acidity
About a half-pint of water, to get the consistency right

Then…
Sling the onions in a pan and fry them for a wee while until they begin to capitulate, before chucking the rest of the stuff in. Stir at will, while prancing around the kitchen to the dulcet tones of Spiro‘s Lightbox (this last bit is optional, I hasten to add). Realise that one’s small girl is dancing too, and laughing at you while she’s doing it. Cook the sauce for about ten minutes or so, to make sure the onion’s not too crunchy.

Spead the sauce on the base, and then chuck on whatever you fancy, really; our favourites seem to be cheese (obviously), red onion slices, courgettes cut into large chunks, sweetcorn, more cheese, and pepperoni, with sunflower seeds sprinkled on the top for added crunch. (Sunflower seeds are my favourite addition to the top of most things; I love love love them on top of hovel pie, a lentil-based version of cottage pie which we ought to eat more often, and which might form the next part of this menu-pimping malarky, come to think of it.)

Although I feel content, generally, with the sort of things we eat, it’s always nice to come across new favourites, so I ask you, lovely readers, what am I missing out on that I should be eating EVERY SINGLE DAY? What can motivate me to lurch out of the rut that we normally inhabit, lovely though that rut might be? There’s nothing like a new recipe to look forward to…

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

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

- largely covered in lime render;

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

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

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

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

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

Ahem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you? What’s good where you are?

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

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

Shhh.

Quiet.

Lean in closer, and don’t say a word.

*whispers*

I’m contemplating trying our cloth nappies again. It’s been months since we abandoned them, and the other day I happened upon them while up in the attic, rootling my way through boxes of kitchen paraphernalia which hadn’t seen the light of day since, well, probably 2005. There they were. The nappies, that is. Not the kitchen stuff. Though that was there too, of course. Ahem. Yes. Nappies. Now, some of you may recall the succession of traumas which were visited upon us during our time as cloth-nappiers. There was the nappy rash. And then – oh – there was some more. And then? Just for fun? A bit more of that ol’ rash malarky. And did I mention the rash? And of course, accompanying the rash, there were the creams. And the liners. And the lotions. And the camomile tea-soaked wipes. And the washing-powder changes. And the white vinegar, and then the not white vinegar. And the nappy-free time, and the hourly changes.

Oh, how we laughed.

And now, BECAUSE I AM INSANE, I find myself wondering (as a good friend of mine once did regarding his intense hatred of salmon) if this time, things could be different.

Of course, it’s probably idiocy of the first order to contemplate such a step, but you know, it really galls me that we have about two hundred pounds’ worth of nappies just sitting in the sodding attic, while each week I go and buy sodding disposable nappies (albeit the ones with a sop to the eco-conscious amongst us) from the supermarket, only to chuck them into landfill a few days later. They are very convenient, I’ll admit – quick to change, slim-fitting, and easily wrapped up using their own tabs when you want to chuck them – and, thus far, they are the only thing which has meant the small girl is rash-free. She does still get sore from time to time, but not in the skin-peeling, sunburn-resembling manner we started to think might be inevitable when we were using cloth all the time.

But…

But…

BUT – ! (If you’ll forgive the pun…)

I hanker after cloth backsides again. I didn’t mind the washing rota (although they do take FOREVER TO DRY, it has to be said, and I do think that tumble driers are probably anathema when it comes to the eco-contribution the cloth nappies make), and I loved the way they looked when she was trolling about in them.

(Is it sharing too much to say that what’s prompted this longing, in part, is the decision to buy some cloth sanitary pads? [Isn't that a grim phrase, by the way? 'Sanitary pads'. Shudder. Any better alternatives will be greeted with a friendly - yet not too firm - handshake and a smal piece of flapjack, the recipe for which will follow reasonably shortly, or, at least, as soon as I finish gorging myself on the aforementioned.*] Yes, it probably is sharing too much, but hey – them’s the breaks. I think that the cloth nappy experience just made me realise how many of such pads one buys, each month, only to chuck and find you’ve run out at just the wrong time the next month. So, washable ones, given that we still use washable wipes for the small girl, seemed like a natural progression.)

Has anyone out there found that an utterly irrational improvement was found after a long break from such nappies? If so, please do let me know; there is no reason to suppose that a second go would be anything other than a repeat performance, yet still I hanker…

* Don’t even ask about the exercise/eating regimen. I’m not gorging, honestly, but the last month has been an utter joke, exercise-wise. I shall do better, and retire to flagellate myself in the meantime. Hmm. Flagellation as a form of calorie-burning. Has promise, no? No. You’re quite right. No.

A while back I made some passing reference to chocolate malt cake, and I may even have gone so far as to add that I’d post a recipe at some point. Foolish me. Those words sealed the fate of that recipe for at least a month, as I then promptly went away for a week or so, and had a general melt-down. Well, meltdown over, I now present said recipe, along with an apology for its being so long in coming. I know what chocolate and malt means, gentle reader, and I don’t mess with such power lightly.

Chocolate Malt Cake
Ingredients
Chocolate and malt. Ha. Had you there, didn’t I? But seriously…
2 mugs self-raising flour
2 large-ish eggs (in my case, three smallish blue ones, I think)
½ mug dark brown sugar
½ mug malt extract
¼ mug cocoa
¼ mug sunflower oil

Yes. I used mugs. Not cups. BECAUSE I AM GREEDY.

Then…
Sling the lot in a large bowl and beat the buggery out of it. Pour the resulting shiny happy mixtureness into an oiled loaf tin (or a smug-inducing silicone one which requires no such fiddling) and cook in YOUR NEW OVEN WHICH HEATS UP IN ONE NANOSECOND AND ISN’T COVERED IN A MYSTERIOUS FILM OF OIL for about forty-five minutes on 180°c.

All clear?

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

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

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

We are pikies. It’s simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plus side:

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

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

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

The not-quite-so-plus:

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

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

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

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

Much to my astonishment, the last-ditch email I sent David has elicited a response – I still have very little idea what’s happened as he was quite mysterious about it, frankly, but at least we’ve established some form of contact, and he’s emailed back saying he’ll get Jules to get in touch with us. So, that’s a big relief – I really hate conflict, particularly when it involves people I consider friends (albeit in a ‘I may voodoo you soon’ manner), and I’ll be very happy if we can resolve this amicably; it’s never good when you find yourself idly wondering if the police will be able to give you reliable advice on something, is it? So, fingers crossed, this will be sorted soon.

In other news, I am running away from home again. The kitchen is nearing completion, but the dust, grime and hours needed simply aren’t really working with a small girl who isn’t very well and a sleep-deprived mama, so it’s off to Quercus’s mother we go, we go, yo ho ho. Or something. This means no internets for a few days, but probably lots of knitting; I’ve finished that cardigan shown in progress in the last post, and am suitably stunned at my own wondrousness (er… ‘luck’ might be closer to the truth), so I’m now casting around for something new to knit. Current possibilities are, well, largely hat-related, although truth be told I’m a bit bored with hat-knitting; somehow I have accrued lots and lots of small quantities of very pretty wool, which means lots of small projects, really, unless I buy yet more wool, when what I really want is something more substantial. The only candidate for such an enterprise is, at the moment, a huge knot of wool which looks as if the cats had scrumbled at it for at least two weeks prior to its being forgotten in the attic for about six months. Ahem. This is rather dampening my appetite for starting, shall we say.

Hoo-ho.

And you? What’s going on in your neck of the woods?

ARGH.

So.

The letter that we sent recorded delivery to David, he who hath saddled us (apparently) with a caravan we don’t want, don’t own, and want gone, has come back to us – the post office attempted to deliver it, left a card saying they’d tried, and then it waited for two weeks in their depot thingy before wending its way back to us.

ARGH.

Is so annoying.

In the meantime, I’ve tried emailing David again to let him know that if we can’t raise him by post or phone, we will end up going round there, either to tackle him face to face or to find out if his landlord knows where the fuck he’s gone. It’s all so bloody unnecessary. That’s what pisses me off. It’s not like we want anything from him now – that ship sailed bloody months ago – but you’d think someone we once considered a good friend would have the decency to pass on a phone number, at least, wouldn’t you? I mean, obviously we did something to piss him off, but surely it must be clear that we’ve no idea what, and, if he ever does read this blog still, that whatever it was was inadvertent; I just can’t for the life of me work out what has happened here.

Fucking caravan.

Fucking situation.

Fucking prospect of over an hour’s drive each sodding way to see if he’s moved.

Fucking fucking fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ack. Haloscan is stopping its current free incarnation. I thought I’d stop using it, and go back to WordPress comments. And then I broke my site, for the umpteenth time, and of course I’m buggered if I know how to sort it, so until I can summon up the energy to fix up the mutilated CSS and the strange-looking header, I’m going with this oddly Germanic number.

Ick.

And also, bums.

Update: yes, still most of the above; just a quick question, too – does anyone actually ever use the search bar? I ask because it’s just possibly going to drive me demented; finding the CSS which governs its appearance seems to demand a peculiar combination of dogged determination and a devil-may-care attitude to the passing of time – I can manage the former, but the latter is proving tricky…

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

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

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

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

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

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

In amongst some stressful happenings, there are bright patches of warm, glorious sunshine. This afternoon, and indeed its counterpart yesterday, was spent curled up in the warmth of a large feather quilt on a large comfortable bed, watching as the small girl snoozed quietly beside me. There is nothing like sleeping together to smooth away the cares, to brush back the shadows, to bring back the radiance, to strengthen the connection. The small girl sleeps deeply, her breath a constant source of wonder to me as I think of the tiny lungs in her chest working away, almost by magic. She sighs as she sleeps, and I wonder what her dreams show her. Does she think of time spent in the velvet sling, carried on her parents’ willing backs? Does she think of the softness of luscious black fur, proffered on a friendly cat’s paw? Or does she dream of the night sky, the moon which fascinates her and the stars which make her smile? Perhaps one day she will tell me. For now, I am content to lie there beside her, moving in and out of my own dreams as I hold her against me.

Those of you using feed readers may have picked up a post I disappeared a while back, one in which I explained the oddities of the caravan which lives in our garden at the moment. Well, to those of you who didn’t, the brief overview goes thusly: Lovely David, fixer-up of Citroëns and general all-round good chap, helped enormously on our extension self-build, and in the process he found us a caravan to use as a temporary kitchen, bathroom and general living space while chaos enveloped our house. The caravan belonged to a friend of his, J(o?)ules; we did him a favour in giving it a temporary home while he moved house, and he did us a favour in providing us with something which we’d otherwise have had to buy and then resell when the building work was done.

Hmm.

So far, so good.

Fast-forward six months, and it was the summer of last year. David had some odds and ends to finish on the wiring he’d done in our extension, wiring for which he’d been paid (and which he’d been able to do because, during the build, he’d gone on a course to become a certified electrical installer-type person, able to do Part P certification, a necessary part of building regulations in the UK; we paid about a third of the fee for this, which was quite a considerable wodge for us), and we’d arranged a time for him to come and do it. He didn’t appear, and since that last normal conversation back in the summer, we’ve not heard from him at all. Despite calls and emails and texts and messages and forum posts.

I’d just like to say, at this point, how upset I’ve been about it; we both have. We thought this man was our friend, and, while we’re both open to an explanation which contradicts our eventual, reluctant conclusion that not only was he not really our friend, but that he was being a bit of a swine too, we’ve no idea why he’s disappeared off our particular universe. Being me, and naturally prone to a particularly unlovely combination of guilt and incessant curiosity, I feel quite sad about it still, if I’m honest; it’s so rare to meet people with whom you really get on almost from the word ‘go’ that I feel you have to hang on to them wherever possible. Of course, to do so requires, generally, a little reciprocation on their part. That is where this one falters a bit.

And, while Lovely David may have beaten a hasty retreat, sadly, the caravan has stubbornly refused to do likewise. It sits, festering, at the end of the garden. It is eight feet wide and twenty feet long. It occupies the space we have got in mind for a woodshed, and it’s a pain in the arse, not least as it means we’re constantly parking in eight inches of Devon mud. Also, of course, it’s one of those “but it’s not even ours!” things. J(o)ules hasn’t got in touch with us, as, to the best of our knowledge, he hasn’t got our number or address (although my real name and general location on Google brings me up as hits numbers one to ten), and we haven’t got anything beyond his first name, and David doesn’t seem to want to give it to us.

So, yesterday, I finally managed to speak to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, and they tell me that we must write to David, sending it by registered post so that he must sign to show he’s received it, and then wait two weeks. If he doesn’t reply, we’ll be selling the caravan, before hanging on to the proceeds for six years (!), in case J(o)ules should appear, wanting his wagon back. I don’t know if David will reply; to be honest, if you’d told me a year ago that we’d find ourselves in this situation, I simply wouldn’t have believed it, so little would this have fitted in with the image that we had of him at the time. But hey -here we are. I’m quietly depressed about the whole thing.

Two weeks and counting, eh?