Ohhhhh. You know how some days feel as if the edges are fraying, and you’re clutching at those threads while juggling an armful of energetic frogs all hell-bent on escaping your dubious attempts at captivity, AND you’re doing all this while walking over hot coals and reciting German verbs in all sorts of challenging and deeply un-Anglo-Saxon-seeming tenses?  Today has been one of those.

If I’m honest, it’s not so much the various miniature traumas of today that has me feeling a little beaten, though. I think it’s the cumulative effect of a few weeks or so that seem to be one step forward, two steps back. Sometimes things just seem like a bit of an uphill struggle.* The small girl is feeling quite clingy towards me at the moment, it seems; not sure why, but only I will do when it comes to a variety of ostensibly fairly superficial tasks, like, say, being helped out of the bath and got into pyjamas, or holding someone’s hand to cross a road, or being carried from our bed to her own in the evening. Part of me finds this utterly endearing; part of me dreams of a day when Quercus could do the end-to-end bath and bed routine without me necessarily being there, and without utter meltdown being the inevitable conclusion.  Of course, the irony is that it’s not so very long ago that I withdrew from a return to pottery evenings because I didn’t feel ready to let go of the small girl’s bedtimes; it’s not so much that I feel differently, now, but rather that I’d just like to have the option, I suppose.

Also, I feel constantly that if I could just get a better grip on things, life would flow more easily. Today, for example, the small girl and I came back from visiting a lovely friend and we were probably half an hour later than we normally would be for her tea. This meant, together with her not having had a snooze this afternoon for some reason that the gods of humour deemed viable, that she was pretty much done in , and not feeling at her most sociable, by the time we ate, and by bathtime, she was really at the end of her tether, not least as she was getting in the bath at about the time she’s normally heading upstairs with me for a feed and a snooze before she goes to sleep.

Oh, I know, I know. I’m tired, I’m hormonal, and I’m skint. That’s never a good combination, really, is it?

Things keeping me sane at the moment, as I trudge blearily through this week:

• David Bowie, in a variety of guises from ‘Station to Station’ to ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’, including ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ and ‘A New Career in a New Town’

• The acquisition of some large samples of fabric, which have patchwork cushion written all over them.

• The quiet debate about dreadlocks which I’m still having with myself, this time prompted by the fact that, well, not brushing your hair for a really, really long time, together with a no-shampoo regime, does create a really quite strong tendency for dreads to form of their own accord. Ahem.

• A vaguely tidy kitchen which includes my first attempt at lime marmalade, a superbly large loaf of homemade bread courtesy of 2lb silicone moulds, and a ginger cake where ‘ginger’ = ‘dynamite strength’.

And you? What are your sanity preservers this week?

* Yes: I am officially a privileged white person living in a western country and bitching about how terrible life is despite my two-salary household (at least in theory; let us not speak of our actual salaries at the moment). I say all this, as ever, with the clear knowledge that I am being an ungrateful trout. But hey – this is my blog, innit, so I can whinge if I want to. Or something.

With thanks to SouleMama, my rather more verbose attempt at ‘a Friday ritual, a single photo, a moment to savour’. (Well, in this case, three photos, but the same moment, somehow. And let’s gloss over the whole ‘no words’ bit, shall we?)

The small girl has had a hacking cough for the last week; Beatrix Potter is the best cure, specifically regular doses of ‘Old Mr. Tod’. Shifty though I feel about small children and screen hours, I am trying to remind myself that less than an hour a week is probably not going to squarify her eyes.

The tiles are finished, and have been for nearly a month, yet still I marvel at their shiny brightness every day. Cream-coloured grout, since you (didn’t!) ask.

One of the things I love the most about our new kitchen space is the light which comes from having windows in two walls, together with rooflights. The rest of our house is north-facing, so the light in here never fails to amaze me. If only I could get the kitchen table clear, things would be just dandy. But hey – for now, I’ll settle for the light.

This weekend, I mostly made marmalade. How is it that so few oranges can contain so many pips, and what sort of bending of the laws of physics takes place in order to allow one to end up with far more marmalade output than the constituent ingredients suggested might be the case? Somehow I have eight pounds of the stuff. Not that I am complaining – at the moment, marmalade on muffins is about right for me. I’m also going to make lime marmalade later in the week, just because I can. I’m a devil, me. (Just don’t ask about jars, because I haz nun.) Making this stuff, though, prompted a quick overview of the things I made last year.

We have a cupboard full of jam:

• ten jars of spiced apple jam;

• eight jars of quince butter;

• six large jars of sweet and sour spiced plums;

• eight jars of dark Seville marmalade;

• seven jars of apple and herb butter;

• four jars of plum jam.

And the booze:

• four gallons of sloe wine;

• two gallons of quince wine;

• two gallons of plum wine;

• two gallons of elderflower wine;

• a gallon of greengage wine.

And then there are clothes:

• trousers in brown velvet, brown cord and cornflower blue cord for the small girl;

• a turquoise fleece dress for the small girl;

• two sundresses for the small girl, one with a bell closure;

• a sun bonnet for the small girl;

• a reversible quilt… yes, for the small girl;

• a knitted hat, in Noro’s gorgeously soft Kochoran yarn, together with scarf and legwarmers… for the small girl;

• two pairs of pyjamas bottoms, for Quercus;

• a brown fleece goblin hood for the small girl;

• clothes for Bluebell, the doll I made for the small girl’s second birthday;

• knitted wristwarmers for Quercus’s birthday.

And then there are, well, things:

• a seat cover for the small girl’s high chair;

• a felted wrap for our coffee pot;

• more felted pumpkins than I care to number;

• several sets of felt dreadlock-style hair ties;

• more felted acorns than is strictly decent;

• a baby.

EEK.

Ah. Yes. I realise that last point may require a little explanation. Ahem. Thirteen weeks down, twenty-seven to go: our second child is due in early August, if all goes to plan. We’re delighted, and, predictably, knackered, terrified and skint, not necessarily in that order. Did I mention that this is the year when we plan to replaster the rest of the house?

In slightly more detail:

• I’ve cast on the child’s placket neck sweater from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts (that was Knitted Gits first time); I have some rather lovely Rowan wool in, worryingly, a shade called ‘Rage’. Does this indicate the shape of things to come, I wonder? Probably, as I’m relearning the magic loop technique for this sweater, and wishing – so, so wishing – that it was just knitted flat. And on BIG needles, rather than 4mm ones, which seem rather piddling after the 9mm variety I used for the last knitting I did. Anyway, we shall see. I really hope that I find my knitting zen; I think that despite my professed love of winter, I am finding the stultification of a very wet, muddy January a bit of a bummer, technically, and as previously discussed, I need to achieve things if I am to avoid feeling a bit shit, really.  I’m also hoping to kick off the hourglass sweater in the same book for myself (the first thing I’ll have knitted for me! all me!), but am a bit dismayed at the concept of 15 skeins of Noro anything; approx. UK price for that would be somewhere over £100, so I’m going to be attempting to come up with an affordable – hopefully tweedy-looking – alternative. Any suggestions? I would love to just use up some of the stash I’ve accumulated since I started knitting, but as ever, nothing is the right size, or the right quantity. Typical, no?

• Why do I keep seeing knitting things I want to do, but which always call for either a different sort of wool or a size of needle which I don’t yet possess? Also, as an aside, how is it possible that I don’t now own at least one instance of EVERY SIZE of needle, given the vastness of my inherited/purchased collection?

• I find the prettiness of my circular needles rather distracting. I keep finding myself wandering off, mentally, and completely forgetting how many stitches whatever particular form of torment I’m engaging in at the present moment I have actually done. This has lead to an interesting border to the bottom edge of the sweater. (I’ve now frogged the blighter and started over.)

• I have submitted my tax return, though I hope to all that’s holy that the calculation is wrong; it’s over £100 more than I’d estimated. Fortunately, I’ve got a week to speak to someone about it before the deadline, so if it’s out, I can hopefully sort it before simply stumping up. Sodding, sodding student loans.

• Today, I declare to be a baking day. This morning, the small girl is at a toddler group with Quercus brandishing craft supplies in line with the theme of shopping; this should mean that she probably wants a reasonably quiet afternoon, and baking is our default activity at such times. I’m itching to try something new, though; cake suggestions, anyone?

• Preschool: the pros and cons thereof. Please discuss. At present, the small girl goes to a toddler group once a week, and we meet up with friends who have similarly-aged children probably most weeks, so she gets a reasonable quantity of socialising, but, left to our own devices, our rhythm is pretty home-centred. Lots of people we know are now looking at preschools, or, indeed, have had their infants merrily toddling along for the last few months; are we doing ours a disservice by not following suit? I can’t imagine leaving her somewhere on her own at the moment; she is going through a particularly mother-centric, well, life, really, although she is confident with people she knows reasonably well, and will quite happily toddle off with some of our friends and so on. I don’t want to push her into something for which she isn’t ready, but at the same time, I do think I underestimate her sometimes, so I am wary of being simply selfish in my desire to keep her with me, all the time. Ahem.

• Wet, dank, grey. That is Devon this morning.

And you?

SLEEP • more time outdoors • exercise • what to cook for fucking dinner • where did that money go • cars cars cars • window leaking • mould on sodding wall • freelance work • TAX RETURN!!!!! • where is my sodding P60 • must remember to go to the post office • sod – when is MOT due on car? • why does Renault persist in stupid, stupid key cards which you can’t put on a keyring? •  why does sodding key card not work? • where is sodding key card? • haven’t blogged for ages despite best intentions • lists, lists, lists • should we re-render the inside of the house this summer, or give ourselves an easier time, but with renovation spread over a longer time, thus meaning less time in the house when it’s finished before we end up moving? • garden like the Somme • mud, mud, mud • grocery-shopping = minefield • tax bill set to be £200 more than I thought • will Quercus have a job after this summer? (Civil Service UK = bad place to be working at the moment) • what are we going to do for money? • why is our ‘hard-standing’ parking now soft-standing mud? • SLEEP • teething, both the small girl and Quercus (wisdom teeth) • dentist • managing expectations • must start knitting again if am to maintain sanity • pick project and DO IT • choose bulbs for garden • plan veg for later this year! • hanker after Anna Marie Horner’s flannels (does that mean brushed cotton?) • why do all white things end up cream or worse? • make marmalade • Seville or Seville? BBC says latter yet I think former… • bake bread • make soup • stare at moon while drinking hot chocolate on the patio • ponder life, and its many insanities.

And you?

Chrimbly was good – lots of snow and sitting about and then lots of slush and ice and wishing it would sod off while eating mince pies and eyeing up the ginger wine.

Post-Chrimbly – so far, still just cannot believe that I am back to getting up at 6.45 and sitting at a desk for five mornings a week, but other than that, life is good. I have News, but I’m not yet able to share it here because of the, er, width of my readership… But I don’t want to fall completely out of the habit of blogging, which I am in danger of doing if I don’t pull my proverbial out and get on with it.

Ugh.

Which isn’t very helpful, really, is it, but still, it will make sense in due course, I think.

Still to come: this year is going to be the year we destroy the inside of our house and rebuild it. Given that we live in our house rather efficiently, using ALL OF IT ALL THE TIME (well, nearly), it’s going to be quite challenging finding a way to take down ceilings and strip off old plaster while still, well, living here. Knackered it may be at present (and let us not speak of the gaffer tape and wallpaper paste required to preserve wall integrity lately), but it is sort of intact, if that makes sense, and the idea of hacking into that order, even if it is utterly duff in nature and deeply deserving of a refit, is slightly daunting in a way that the kitchen and bathroom just weren’t, given that they are tacked on in an extension. I think the thing is going to be to just move into those rooms (now finished, complete with tiles and grout! of an oatmeal sort of colour!) and try to ignore the chaos beyond the kitchen door.

So, intentions, in a slightly more verbose manner than is strictly decent:

1. Garden: we’re going to have a bit of a January push on sorting out some outstanding business – paths in the muddy hellhole which passes for a garden, some beds dug in for later in the year, some grass seed sown. I’d really like to be able to get back to growing some proper veggies this summer; with the extension self-build and the re-rendering taking over most of the summers since the small girl’s birth, we’ve done little more than tomatoes and the odd herb for three years, so it would be nice to get back to a level of produce which might actually have an impact on our sodding, sodding grocery bill. The intention, then, is that we get path sides in, and find some paving slabs for stepping stones. (My role in this is probably going to be chief bottle-washer and whatnot, as it tends to work out that Quercus does Heavy Muddy Things while I ponce around with the small girl, making something out of felt.)

2. Food: veg boxes. Anyone out there get them? And from whom? And do you like…? We are spending about £65 a week on groceries, and I am determined that January will be the month when we bring that down by a tenner a week. Part of the problem is that food just seems to cost more than it did a few years back, by a disproportionate sum – i.e. 7p for tinned tomatoes in 2005 now = 42p – but we also need to trim how much we cook (we often have leftover rice, for example, but now we’re henless, this ends up composted more than it should), and our tendency to stockpile, which is fine in theory but we never quite seem to get to the bit where we find ourselves shouting smugly ‘ooh – no need to shop this week!’. So, I’m hoping to get more organised, going back to menu plans but perhaps on a fortnightly footing, and maybe switching to veg boxes delivered, with just possibly meat boxes too. These scare me slightly, given my veggie tendencies and lack of familiarity with general Meat Cooking, but I want a change, and I want to get away from spending lots in evil supermarkets, and I’d also like to eat more organically. So, anyone with tuppence-worth to add, please be my guest.

3. TAX RETURN.

4. Organising: we need to start pruning our possessions where possible, after the chaos of building work and having things in storage; when we get to the rendering work later in the year, we’re going to need to pack up the main house and put things away for a while, so it would be useful to have somewhere to put them… This means… sorting out the attic. I’d like to Freecycle/sell/donate to charity half a dozen things this month, and I’d like to organise some of the utter bedlam up there into some semblance of order.

5. Start knitting something. I have shitloads of wool. Oh yes. Now to knit something and actually stick with it, after months of thinking ‘oooh yes, knitting – I remember that’. I’d quite like to do something like a cardigan for myself; I have eight very large balls of pure Cornish wool which I inherited from my mother, and it would be nice to do something with it, finally.

So, a short list, but a corker nonetheless.

Witter, witter.

How about you? Good break? Lovely food? Horrendous presents?

I had lots of good intentions about various posts, but somehow none of them got written, and ten days two weeks slipped by without my noticing it. I’m going to go with the zeitgeist for slowing down, and blame my lassitude on that. Ahem.

This evening finds Devon under a thick quilt of feather-like snow, downy and soft. Last night, six inches fell, and more is predicted tonight; this is so unusual in this area that most people have been quite caught out by it, I think, so often are the forecasters wrong when it comes to ‘wintry showers’. We ventured into Exeter, our nearest town, along roads thick with ice and slush, and the drive along our lane was easily as interesting as I would want it; no gritters get within two miles of us, which, given the tiny nature of our lane, is not surprising, and I was glad to get back safe and sound, with a bootful of food and a toddling person gleeful in the face of impending blueberry consumption. (The small girl has been out of sorts for a few days, with a temperature and a cough, hence tantalising morsels to eat.)

We have also acquired a wooden sledge, knocked together by Quercus the first morning of the snow, and perfected with plastic drainpipe runners; this means longer walks are good fun for all of us, rather than presenting boot-topping challenges to the smaller of our number…

These days, one of the best things about living in a house which needs, ahem, a bit of work is that we have so many things kicking about the place. Of course we had drainpipe and suitable wood, because, well, who doesn’t keep eight metres of plastic pipe kicking about? Er… It’s both delighting when we get to make something out of, well, not quite nothing, but certainly oddments and remnants, but at the same time maddening, as we have so much stuff which has yet to find a proper home, and even more stuff for which a suitable home is unlikely to appear unless we move to a much larger house… Oh, the irony – fix your house, in the process acquiring so many tools that you then need to, er, move…

And yes, that is the goblin hood I mentioned a while back, which I managed to put together quite quickly as the sewing machine has switched its allegiance back from the powers of darkness to me, largely, I think, due to blandishments involving fine-grade oil.

It took about three hours to get the sodding door shut, of course, after we were foolish enough to open it…

Predictably, while I have yet to finish some of the things I’d like to do before Christmas arrives in earnest, as it were, I’m happy to undertake side-tracks right left and centre. Note: felted winter fairy queen whatsit stage left. But the weather shift has changed the feel of the days already – we live at a slower pace, aware of impending darkness from mid-afternoon, and waking when the light bounces off the brilliant white of the fields and hedges which surround us. Somehow, the sense of busyness which I felt only a few days ago has receeded slightly, and I’m just letting myself go along with that. (See earlier jumping-on-bandwagon-excuse-making.)

Things have been crossed off lists not because I’ve done them, but simply because I’ve ended up questioning whether it was actually that worth getting worked up about. I have nearly finished grouting our tiles (for interested parties, we ended up with a sort of biscuity colour, which seems to set the bright colours off well), and I’ve managed to make some clothes for Bluebell, the small girl’s doll, and to attain a level of control over the craft cupboard not seen since shortly after its arrival, but for the most part, I am trying to feel OK about Just Being. Because it’s a bloody good thing, isn’t it? If you can get it to sit right?

Just Being is so important to one’s sanity, isn’t it? It’s something Quercus and I are both utterly rubbish at. We both struggle to sit, to contemplate, without constantly Doing, and Achieving. I only realise this, really, when we have nothing obvious on our lists (of which there are many, naturally, at levels ranging from ‘fix house’ to ‘sort escutcheon on front door’): these last few days of snow, neither of us has been out and about doing our normal things, and we’ve both been a bit on the antsy side, casting about for Tasks, for Purpose, for Things To Finish. Funny, really, for two people who often lament the lack of Time Off – when we are given it, we don’t seem quite sure what to do with it! It has meant, however, the completion and organisation of a few bits and bobs which were just sort of hanging; we’ve shoved (what felt like) hundreds of demijohns up on top of the oak cupboard, and we’ve put things in the newly-finished workshop, and we’ve hoovered the place and generally sorted a few things out. All of which is good. And makes me think, slightly, ‘this must be what sane people do at the weekends, rather than buggering about with knackered old houses which have a tendency to fall apart’. That said, of course, I know enough people who do what we do to realise that we’re not alone…

Anyway, with Quercus’s mother arriving tomorrow and a small girl who quite miserable (and has her first ear infection, we learned this morning), I’ll be back in this space in the new year, folks, so a medley Crumphole to all who read and visit and comment here, and bright starry wishes for 2011.

Every year, since I’ve been a grown-up in control of my own household (ludicrous! the very thought of it!), I’ve had various ideas about Things I Ought To Be Doing at any given time. This gets particularly ridiculous as winter draw(er)s on. Chrimbly, it seems, is quite important to me. Not, I hasten to add, because I’m Christian, or indeed religious in any way, really, but rather because I so love this time of year that I want to celebrate it with gazillions of biscuits, with strings of lights visible quite maddening in their multitudinousness (is that a word, one wonders?), with Comfort and Joy and All Things Nice. I wonder if it’s because my parents were a bit haphazard about the whole festive affair; usually, Chrimbly involved a last-minute dash, normally conducted in the pissing rain for maximum enjoyment, to some dodgy car-park or oddly dark household wherein lurked a Christmas tree vendor normally seen only in police line-ups, to procure a tree of dubious vintage whose needles numbered somewhere in the region of, well, thirty, or so, on a good year. This joyous trip was normally sprinkled with various enticements such as the opportunity to see one’s paternal relative invent new phraseology to cover falling over in the ice, the inability of the car to shift its arse on its own, its stubborn to start despite multiple kicks, verbal and physical – you get the idea.

So much for the hunter-gatherer end of the equation, whose giddy jollity was complemented by my mother, largely displaying signs of one who felt she Should Have Done More By This Time, i.e. there should have been handmade decorations a plenty, set off to perfection by a veritable shedload of biscuits (of some predictably Germanic or Swedish origin, for it is written that They, and Only They, know how to do Christmas, and indeed winter as a whole). Instead, she’d have sort of thought about it, and then ended up playing the piano for a while, and making a few biscuits while telling me the story of the Nibelungenleid. That was the thing about my mother; she was so incredibly knowledgeable, and so very talented, that it was hugely frustrating sometimes to watch her beating herself up about not having done something which she could actually have done in a jimminy-whatsit had she so girded her loins.

Loins, the girding thereof, is not my problem.

My problem, gentle reader, is overstretching myself, and taking on so much that even the fun bits end up feeling like some hideous Herculean task designed to extract the very last ounce of festive spirit, before distilling it, adding in a little hemlock just for kicks, and asking you if you’d like ice with that.

So, this year, I found myself compiling an ever-increasing list of Lovely Things To Do. Somewhere, this list metamorphosised, cunningly and slyly, into a list of Things Which I Must Do If I Am To Be A Good Person. See? Not cool, is what that is/was. Suddenly, my old friend Procastination was creeping through the door, bringing with him his cousin, Guilt, and I found myself swigging back the hemlock like mother’s milk.

Part of my problem is that, while I’m not particularly avaricious by modern standards (it only really takes shiny or bright colours and you’ve got me, hook, line and proverbial), I am crafty-avaricious. I read blogs. I look at pictures. I think about the things I could make, the things that the small girl would like, the things that, if I’m honest, would make the people who I love love me more than they already do, because, obviously, it is completely logical and unassailably reasonable to assume that nothing says ‘I love you, and I am a lovely person who you love! Right? RIGHT?’ like a felted reindeer.

And there you have it, you see, in (in)glorious technicolour. For some reason, I seem to equate making, producing or otherwise creating with love, to the degree that I feel that I am almost betraying people if I think of making them something and then back out for some reason, even if I hadn’t mentioned the plan to them. So, the list of things that I wanted to make for the small girl grew, and grew, and grew, until it assumed quite fairy-tale-like properties, and I started to wonder if there was an ogre on the other end of it, piling on the suggestions until it wasn’t just the craft cupboard which was threatening to explode… ‘Thar she blows, Cap’n!’

This week, I have reached a bit of a low point. I was dreading doing any of the things on my list, even though in theory I was happy to do them, and had got the things necessary, and could see them complete. I procrastinated. I spent more time on Facebook than can ever be good for a human intent on making it past forty. I even cleaned the sink. Oh, it was quite like old times – many, after all, was the happy hour I spent thrutching about in u-bends for old tealeaves rather than writing the odd word towards my thesis. So, after realising that I’m going completely bollocking mad, and all for the sake of the random assembling of buttons, beads and felt into a small herd of Chrimbly reindeer, I have decided that this is lunacy, and must be set to one side until sanity can prevail. (Assuming that day comes, of course.) I’ve put the thing I’m making Quercus on hold (largely because a two-week break from it served only to produce a ‘…. But that is complete shite! What was I thinking?!’ reaction during our reunion. I’ve scaled back my plans for the small girl, and I’m trying to remind myself that what she would really value this year is a mother who doesn’t twitch involuntarily at the mention of the word ‘present’, and who is able to remember she has knitting needles in her hair before leaving the house.

It’s a learning curve, this sort of bollocks, isn’t it? Pass the biscuits.

So far, December has been very cold, from the outset. The night before last brought a beautiful hoar frost, covering the land in a blanket of icy crystals which didn’t leave even in the brief midday sun. The small girl and I walked to the top of the hill along the lane, to see reindeer and to look at Christmas trees, which, thankfully, appear to be half the price they were last year. I’m trying to make sure that the cold weather doesn’t prevent us going out and about as much as ever; it may now involve snowsuits, mittens and wristwarmers over the top, but the small girl’s ride in the sling was clearly good fun, and she loves to make observations about what we see as we walk, enjoying the superior views afforded by my towering… 5′ 6″. Ahem.

In between our forays into arctic survival, we have mostly been baking and making. So far, six jars of apple mincemeat, with, rather conveniently, no ingredients bought beyond what we happened to have in the cupboards. (This probably testifies more to the strange contents of our kitchen than to any particular fortuitousness…), several batches of gingerbread and Chrimbly Scandinavian-style biscuits, nine red fleece hearts to hang on the Chrimbly tree, when we get it, and three moosibous (somewhere between a moose and a caribou, these felty critters are now lining up on the shelves, complete with antlers, bells and the odd button nose). Still to go: lots more felt hearts, lots more biscuits, cake, puddens, and various crafty bits about which I cannot speak for fear of Prying Eyes. (And yes, I am looking at you, Quercus.)

Oh yes: before I go wittering on, has anyone out there perfected The Ultimate Chrimbly Biscuit? I am thinking of something along the Pfeffernüssen and Lebkuchen line, with spices and whatnot. We’ve tried a few recipes this year (and I wrote my own recipe a while back, when I was blogging as Kitchen Witch; I’ve meant to add my archives from that site to this, ever since I started here, yet have I done it? Have I buggery. This means I will have to go through the hideously long text file version to find the sodding recipe. That’ll teach me) but I’ve yet to find The One Biscuit To Bring Them All And In The Gluttony Bind Them.

The ice was about an inch long on some of the ferns; just beautiful.

Holly leaves, with cinnamon, orange zest and whatnot. Lovely smell, but recipe was a tad disappointing as the biscuits were a bit on the dry side, despite adding extra milk, and a bugger to roll out as a result.

I’ve never been particularly sure about this lamp, which is in our garden; it always looks a bit out of kilter to me, with its nineteenth-centuriness, against our blatantly-older-than-that house, but it does do a good Narnia line in this sort of weather, so I think I will get over it.

This morning it is bright, sunny and cold once more, though the magical dusting of yesterday has now gone, and apparently it’s going to be warmer this weekend. I love winter; this time of year is my favourite. I do hope we’re not about to have a bout of warm-and-wet, though, because that is all sorts of crap in my view. Let’s stick to the cold and bright, please, weather gods.

In about a week, it will be ten years since my mother died. I can’t quite believe it: an entire decade of this alternative life, this strange, skewed existence which still seems off-balance to me sometimes despite the passing of time. I have decided that December 14 will now be the day when we get our Chrimbly tree. I don’t want to wallow, and I don’t want to dwell on the fact that my mother isn’t here to do this with us, to meet the small girl, to watch us grow, together. Rather, I will spend my time with a small girl for whom Chrimbly and the midwinter is so very exciting, this being the first time she has really taken note of what’s going on, and I will celebrate the going-on of life rather than its disappearance, inevitable, inescapable, ineffable. This small girl of mine has done what no amount of counselling, or thinking, or mourning, or distraction, could do, and she has done it without even knowing she was doing it, never mind trying – she has flipped the coin, making me the mother, and recasting my loss in a new role. I am now the mother, and in so becoming, I feel in charge of myself, grown-up in a way that I thought I had lost forever when my mother died. So, here’s to the healing powers of mincemeat, and of cake-baking, and card-making, and present-plotting, and cold walks in the crisp frost, and reindeer who live at the top of our hill.

I had a moment of insanity on the afternoon of 30 November, where I suddenly thought what fun (fun!) it would be to make the small girl an advent calendar. Not for us those cruddy chocolate nonsenses available at supermarkets the world over; oh no – we – we – we would have a nice, homemade, felt-and-wooden-button confection, with pockets suitable for hiding all manner of festive delights.

Fun.

FUN.

And, of course, the fact that this epiphany struck only at three o’clock on the afternoon of the day before advent begins – well, a minor detail. Ple-e-e-nty of time for creativity to whip its way through a little diversion like this.

And, of course, the fact that the sewing machine decided to bugger about and start snapping the thread right left and centre, well, that just added spice to an otherwise doddle of a project.

Ahem.

Let us not speak of the fact that the sewing machine appears to need another service, after having sewn three layers of felt together. I fear that perhaps three layers was just asking too much of it, though it is rather strange that it worked fine as I sewed the back and front together, and when I sewed on the first five of the twenty-five pockets. And let us also not speak of the fact that its needing attention will probably necessitate a round-trip of some sixty miles, as I take it to the magic-weaver who brought it back to life for me last summer, when I thought it was my own ineptitude which made every project take ten times as long as I’d thought. (Well, of course, my ineptitude accounted for at least three-quarters of that time, but the sewing machine was buggering about too, I learned.)

That said, it was worth it when the small girl got the hang of it, and she was very nice about the concept, and said just the right things about the tree itself being pretty. She is a very rewarding audience, and every time I make something for her, or for us, I feel remarkably fortunate to be able to do these things, and to have her to introduce these things to. I think I’ve written before about the genuine delight I feel in creating family traditions of our own – ditching the Christmas Eve hunt for the inevitably dog-eared tree in which the aged parent used to indulge was a revelation, for example, in lowering stress levels – and bringing her along, showing her the world and the joy which it can hold, is just the bestest of the best.

God.

How twee am I?

(And yes, that is a very obvious join in the wallpaper you can see. Technically, this is known as ‘papering over the cracks’, because the plaster is actually falling off the wall here. So, another layer of paper, just to get us through until the summer of next year, when hopefully we will replaster.)

Once more, pinched from the Suburban Yogini after her post reminded me that a new month is upon us, here comes a list of intentions for the forthcoming month. I’m enjoying the focus this sort of list offers; no pressure, as it was only ever intentions, but a useful reminder if you find yourself with a spare five minutes and a brain which has dissolved parliament, so to speak.

So, here goes:

1. Grout the tiles.

2. Make some Chrimbly bunting.

3. Clothes for the small girl’s doll -
- velvet trousers
- some sort of fleece/felt top
- velvet shoes

4. Craft Project for Quercus, the details of which shall remain unspoken due to Quercan Prying Eyes. (All I can say is I’d keep your eyes on that Ilex fellow – he looks mean.) Abandoned due to incipient craft madness.

5. Fleece goblin hoody-scarfy snood (?) thing for the small girl.

6. Brown dress with toadstool for the small girl. Postponed.

7. Watercolour the unfinished wooden toys I’ve got en route from the States for the small girl. (They’ve been shipped, so should arrive in the next two weeks.) Postponed due to realisation that had gone completely overboard on presents.

8. Sand and paint the wretched, wretched skirting boards.

9. A decent walk three times a week. – ish.

10. Earlier to bed by fifteen minutes at least three times a week.

11. Freecycle three things From The Attic. (Shudder with me, dear reader, at this prospect.)

12. Assemble reliable Chrimbly lists for anyone who’s going to be on the receiving end of presentage from us.

13. Make wrapping paper with the small girl. This year: brown paper with plasticine stars stamped thereon. Let there be chaos.

14. Chrimbly puds and cake.

15. Eleven felt reindeer to go on whatever shambolic tree effort we end up with. (Locally they are selling for FIFTY POUNDS. Clearly, that’s not on. To the drawing board, I say!) Three we ended up with, and three were fine.

16. A red fleece heart for each day until Chrimbly, for the small girl to hang up somewhere in an unspecifiedly pretty manner. (Two down, twenty-three to go.) Eight we ended up with, and eight were fine.

17. Some sort of present malarky for the Gothic Folly (my brother).

18. Last-minute felt advent tree.

And you? What games have you afoot this month?

This weekend the aged parent came to visit. Oh, it wasn’t great. No. Wait. In lots of ways, it was fine. We talked, and he bought take-away, and came armed with wine. He cleaned the sink, and put some wallpaper up for us in the sitting room, where the dust is quite bad because the plaster is falling off the walls (we’re hoping to fix it this coming summer, by replastering the whole of the inside of the old bit of the house, so there’s just no point in doing much beyond papering over the cracks – literally! – for now).

But…

When will I learn that I won’t get what I want from him? That showing him things I have made, or written, or cooked, or tiled, or built, even, just won’t elicit the response I appear to crave, despite my outward nonchalance? And why do I crave it? I despise myself for so doing; I feel like a small dog, yip-yip-yipping as I jump up at his leg, desperate for attention. Yet time and again, I produce the quilt I have sewn (a sort of mildly bored ‘right you are’ acknowledgement being the best result here), I show the tiles I have fixed (which he hadn’t actually noticed, despite being in the room minus said tiles only a couple of months ago – regular readers will have noted that they are not exactly subtle…), I volunteer information about things I am writing or have had published only to realise that the conversation has miraculously moved on to his wife’s proofreading work, or his stepdaughter’s eating problems. Time after time after time.

Also, when will I learn that I must make my plans so that they may coincide with his, but are not dependent on them? To wit: this weekend, there was an advent fair on at a local-ish Steiner school. I had wanted to go for weeks, and had planned accordingly; I knew what time I needed to leave, and what I would do afterwards, and where we could get some lunch, and how I’d manage some sleep for the small girl, who sleeps most afternoons shortly after lunch. I had thought about the possible Chrimbly presents I might manage to buy for her, and how best to hide them from her notice if I ended up going alone with her. I told him about this fair before he said he was coming, and we agreed, when he’d arranged to visit then too, on a time at which we would need to leave. It wasn’t prohibitively early, really – 9.00. Yet 9.00 came and went. As did 9.15. And 9.30. And at 9.45, when he arrived, he strolled through the door in a leisurely manner, appearing somewhat wrong-footed by my bags-ready-let’s-go response. We got to the fair about forty minutes after it started, as a result, and, as I had feared, it was utterly beseiged. Being reasonably out of town, there was nowhere left to park, and no easy alternative. I abandoned the attempt, bit down my disappointment because I didn’t want the small girl to see it, and moved on to the rest of the day.

But when we got home and I heard him saying airily that we’d decided to give it a miss, I did feel sad, to be honest.

And when he shot off home on Monday, having spent a weekend looking rather bemusedly at the small girl as she attempted to engage him in conversation, or telling me how she ought to wash her hands before she comes to eat, I couldn’t help but feel that he rather misses the point with her. He says she is lovely, but he won’t play with her. She asks him to play with her – ‘Grandad come an’ play wiv me? Have a look a’ my toys? P’raps read a book?’ – but he’s not even interested enough to sit on the floor, preferring to sit on the sofa, not at her level, and read the paper. He couldn’t even read a book to her the one night that he did try it – he just sort of flicked through the pages while she clearly felt confused by his lack of animation. This, from the man who thinks he is good with small children.

It’s stupid, really. It hurts. It still hurts. I can predict how he will behave; I can see the hurt coming; I can warn Quercus that it’s not going to work, asking him to look after the small girl, because if she comes to expect anything from him, she will be disappointed, and I am not willing to have that happen if it is at all within my control to avoid it. I can predict the inappropriate presents – more soft toys which she doesn’t need and won’t really play with, and a cardigan both ugly and strangely-sized – despite the fact that there are, of course, lots of things I could have suggested, and which she needs.

I have learned to predict the hurtful or thoughtless things he can and will do. But still I can’t stop it hurting. I have learned the lesson, so why can’t I act on it?

A gratuitous small girl photograph. Yesterday we went out to tea in Exeter. We looked at the lights; we walked; we talked; we pootled; we ate massive quantities of cake. Life is good.

The fleece stars which took approximately four lifetimes to sew; the new quilt project has finally come to fruition, and just in time for the cold weather. Because I already had the white fleece in my stash (let us not speak of those cloth napyp days), this feels almost like it was free. Almost. (Well, it was only about £12, I think, which isn’t bad, really. I’m going to draw a tactful veil over the years it has added to my Dorian Gray-style attic painting, of course.)

Quilts = hiding. Fact.

I think she likes it.

Damn grouting. Damn handmade tiles. So, brown? White? Grey? I am all agog for your grouting suggestions. (And there is a phrase which one does not find springing from one’s lips particularly often.)

Yes, they are random, and yes, we love them. Better pics to follow when I have finally pissed or got off the grouting pot.

My first piece of flat felting.

And it is possible that I have something of a felted pumpkin addiction. I just can’t stop. And the more there are, the better they all look. It’s compulsive.

If only these leaves were likewise. I had in mind this fantastic autumnal banner with heaps of the blighters, only to find I’d used up a lifetime’s quota of blanket stitch tolerance in, well, about six leaves.

Though I did enjoy doing the oak leaf, in particular.

Not quite as abundant as I’d hoped, but hey, it’s a work in progress, right?

Monday morning:

- Bright sunshine and hard frost.

- Small girl’s starry quilt finished in time for the first proper cold weather (pics to follow when I finish changing cameras; have I ranted recently about how much technology has pissed me off lately? Broken or useless in the last few months: microwave, kettle, toothbrush, two digital cameras, external harddrive; it’s just not funny!).

- Several new recipes to add to the stash (sweet potato and lentil burritos, butternut squash and rainbow chard lasagne, stuffed pumpkin).

- House full of clothes needing either washing, drying or putting away (why oh why have we no decent line outside? Winter sun may not be either frequent or particularly warm but it beats the hell out of dank indoor set-ups, with the exception of the wonderful Victorian airer we have on a pulley system…).

- Hair cut on Saturday and now the mirror shows me someone else; can’t do the things I normally do with it very successfully, and yet don’t like it just down… Time, I guess, will solve that one!

- Small girl has been quite cross for about a month now, and Quercus and I are definitely noticing. Teeth? Virus? Chickenpox? All considered, but nothing conclusive.

- Gingerbread forest baked on Friday; eaten by Saturday evening.

- First pieces of flat felt made, one with stripes and one with spots. Again, pictures to follow once I sort the camera issue.

- For some reason, I appear to be savagely bad-tempered lately. Not sure why; maybe I’m catching it from the small girl (or maybe she’s catching it from me). The house is really getting me down, and I long to have the spare time together that ‘normal’ people seem to get at weekends, rather than the ships-that-pass-at-mealtimes experience that our weekends normally seem to be. I know that the things we each do are valuable, in some cases vital, but that doesn’t make it easier when you get to Monday and just feel flat because the weekend was… blah. Quercus is working to finish the workshop at the moment – the cladding is nearly done, and then he’s got a door and two windows to make before he can move our vast collection of tools in – and I’ve been tidying up things like gate-painting, crack-filling, kitchen tiling and whatnot. I can see progress, and yet the rest of the house is so dusty, so cobwebby, so mouldy (in places), so chaotically full of STUFF that just won’t fit anywhere else because our storage is virtually non-existent, and all I seem to do is half-finish a job while the small girl sleeps only to break off and do something else when she wakes, because otherwise we spend ALL DAY doing housework, which doesn’t seem particularly fair on her, despite her relative patience in such scenarios. (I find she tolerates me doing things like that for a long time, but we often end up with a period of relative meltdown later in the day; it makes more sense, thus, to go for a walk together at some point, even though the laundry mountain will only mock me for such weakness.) What I need is four hands, a forty-eight-hour day, and professional help. I just never seem to be able to keep up with all the things I’m supposed to be doing, and our house is the dustiest, mouldiest place I have ever lived, so here, more than anywhere, I really want to keep things clean. (Insert mild rant about possible reasons for developing asthma here.)

So where are you this Monday morning?

So, there I was, writing myself a good listy whatsit and trundling out lots of productive and creative uses of my time. Well, so far, I have finished painting the bottom of the house, and I have filled in the French drains we’d dug (shovelling pea shingle, how I love thee), which has taken the outside of the house to a whole new level of Finished. I have also finished tiling the kitchen, though I have yet to grout.

(An aside here, and a question: coloured grout – tasteful and a good idea with handmade and thus very uneven tiles in a size-of-gap-disguising way, or just a hideous throwback to 1970s colour-schemes involving taupe? I am contemplating dark brown grout for our very multicoloured tiles [red, orange, dark brown, dark green, dark blue, duckegg blue, pea green, yellow] because I fear white might make the varying gaps necessitated by the uneven shaping of the tiles look all the more noticeable, in a Not Good way. Has anyone out there used coloured grout? Good, bad, ugly? And where did you get it? Any recommendations?)

I have also goodly painted one gate with primer, and two coats of the dark grey which we used on the external woodwork.

Oh, and I have cooked up a vast vat of quince, which I’m going to freeze in little blocks which can then be chucked in with apple pies or crumbles for exciting culinary adventures long after the quinces themselves are but a memory. Or something.

And that, my friends, is where the good stuff ends.

Mostly, other than that, I have been making needle-felted pumpkins.

Or reading Permaculture or Juno.

Or novels.

Or making lists.

Or fretting about what to make Quercus for Chrimbly. Oh, and the small girl.

Or wondering if that rash is actually chickenpox, and if that would explain the grumpiness which has marked the small girl’s days of late.

Or looking for the goblins who come into the house each night just to sprinkle dust around the place, and, you know, trash the kitchen.

Or wishing I could knit faster, because that way, the birthday gift which I wanted to send to La Que Sabe in time for her actual birthday, rather than, well, probably two weeks later,  would be finished. (Shh! I’m not saying what it is because I am still going to send said present… just shamefully late.)

No-one’s perfick, eh?