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?

Shameless because it was pinched from Suburban Yogini. I’m feeling a bit out of focus today, in lots of ways – fuzzy around the edges, and directionless. So, something which reminds me of where I’m going, and where I’ve been, seems a timely concept.

November, then, will hopefully include the following:

1. Finish tiling the kitchen, including the scary bit around the sink and the grouting.

2. Finish painting the bottom of the house.

3. Two coats of paint on the gates. Well, one completely done, and the other undercoated and half top-coated.

4. Sanding the skirting boards in the kitchen and the bathroom. Didn’t get within spitting distance.

5. Painting said skirting boards. Ditto.

6. The small girl’s fleece quilt. (I had some white fleece bought for nappy liners; we didn’t use it for that because of the ongoing nappy rash which drove us to disposables; it’s big, but not big enough to be a quilt on its own, so I’ve bought some red fleece and am going for a double-sided-with-contrasting-stars-sewn-on-in kind of thing.)

7. Decent length walk three times a week. Some weeks yes, some… not so much.

8. Swimming once over the weekend. Not even remotely.

9. Earlier to bed by fifteen minutes. Quite frequently yes.

10. Quince cheese-making.

11. Mincemeat-making.

12. Craft swap!

13. More fruit in the ol’ diet. Not bad on veggies, given that I think my favourite food is probably sprouts, but I’m trying to improve on fruit too, and particularly while there are lots of local varieties of apples about.

And you? What do you hope November holds?

It’s Samhain, witches’ new year. The skies are dark once more, and it’s been wet and windy for most of the day. Despite that, though, a small girl managed to hollow out a large pumpkin this afternoon while sitting on the patio, aided and abetted by her grandma, and Quercus has put up much of the waney-edged boarding which forms the walls of the workshop. I have mostly been tiling – bright rainbow tiles now cover a large portion of one wall in our kitchen, leaving, sadly, the very cutting-intensive bit to do tomorrow, and of course the motherlode of grouting (though, as has been previously observed in the comments, grouting is a very satisfying job, really).

In the last few days there have been some extraordinary skies. We walked up Raddon Hill last weekend, and were rewarded with huge views over towards Dartmoor, and with mountainous clouds exploding on the horizon. Possibly my favourite, though, was the trees. I sometimes feel when I walk in woodland, or I sit under a large tangled beech or an expansive oak, that the otherworld is so close as to be almost visible, if you turn your head fast enough, out of the corner of an eye. That it is not really so much other as just over there – there! – behind that tree and around that corner, hidden by that shadow.

I feel similarly when I see the blanket of stars which the clouds so often magic away. Tonight, the skies are clear, and the wetness of the day is forgotten. I think of people I have known, and people I miss, and that otherworld seems once again tantalisingly near. Near enough, I hope, that those who are behind that tree, around that corner, hidden in that shadow can see that we still think of them, and wish them well, and hope beyond hope that they do likewise. Being a part of that other land does not preclude a continued existence in this one, you see. Far from it.

Isn’t it funny the days that turn out to be successes? Today, I have mostly been accustoming myself to a new (steroid) inhaler, courtesy of my doctor, who is now firmly persuaded that my recurring cough and general tight-chested shitery is caused by an asthmatic reaction to either a virus or an infection. So, I now find myself the proud owner of a grey-blue inhaler, a brown inhaler, and the excitingly-named Aero Dynamic Device, which, somewhat disappointingly, turns out to be a spacer designed to improve the inhalation part of the inhalers. Ho hum.

On top of this, it’s been wet and windy here today – proper persistent rain, too, not the sort of shall-I-shan’t-I misty business that you can largely ignore as you go about your daily. It’s going to stay like this until Monday, apparently, too. Getting colder, as well, and last night there were high winds; this morning showed lanes with a snow-like dusting of autumnal leaves, together with some small branches which were dislodged as we slept by the clever north wind.

Oh, and over last weekend the washing machine, not in its first flush of youth, decided that door-opening is really not included in its job description, clamping its poisonous self shut with a fervour normally associated with some sort of religious order. So, it’s now in the middle of the kitchen floor, still plumbed in but about four feet in front of its normal cupboard hidey-hole; Quercus cunningly hid our dishwasher, the microwave, the dustbin and the washer in the oak cabinets he built, because we both find kitchen Stuff irritating, visually, for the most part, and this is great, except for when you need to retrieve said item for some reason. In fact, in the case of the washer, it’s more than normally troublesome to retrieve the damn thing because the slate flooring doesn’t go right to the edge of the room, while the cupboards do, meaning that the sodding washer slips down a bit as it goes back, and is a complete bastard to get out, thus.

So, the house is chaotic and untidy – kitchen surfaces covered in quinces (still about a hundred to go, I should say; I am trying to put off making quince cheese until I am feeling resilient enough to cope with the sodding chopping of the blighters, and, worse, the passing through a sieve bit, which just makes me want to run for the hills when I think of it after my rosehip encounters earlier this year) and bread-making detritus, to say nothing of the kitchen table, which is currently home to my gargantuan sewing machine (which is a pig to move, as it’s cast iron and thus weighs something akin to a battleship, fully laden), a host of paperwork, the latest edition of Permaculture (which has a really good recipe for HOT SOUP in it), some random wax crayons, two large pieces of fleece acquired for a small girl’s winter quilt and at least half a ton of general crappery besides this shaming list.

Yet, despite this, I feel happy. It seems that ‘happy mess is better than miserable tidiness’. This week has been quite a challenge; I have struggled to adjust to medications which make me a bit shaky* and a bit worried;** the small girl has been a bit under the weather and consequently rather inclined to a whinginess which is not her norm; I’ve been worried about taking more time off work after the disastrous winter of last year; as ever, we are not quite where I’d hoped in terms of finishing off things in the garden/on the house Before The Weather Closes In.

But set against this, I have made a gallon each of quince wine (and I used our German steamer to get the juice, letting it cook out all day long on top of the stove – thus, smug-makingly eco-friendly), pear, elderflower and lemon wine and grape, apple and sage win; I have sewn two pairs of toddler trousers without swearing once; I have made three loaves of bread; there are two sets of saltdough decorations drying by the stove (including some fantastic pigs, made using the spotty rolling pin I mentioned in my clay dough post – they look just like those Gloucester Old Spot chaps – because obviously, nothing says ‘festive’ like, er, saltdough pigs); there is a newly-finished autumn farrago (felt leaves, blanket-stitched, hanging on embroidery thread with wooden beads separating them; pics to follow at some point, as I quite like the overall effect while suspecting that I ought to do more than six or seven leaves; my enthusiasm waned after what felt like the five-zillionth blanket stitch) hanging up in the book room.***

Not a bad week, then, on balance. And balance is what’s needed, I think.

Oh, and a quick aside: if you’d like to take part in the postal parcel paraphernalia which came about in my post on doughs and whatnot, please drop me an email: earthenwitch [at] gmail [dot] com. I’m thinking of one or two bits, possibly crafty, possibly edible, possibly local to wherever you happen to be, but nothing valuable or seriously time-consuming.

*The Ventolin inhaler seems to cause slight trembling for me. I don’t think that I can just not use it, though, realistically, at the moment.

**The steroid inhaler has a list of side-effects which scares me, frankly, as it includes things about bone density and stunted adolescent growth; I have a longer-term plan to ditch this thing when I’m over the hump of this infection, and try improving my general health with more swimming, more garlic and much more chilli and ginger consumption, because anything involving ginger gets my vote, obviously. I have a friend who runs a healthfood shop who has suggested a variety of things including Holy Basil, salt pipes (?!) and elderberry syrup; she attributes my wheezy tendencies to our mould-ridden, dust-festering cob house, and thinks that when we’ve finished the internal plasterwork, thus stopping (hopefully) both dust and mould, things will improve. I really, really hope she’s right; her dire comments about the steroids and breastfeeding did not fill me with optimism.

***I know, I know – it sounds deeply pretentious, but I am trying to get away from calling it the dining room, given that we, er, don’t dine there anymore; I dislike ‘play room’, and there are more books in there than toys… so… Does that let me off? (No. I know. It doesn’t.) And if it doesn’t, then have you a suggestion which covers a room used for storage (understairs cupboard), piano, crafty things (knackered old chest of drawers), books, toys, and general walky-throughness?

It was Quercus’s birthday yesterday. I had smugly knitted him some wristwarmers, and I’d also managed to cajole the sewing machine into creating two pairs of pyjama bottoms for him. (Nice pyjamas for men seem to be a bit of a hen’s teeth thing, here at least, and after realising that anything approaching acceptable in fabric terms seemed to translate into sums of money which were anything but, I ordered some rather nice brushed cottons from the disturbingly cheap Croft Mill.) Much to my astonishment, the results are wearable, and quite appealing, and Quercus is either delighted with them, or a very good liar. (Let’s hope either state persists.) The complete works of the Mighty Boosh, a book about clouds, some Horace Silver and a ginger cake shaped like miniature gourds later, and I think it’s safe to say that this birthday was a good one. And that’s before I get started on the celebratory quince pie I made for afters, of which more anon. (I might also post the ginger cake recipe, as it was surprisingly successful given that I realised halfway through its concoction that I had run out of eggs, and Quercus was out, and the small girl was asleep upstairs, so my options were rather limited. Cue: the Inadvertantly Vegan Ginger Experience! Catchy name, no?)

We also managed a walk by the sea in the closing light of the afternoon; it was surprisingly calm, and the sun was just glorious, despite brief showers. It is extremely civilised living within a half-hour of lots of Jurassic coastline.

(Lengthy aside: the only slight fly in the ointment was that I appear to have picked up some evil chest infection thing. I didn’t really write much about this at the time, but last winter was officially not fun in terms of being ill. I think because we were getting so little consistent sleep (the small girl often waking several times a night, very rarely sleeping an entire night through and waking earlier than seemed strictly civilised), coupled with having rather a lot to do (work, house renovation, freelance stuff, childcare, the need to appear to be a functioning adult etc), my immune system just buggered off and left me to it, saying something along the lines of ‘well if you’re not going to have a holiday, I certainly am!’.

Result: 42 days of sick leave in one year.

Yes.

That’s FORTY-TWO DAYS. About a month of that was the point where my GP said ‘you need a break; here is a certificate for three weeks – kindly get some sleep and try to get yourself sorted as you have had TOO MANY ANTI-BIOTICS TO BE ENTIRELY SANE’. Obviously, it’s fair to say that the people I work with were not exactly delighted by this absence, and I felt utterly rubbish about it, not least because the whole time I was off, I felt terrible. Hacking cough, tentative adult-onset asthma diagnosis because of SO. MANY. INFECTIONS. The whole nine yards, and all that. Then, in the summer, the small girl seemed to hit her stride, and her sleep has been much, much more consistent since about May, overlooking teething and the odd glitch. As a result: one day off sick since then. Now, however, I’m worried that perhaps that diagnosis of asthma wasn’t as wide of the mark as I’d hoped; I thought that I just kept catching things, and they were ending up as chest infections because of those postcards from Rio that my immune system used to remind me of its existence. I picked up a cold last weekend, thought I’d cleared it, yet here I am, wheezy and tight-chested with a cough which sounds like that of a heavy smoker. I wish I could just crawl back into bed and stay there until Wednesday, but the thing is, I really, really don’t want to take more time off work. I’m into a new year now, as it were, and I don’t want to blot my copy-book so early in the winter. So, my plan is just to hope that it’ll bugger off shortly, leaving me fine and not wheezy and distinctly un-asthmatic. In the meantime, I’ve asked for an inhaler prescription. Woe. Woe is me. Anyone with tips for easing a wheezing chest (rhymes! see? recipes, pictures, AND RHYMES! Don’t say I never give you anything), please share.

Ahem.

Back to the birthday.

Quince pie. QUINCE PIE. In fact, QUINCE PIE!

Like this:

Runcible Pie

Take…

Filling:
3 large cooking apples;
2 quinces;
a very goodly sprinkling of sugar (for which read: half a truckload);

Pie itself:
about a pound of shortcrust pastry, i.e.
12 oz (in this case) self-raising flour (yes, I had run out of plain, and yes, I was determined anyway);
5 oz margarine/butter;
4 oz icing sugar;
enough cold water to form into a decent wodge of pastry.

Then…
First, bugger about assembling pastry while remembering fondly the days when your mother had A Mixer Which Did All This For You. Congratulate self on green nature of doing it by hand, and swig more sloe to ease cramp in hand. (That’s my excuse, anyway, and I am sticking to it.) Pastry sorted, stick in fridge to cool. Retrieve it after about twenty minutes (or, er, rather longer, if you completely forget about it while gorging yourself on quince pulp), and line an eight-inch greased pie dish with it, leaving about a third aside for the pie lid. I then blind-baked the case, as we had the oven on for dinner anyway, for about twenty minutes at 180°c.

Then peel, core and chop the apples and quinces, and pop them in a pan with about an inch of boiling water. I was amazed at the speed with which quinces discolour; two minutes after peeling, they were already very brown, so putting them in water as you go is probably the way forward. Cook them gently, lid on, for about twenty minutes, until the apple is completely pulpified and even the quince is looking a little mollified. Poke suspiciously at the quince, removing a small section with an inappropriately cumbersome utensil. Ingest said morsel, and come to terms with the need for SUGAR! yes, SUGAR! immediately. Turn head right way round and drink gallon of sloe wine to recover from after-effects of sourness. Bung in about eight tablespoons of sugar, stir until dissolved, and test, gingerly, sourness levels. Decide acceptable, and have at the lot with a masher, as the quinces don’t break down as much as the apple.

Pour the resulting gloop into the pie case, and whack on your rolled-out lid. Whole lot then goes in the oven for about another twenty-five minutes at 180°c.

THE QUINCES. I cannot stress the loveliness of the quinces.

Slaver, slaver.

Still to come: that vegan gingeriness, apple, grape and sage jelly, quince cheese and apple butter recipes, together with elderberry delight and quince cordials. Recipes, that is. (I will get those sodding 52 Recipes in 2010 done, dagnammit.)

And you? What has the weekend held for you?

Last week the small girl and I started experimenting with what I am ambitiously terming biodegradable Chrimbly decorations. For ‘biodegradable’, read ‘they will probably disintegrate long before they get within spitting distance of midwinter’. This, dear reader, is because they are made of dough. Squidgy, squashy dough. The first batch we made from cornflour clay, which goes like this:

1 c bicarbonate of soda;
2 c cornflour;
1c water;
essential oils to scent if you fancy it.

It has a pleasantly porcelain-like effect, courtesy of the cornflour; the ‘clay’ is very white, and slightly sparkly because of the bicarb, and it’s very smooth to roll out. Somehow that pristine whiteness is rather appealing, and it’s tough enough to withstand toddler poking without just falling apart.

We used cedarwood atlas oil to make it smell nice, and we had a good old bash at it with the rolling pins that La Que Sabe bought for the small girl, together with some Ikea cookie cutters.

After baking them (using up the heat after cooking dinner; took a couple of goes this way, but I didn’t fancy turning on the oven specifically to cook these little blighters, and hey, patience is a virtue [which I do not possess], OK?), we then had at them with some watercolour paints. You can see the basic white colour in the picture there, on the right; I almost wish now that I’d kept some of them white, because they do look rather pretty in a sort of pared-down way. Of course, pared-down is not, perhaps the most obvious watch-word for my, er, style, if you can call it that. Ahem. (That probably explains the explosion-in-firework-factory end result.)

Turns out that the little blocks of watercolour work very well for this sort of thing, though I’d thought they wouldn’t give a dense enough colour. Certainly, some of the ones that the small girl did on her own were quite wash-like, colour-wise, but variety is the spice of life, right? Plus, I have been genuinely alarmed previously by sessions involving tubes of paint – the paint! it goes so fast! you can virtually hear the coins chinking! This is how they turned out:

As they’re still only flour, really, and water, I think we’ll probably dip them in some sort of varnish or hard oil soon, to try to keep them for as long as possible, though I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how hardy they are, at least for now – we dropped several during the painting session, on to our slate kitchen floor, and not a one broke, despite being (I would have thought) a reasonably fragile shape.

We’ve made up some saltdough since then; the resulting stars are drying out as I speak. The dough is a creamy colour with small flecks in (courtesy of having used up part of a rather damp bag of wholewheat flour), and I’ve added lemon juice and sunflower oil to make it (apparently) more malleable when being worked and harder when dry. The basic recipe I used was this:

2 c plain flour;
1 c salt;
1 c water;
1 tbsp oil;
a good squeeze of lemon juice.

Again, the stars are getting a quick cooking here and there after dinner, and other than that, I’m leaving them to dry out by the woodburner. (Talking of which, we had our second frost of the year last night – everything was glittering with a dusting of powdery ice this morning, and very pretty it was too.) I think we’ll probably try the watercolours again afterwards, though I have also got some acrylic gold paint, which I wondered about just rubbing on by hand around the edges or somesuch arty-farty nonsense.

In other news, it’s Quercus’s birthday on Saturday. (‘Daddy’s burfday! Candles! Cake! Sing ‘happy buuuuuuurfday!’) Predictably, I have left sorting out his presents until the eleventh-and-a-halfth hour, partly because I am horribly disorganised of late, and partly because he hasn’t been going to his sodding rehearsals (he plays in two local orchestras, which should – note should – mean he’s out for two evenings a week, leaving me free reign of craftiness galore, but they’ve had a lot of sectional sessions, and as he plays a stupid instrument brass instrument which isn’t always needed, that’s meant a lot of missed crafty time, dagnammit).  This means that the last week or so has found me beggaring about in a feverish frenzy of I-can’t-say-because-he-reads-this-blog, and tonight, when he departs – finally! – for a rehearsal, will be no exception. Let us just say that there may be baking involved. Recipes and whatnot to follow shortly.

And in still other news, I am rather excited to be doing a parcel swap of goodies with the lovely Nadine, who lives in Prague and thus, it seems, has access to all sorts of striped delights of a tightly-sock nature. I really love finding out about people who come here and read the blathering idiocy that I inflict on the webly waves; it tickles me all sorts of puce to learn that someone reads this blog while eating breakfast as I am going to bed at night (hello, Nettles!), or that they too are interested in a cob hot tub run off wood (hello Canadian person whose name escapes me but which may have been – nope – sorry – it’s gone; please remind me if you’re still out there).

So. In the manner of the Spanish inquisition, who are you, where are you reading from, and what pearls of wisdom, crafty* or otherwise, have you to share on this bright frosty morning (here)? And would anyone else fancy doing a small parcel swap, goodies from deepest darkest Devon to… well, anywhere, really? I do love sending and receiving things in the post. There is something about unwrapping actual, physical parcels which makes me think of The Box of Delights and steam trains. Scrum-diddly-umptious. (Sorry. I don’t know what came over me there. Blame it on the brown wrapping paper.)

*After the stars fest, we are now looking for something else to do, craft-wise, which suits small fingers but gives big fingers something to do too. Recent hits have included wax rubbings of leaves and various baking bits. Any suggestions welcome.

That slump I mentioned has hit me again. I feel a bit pissed off, truth be told. Last night, I even ranted about a situation at work, when I was at home – that may not sound particularly unusual, but it’s a near-golden rule for me that work stays at work, and when I close that door as I leave the office, everything to do with it gets locked in, in a sort of academicky Pandora’s box manner. Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that I have just realised yet again the importance of encouraging one’s life in the directions which matter to one, rather than spending time worrying about why other people’s directions don’t seem to matter to one, and whether or not they ought to, and whether, in fact, one’s own direction is actually a lack of direction and so on. In short, I had a moment of wondering if I’m not a bit sort of lacklustre because I don’t seem to be splendidly career-motivated; my conclusion was that for some reason, I don’t and never have judged success by income, and that I think I’d rather I stayed that way.

I sometimes feel that I’m not really pushing myself. That I ought to try harder at work, and make myself a likely candidate for promotion, or for another job, or for leading a project of some sort. I look around at the people I work with, most of whom are very lovely, and I see a new generation of colleagues now in their mid-twenties who are super-keen to use that language, to ‘move things forward’, even, gods forbid, to ‘blue-sky’ something. I just can’t do this. I couldn’t, even when I too was a twenty-something just-started-and-look-at-my-shiny-suit-type person, insofar as I ever was. For me, the compromises feel too great. You can think your own thoughts, but don’t share them. You can see things are ridiculous, but don’t admit it. You can all know the open secret – that the system sucks in lots of ways, and creates extra work in others – but don’t mention it. It’s maddening, and so is the expectation that you’ll want to do this forever, that when people answer ‘I am a so-and-so’ when asked what they do, that answer really does explain what they are, that their job is who and what they are, and hope to be, and have become. My job is none of those things. It is a thing I do to earn the money which pays our bills, for now. Surely it’s better to be happy and hard-up than it is to be rolling in money and miserable; I look at people I know who work sixty-hour weeks and never see their children and just wonder why they do it, given that it appears (at least to me) to do little more than funding a new car and lots of trips overseas.

Is it something missing in me? Did I just not make the queue when it came to the doling out of ambition? I don’t know. I do have ambitions, but mine just don’t seem to be particularly in line with what you might expect of a university graduate who went to private school and has mysteriously managed to accrue three degrees in the decade since leaving. When I was a teenager, I sort of thought I might try working in London, living somewhere predictable like Turnham Green while commuting into the city and reading the Guardian. I do read the Guardian sometimes, but that’s where the similarities end. I think I always knew, really, that I’d be happier living in the middle of nowhere, with a large and chaotic number of pumpkins growing in a small and ridiculously over-planted garden. But sometimes I see myself through my father’s eyes, and it seems to me that the path I’ve chosen is perhaps not what he’d expected or wanted for me; married to a man he thinks only serves to exaggerate my tendency to vegetarian* shoes and mad hair and strange houses in insane locations, my job is a very small part of my life, really, where his was, for some three decades, a defining part of Who He Was, and I think that puzzles him. He thinks I should try for a proper academic career; publish some articles, if possible, and try to write the book which might follow on from my PhD thesis, while I, I struggle to motivate myself to do things other than making bread and ogling quinces while working out what knitting abbreviations mean and wondering whether that circle that the small girl has drawn might constitute her first drawn thing. And because, while I am aware that it is perfectly acceptable to do these things and to feel this way, I cannot utterly divorce myself from the expectations I have experienced first- and second-hand since it became clear that I wasn’t actually as daft as I look, I sometimes find myself measuring my progress thus far, and thinking that there ought to be more. More purpose, more reason, more progress.

It spirals around, it does, this cycle of slightly beligerant – defiant – assertion of Self as Mother, Creatrix, and, er, general cook-and-bottle-washer, and Happy That Way, thankyouverymuch, versus the rather shame-faced version of Self which admits to not having pursued its career as zealously as it might have done, and which perhaps ought to feel more motivation when offered encouragement for academic writing, and which ought to have plans which include pensions and all those other things which, well, aren’t bright, colourful bags of stardust which possibly involve bells, and which I thus can’t actually identify. The latter is not Who I Am. The former is much closer, I think, embodying as it does the things which I genuinely believe to be important. Yet I continue to judge myself by the standards to which – I think – others feel I ought to aspire. It’s madness, really, because I don’t even know that people think these things which I am so sure they must; well, apart from the bit about the mad hair, because my dad did recently spend an entire day with me having double-pointed wooden knitting needles poking out of my hair without passing comment because, he later confessed, he thought it was some sort of statement.

Perhaps the time has come to paint a spiral on the wall in the kitchen. The last time I felt a bit at sea, painting a spiral was just the ticket.  It reminded me of what’s important, every time I looked at it; those things are still important – our house, our babe, our shared life of colour, of tinkling bells, of valerian in the oil-burner and bread rising all over the sheets in the airing cupboard. In short: bugger the rest of it – inner whatsit is the way forward. ‘Only connect’, said E. M. Forster, and I think he was on to something.

Ahem.

In other news, I’ve been back on the bread-baking bandwagon. This time, tomato and herb spirals, which went like this:

Tomato and Herb Spirals
Get…
2 mugs of strong flour
About ¾mug of warm water
1 tbsp runny honey
1 tsp Marmite
1 tsp yeast
Large fistful of herbs
About 3 tbsp tomato purée
More flour as needed to stop oneself sticking to the wall courtesy of the resulting dough

Then…
Whack the lot in a large bowl, and knead it all together until it forms a nice elasticky sort of glob. At this point, sling in more flour until you can actually manage to remove your hands from said dough without needing either the assistance of a passer-by or surgical tools, and continue kneading until the extra flour is worked in. You’ll notice the dough is a rather pleasant shade of sunrise – pinks and yellows – but don’t get distracted by this for too long, or you’ll find that stickiness returns. When you’ve managed to get a nice workable dough, pop the bowl in a warm place to rise for about forty minutes.

Retire, armed with a cup of Lapsang Souchong.

Some time later, retrieve dough from its resting place (the airing cupboard, in my case). Rootle it out of the bowl, and give it another good knead before dividing it into small lumps the size of half a fist, roughly. Technical, non? I like using scissors to divide it, because, well, they are so very snippy.

Take each little fisty whatsit and roll it into a sausage, then curl it around to form a spiral, and pop it on an oiled tray. When you’ve got a smug-making tray of these little delights, it’s back to the airing cupboard. This time, I left them to rise for about an hour and a half, after which into the oven, at about 180°c, for about twenty minutes, or until they’re getting to sunset shades rather than sunrise. Whip ‘em out, and eat them warm with a spot of butter and a handy ‘here’s one I prepared earlier’ bowl of soup.

After months years of prevarication, I started dreading my hair about ten days ago. I found a thingy online about twisting and ripping it (this thingy, in fact), and having stopped washing my hair with conventional shampoo some time ago, I felt the hour was nigh, and launched myself into sectioning, twisting and generally buggering about.

Ye gods, it takes a while.

And did I mention the resultant arm ache?

Anyway. The irony is that part of my hair actually looked tidier with dreads in than it had when it was just the natural results of bicarb/cider vinegar washing. My hair, it seems, goes quite mad without ‘normal’ shampoo – thicker, easier to tie up because it’s not so slippery, and naturally rather Medusa-like in that I end up with sort of proto-dreads, sectioned hair in the lengths of it which appear of their own volition. But somehow, it didn’t feel quite right. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but after a decade of lusting, the dreads I ended up with, perhaps because of my hopelessly inept approach, were not what I wanted. The thing that bugged me the most was probably something which would go with time – the sectioned nature of the roots looked (to me) rather bare, and a bit sort of artificial. Which of course it is. Um. Yes. So, one large pot of conditioner and about an hour and a half of brusing later, the dreads I’d done have gone. I’d only got about twelve or so – just a few, running through one side and part of the bottom row done, too – but they were enough to persuade me that for now, it’s probably not the way forward for me. I’m genuinely surprised. I’d wanted to do it for so long that the one thing I’d never questioned (in amongst paranoid worrying sessions about washing, maintenance, having to cut your hair off if you change your mind and so on) was the aesthetic aspect of it. Quercus thought they really suited me, and in a way I did too, but there’s the you you see in the mirror, and the you you feel you are, and they aren’t necessarily the same, are they?

One aspect I liked very much, though, was being able to have beads in my hair. So, I think what I might end up with is the very thing I thought looked indecisive previously – a few dreads, run through ordinary hair, with maybe the odd plait and the odd bead chucked in for good measure.

Decisions, decisions.

(This post brought to you courtesy of Earthenwitch’s Larger Life Decisions, Activities or Choices, and How to Ignore Them: Putting the ‘Super’ in Superficial Since 2004.)

Bits:
Knitting my first pair of socks, veeerrryyy slowwwwwlyyyyy. Realising now that I really shouldn’t have just ignored the ribbing at the top, as they are clearly going to fall down ALL THE TIME, and also, the difference between 3.25mm and 2.5mm needles is far more substantial than those measurements might lead one to suppose is possible.

I have fallen off the wagon, cooking-wise – attempting to eat supper earlier has meant cooking things which are quicker to prepare, and thus inventiveness has been overturned by ease. I have plans, though – next week will see at least two new things being tried, methinks, as otherwise, boredom will set in.

I appear to have started me a set of dreadlocks. It’s astonishing what not washing your hair with commercial shampoo for about, er, two months will do for you. That, and the twist-and-rip method I came across online a few days ago. It’s not a complete birds’ nest, but it’s close. Ahem. There will be more order when I finish this twisting malarky, but my poor little arms get tired quite easily so I am taking it at a Methuselah pace. The big plus, though, is that I found a bead with a spiral on it and I now have it in my hair. Spirals. Beads. Hair. A combination that makes me squeak.

I have lots of projects in mind for the next few weeks: felted dress for the small girl courtesy of another old wool jumper discovered abandoned at the back of the wardrobe; fleece dress from sweater which had received similar treatment; trousers, with cord on one side and brushed cotton on t’other; autumn leaves made of felt for hanging-about-the-place-dustilyartistically purposes; pear wine, courtesy of two enormous bags donated by a friend.

In amongst this, the house is coming along – we now have a patio, paths around the house, drains, drainpipes, a water butt and a retaining wall, and this weekend we’re hoping to fill in the French drains with pea shingle while merrily stacking the woodstore (only a month later than planned, which is nearly a victory).

Bats:
The small girl appears to be losing the need to sleep in the day. Part of me thinks yay! about this, as it increases flexibility for what we can do when, but the other part of me is horrified – I had decided not to take on any more freelance copy-editing until the spring so that I could help Quercus by finishing off small jobs on the house (skirting boards, why must you torment me?) while the girl slept; sadly, that appears to be unlikely now. I think I’m just going to have find a new groove, frankly, so that I can manage to do things with her, but also to get some things finished in order to maintain our collective sanity. Yesterday she occupied herself quite happily for an hour on the patio, pouring water from a washing-up bowl into various pots and pans; I cleaned up and cooked dinner, talking to her through the open back door, and thought that actually, perhaps tiling with her around isn’t quite as crazy as I’d thought.

I’m also feeling more positive about the idea of having another baby, probably because my current baby is so clearly not a baby any more. She has a leanness to her, physically, which speaks of action, of activity, of movement, and of development; these are not the soft rolls of baby fat I see as I undress her for our bath each day, but the muscles of a small child whose constant zing and enthusiasm keep her moving nearly all the time these days. Also, of course, EVERYONE I KNOW IS PREGNANT, or so it seems, which does quite a bit to make me nostalgic. Not enough of a reason to have another baby, of course, but certainly I’m feeling more that adding to our numbers would be a Good Thing for lots of reasons, whereas before I couldn’t help adding ‘in theory’ in there somewhere.

I’ve been meaning to write here more frequently, but the stupidest thing has been stopping me – my camera, replaced about a month ago, is still stupid. It turns out that Kodak cameras have a problem with the operating system I use, and that there is no easy fix. Thus, getting pictures off the damn thing is a bit of an uphill struggle, and to be honest, the quality of the camera seems to be a bit of a bore too – where my old one was genuinely point-and-shoot, this one has focusing requirements bordering on the insane, and its most frequently displayed icon when on ‘auto focus’ is the one which means GET THE SODDING TRIPOD OUT – YOU HAVE AN ADVANCED CASE OF THE DTs. Not being a photographery person, of course, I have no tripod, and even if I had, using one would sort of miss the point of that sodding point-and-shoot approach I mentioned earlier. So, thinking of returning it. Anyone got any suggestions for a reasonably cheap alternative?

Right. I go, to ponder five pages of legal editing while thinking about what to have for dinner. And you? What are you up to this week?