Baby, it's cold outside

It's too cold to do anything except sit as close to the fire as I can manage, and knit.  We've had no snow here in East London but the temperature has not risen above freezing all weekend.

I'm also testing out the theory that chocolate brownies keep out the cold.  We haven't eaten enough yet to be sure though, so we'll have to report back on this theory at a later date.

Inheritance :: the bomb glass

Inheritance :: possession by transmission from past generations

Chambers Concise Dictionary

I don't usually wear gloves when I garden, but I really should do.  Our flowerbeds are full of pieces of glass.  These are the seven pieces I found from digging one small wallflower-sized hole this morning.

The glass is there because roughly seventy years ago, during The Blitz, a bomb was dropped on the terraced street behind ours, badly damaging about twenty houses.  Their windows were all blown out, and they were so structurally unsound that they later had to be pulled down.  There is now a low block of flats, built in the late 1950s, behind our house rather than the Victorian terraced street that used to be there. 

All along our street, the back gardens are still full of shards of glass from the windows that exploded that night.  As the worms rummage through the soil, the glass gets worked up to the surface.

I never find these pieces of glass without thinking about the people who lost their homes that night.  We don't live in the part of the East End that was really heavily damaged - we are not near the docks or the gasworks - but the people who lived in our house then must have had nightly air raids during the Blitz and would have been terrified to hear the bomb drop so close. Then perhaps they would have been relieved - and maybe have felt a little guilty for being so fortunate - that it had fallen a street away from them and that their own house - our house now - was safe.

Another mat - but towelling, not linen

So it turns out that this week is all about mats, not really about appliqué after all. I've made my third mat in three sessions of sewing this week.


This time, there was recycling going on. I've made a bath mat, using the pattern from Amanda Blake Soule's Handmade Home, a pillowcase saved from my childhood and some cheapo hand towels from IKEA (and being IKEA, the handtowels are a bizarre, Swedish size - long and thin - not good for a hand towel, but perfect for transforming into a bath mat). G and the children all refused to entertain the idea of using this marvellously retro pillowcase as a pillowcase, so I figured they can see it when they step out of the bath each day instead.


I love the Handmade Home book. This is the second project I've made from it, and there are so many more that I want to try. When I spread my mat out to photograph it, I realised that I've ended up using very similar colours to the one in the book.


Let's just hope that my family embrace the wonderful hand-crafted, repurposed, retro nature of the bath mat with the same enthusiasm as Amanda's family do hers. I live in hope.

France and What would Michael do?

Well, I have loved this voting lark!

As I suspected everyone voted for different things - the travellers wanted to hear about France, the chefs wanted to hear about the cake book, the people related to Michaels want to find out about the Michael story, and the crafty types want to hear about sewing.

But I think the greedy readers who want to hear about everything shall be declared the winners! France and Michael first, then sewing and cakes.

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We went to Paris for a week and then on to South-West France, where my parents live, for a second week.

I was good at French when I was a teenager and I visited Paris a great deal on exchanges and school trips. In my twenties I worked there for a little bit too, and when G and I were newly going out together he used to catch the Eurostar on a Friday night and come and stay with me for the weekend. Pure romance. We love Paris. If I didn't live in London I would live in Paris.


The children had never been there before and had come up with a good list of everything they wanted to do:

• see the Eiffel Tower
• go on the Metro
• visit the Louvre and find the Mona Lisa
• eat lots of pains au chocolats and drink Orangina
• go to Disneyland

G and I had lists of our own, which looked a bit like this:

• walk up to Sacre Coeur and drink in the view
• sit in a cafe and people watch
• go to Parc de la Villette and the Cite des Sciences
• stroll through parks
• eat amazing food and drink fabulous wine
• go to the Musee d'Orsay and look at everything
• buy French stationery
• prowl around bookshops and look intellectual

G, outside a cafe, practising his French shrugs.

We were there for six days and we managed to do everything on everybody's list, plus several other impromptu things. Disneyland was horrible but everything else was magical.

By the time we got on the train to head south we were shattered!

C on our last day in Paris, waiting for a metro. Just look at those bags under his eyes!

Our second week, in the South West, was a complete contrast. We did almost nothing. I don't think I've ever had such an idle holiday. The peak daytime temperatures didn't drop below 35 degrees the whole time we were there, but despite my hatred of hot weather I had a fantastic time.

In the cool of the early mornings and late evenings I sat outside knitting, or reading, or chatting with my parents. In the middle of the day we played our favourite board game in the cool thick-walled house, and read, knitted or chatted. In the late afternoon everyone went for a long swim in the pool and I sat on the edge, knitting, reading and chatting (I hate swimming). Occasionally we ventured out to the croissant shop or a market or a restaurant, but not in a terribly energetic way.

During our week of extreme idleness G and I had plenty of time to admire my father, Michael's, approach to house and garden maintenance. In a very old, rambling, rural house with a large, lush garden there is a never-ending stream of tasks to be done.

• cutting the grass
• keeping the fridge stocked with wine
• putting new tea lights in the lanterns each day
• testing the pH of the swimming pool
• fixing a new hosepipe with connectors
• treating the centuries-old beams for munching beatles
• bringing in the chair cushions every single evening without fail
• mopping up spills and croissant crumbs so that the ants don't take up residence

Happily my father is not a martyr to these many jobs. He is great company and likes nothing better than to drink a glass or two of wine and chat with family and friends long into the evening. But nevertheless, everything that needs to be done to keep the house a delightful place to live, gets done.

A baby lizard rescued from the perfectly pH balanced swimming pool.

The best illustration is the old wooden, homemade stool that Dad picked up for €2 at a second hand fair. G or I might have bought the stool and then would have taken it home and put it into use straightaway in the front room or a bedroom, marvelling at the bargain. But Dad bought the stool and when he got it home took the time to treat it with two different types of wood preserver and was so that it shone like a new conker and would not stain. There is a thoroughness in the pottering sort of tasks he does which makes their house such a wonderful place to live.

So G and I came home with a new phrase which we have been asking each other ever since. "What would Michael do?"

Well, he wouldn't leave half-unpacked bags lying around our bedroom for days. Nor would he leave the kitchen floor unwashed or six-month old cobwebs up at the top of the windows. He would sweep up the mess in the yard left by the nesting birds and he would wind a little bit more of the flourishing clematis around the trellis every single day. All those little things have been uncharacteristically done on time this week after one of us muttered "what would Michael do?".

Mind you, we still haven't fixed the door knobs that have been broken since before O was born (yes, really; seven years). This meticulous attention to detail does not seem to come naturally to us. But we are trying.
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And I'm sure that my father is delighted that after thirty-seven years I have finally understood that a little bit of care and attention to the more mundane of life's tasks is well worth it. He's probably been trying to tell me this piece of wisdom for years, but you know what children are like. They never listen.

Dad sawing a branch for C to make a wasp trap

A Saturday in my life

For a while now, I have been following Willow's blog. And one of my favourite things is her monthly Day In My Life series of posts. I love the little snapshot into her life - the small details are so interesting. Several of the weekend newspapers run regular columns in a similar way - A Life in the Day in The Times and Writers' Rooms in The Guardian. It is peeping into somebody else's world just momentarily, that gives me such a thrill.

So here - as a one off - is a classic winter Saturday in my life. A day neither remarkable nor special, but just lovely in its ordinariness.

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My children are now old enough to give me lie ins, which is AWESOME. I promise that I will never, ever take this for granted after the years of sleepless-baby-and-wide-awake-toddler, which, frankly, scarred my sleeping patterns for life.

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I emerge downstairs at 9:15 to find C and O settled quite happily on the sofa watching CBBC.

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I am wearing my favourite t-shirt of the moment which was Howie's t-shirt of the week sometime last month.

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I appreciate that all you can see is mirror writing, but its still cool, no? No coffee. No workee. That's me.

G sets the table for breakfast and I tuck into a bowl of my homemade muesli.

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I have recently discovered muesli base from Waitrose, which is a mixture of barley, oats, rye and spelt flakes with sunflower and pumpkin seeds. You then customise the base to make precisely the kind of muesli you want. Becuase people are very finicky about muesli. Some cannot abide nuts and some find sultanas all wrong. I like mine with big old chunks of fruit in it so I add lots of chopped prunes, figs, dried strawberries and sultanas.

After breakfast, I discovered that my children have turned into superheroes. They do this quite often. Today I had Clever Party Girl and Bogey Man (Bogey's my name - snot's the game).

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G cycled to a swimming lesson at the endless pool in Canary Wharf and I reclothed the superheroes and then took O to her ballet lesson.

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While O was at ballet, C and I bought croisssants for lunch.

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After lunch I made some bread - a sesame and sunflower seed loaf - and twiddled around on the computer while I drank some coffee.

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G and C did some research for C's project on the Vikings and O made a playmobil forest.

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I knitted.

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My evening at Stitch & Bitch London this week taught me how to increase, put stitch markers in and put stitches on a stitch holder. I'm attempting mittens now! Oh, and if you click into that link and scroll down, you can find a picture of me - looking very serious, concentrating hard and wearing black, which I only ever do if I am at work.

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I cooked a biryani for supper, and then once the children were in bed G and I dug out a DVD to watch.

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We could only manage 10 minutes of Mamma Mia...the singing! the squealing! the hammy acting! no! no! no!

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So here I am, uploading photos, typing my blog and finding out what events are on in Trafalgar Square tomorrow for the Chinese New Year celebrations.

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How has your Saturday been?

What's beside the bedside?

So Ali asked me what was on my bedside table. Jewellery mostly.

There are pots, dishes, bowls, boxes and all sorts of proper places to leave my jewellery at the end of the day, but I never do.

In this picture I can count 10 pairs of earrings, 2 bracelets, one necklace and a brooch. There is another whole part of my bedside table that I didn't photograph.

The little pot of cream is Jasmine Enriching Cream from Neal's Yard and it is the nicest cream in the whole world. It soothes hands, faces, cuts, scrapes, bruises, toes - anything you like. Love it. I have little pots of it scattered around the house, the office and various handbags, so that I am never without.

I don't yet scatter my glasses about - I always have a pair on, or on my bedside table, but judging from my track record with jewellery and Neal's Yard cream, its only a matter of time, surely?

Christmas time

The holidays have at last arrived for all of us.

They began well with french toast and strong coffee early this morning.

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The Christmas cards are tacked up all along the hallway.

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A Christmas tree and its carefully wrapped decorations were retreived from the loft. There were a few curses (from me) and much patience (from G - he has incredible amounts of patience, more than anyone else I know) as the lights went up.

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I decided we all needed emergency rations of fruit cake and Wensleydale to keep us going.

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But at last, the tree, lights and decorations are where they should be, and our holidays have begun.

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Happy Christmas everybody.

The next generation of list writer

At the last parents evening we went to for O, I noticed that her class teacher had written in her maths book the comment "O is a little unsure of how to write a list".

The cheek of it! My daughter knows how to write a list! I mean, she has list writing genes!

Since then - of course, wouldn't you? - I've been secretly turning her into a proficient list writer. Shopping list needs jotting down? Get O to do it. Gift lists for Christmas need compiling? Get O to do them. Never again will a teacher say that a child of mine does not know how to write a list!

However, I now think I may have been taking things a little too far.

I came downstairs, bleary eyed, yesterday morning to find this stuck to the mantlepiece:


She had been inspired by one of her favourite TV programmes on CBBC at the moment, Gimme A Break, a programme in which the children draw up the family rules....

House rules

• No ballet
• No walks
• No veg
• No accents of any language
• No moaning

She explained to her querying parent, that 'No ballet' meant no ballet by anyone in the house other than her. I don't think we meet her high standards.

'No accents of any language' is apparently for me and C who enjoy conversing with each other in whatever amusing and entertaining alternative accents we can think of. C is going through a Jamaican phase and my specialty is Southern Belle. Can't really see what the problem is there.

'No moaning' was one that I approved of, but then she explained that it didn't mean children weren't allowed to moan - it meant that parents were not allowed to moan about the house rules.

Not life as I know it

It started with the snow.

It was really quite bizarre to wake up on Sunday morning and see thick, fluffy snow everywhere. Nothing has seemed quite right this week, ever since that snowfall.

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C and O haven't been at home this week. They have gone to stay with my parents for the first half of the school spring break. When G and I have spoken to them on the phone each evening we've heard tales about shopping trips, playing in the park with their cousins, nutella for breakfast and adventures on skateboards.

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They're clearly having a wonderful time with their grandparents (and I just loved going to stay with my grandparents when I was small - didn't you?) but G and I feel completely bereft here in our empty, tidy, quiet house.

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The fridge is full of un-drunk milk, the shoes are still in the shoe basket, the washing mountain is a much more modest washing mole-hill and bread goes stale before we finish a loaf.

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Even O's drawing table is tidy. Its all wrong.

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Last night G and I decided we'd had enough of moping and went out after work for a rare treat of dinner and cocktails at Browns, just next to my office. The apple mojitos seemed to do the trick of cheering us up.

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And now I'm off back to Oxford to collect C and O, and I can't wait for the house to come alive again. There'll be fewer apple mojitos but more stewed apple for breakfast when they get back. And that's definitely a good thing. In so many ways!

Little, nice things

This morning I thought I could benefit from some more little, nice things in my life. This is what I found:

• I bought myself a bunch of freesias when I went shopping this morning, and put them in my prettiest vase.
  
  

• I also bought a bar of chocolate when I was in the supermarket, and when I got home, before I even started the unpacking, I sat down to eat a piece (or two...) as I drank coffee from my favourite mug.

• I changed everybody's sheets, put on crisp, new pillowcases and smoothed down the duvets exactly as I like them.
• I enjoyed the surreal sight of two police horses walking down our road. Very bizarre - I have no idea what they were doing strolling down a sunny, residential street. The policewomen who were riding were enjoying a good old gossip as well!
  
  

• When the children came home from school they decided they wanted to do some paintings, and I was left with armfuls of bright primary-coloured firework pictures, brightening up my kitchen.

• I went fabric shopping - on Etsy and in IKEA. The IKEA prints at the moment are mostly very large, so I ordered some tiny, sweet, patterned, Japanese fabrics from Etsy to balance things out a bit.
• I cooked mushroom and spinach pilaf for tea and ate it on my lap whilst lounging on the the sofa and watching rubbish tv.

What a great day!